If you’ve got a website, chances are you’ve heard of Google Analytics.
Google Analytics can be confusing to those just starting out since it presents you with a lot of data, which isn’t very helpful unless you understand what you’re looking at.
To help you out, we’ve decided to start out simple with the “All Pages Report”, to get you comfortable using Analytics.
In this article we’ll cover the components of the All Pages report:
- Page Views
- Unique Page Views
- Average Time on Page
- Entrances
- Bounce Rate
- % Exit
An Introduction to Google Analytics
For those that aren’t familiar with Google Analytics, it’s a free web analytics tool provided by Google. When added to your website, Google Analytics helps you track and analyse the activities of your users.
This information is then displayed on the Analytics page where there are various areas you can drill down into, depending on what you’re looking for and what you’re goals are.
The All Pages Report
To get to this page, go to the side bar and find Behaviour > Site Content > All pages. You should then see something similar to the image above.
Before we start getting into things, you’ll want to adjust your date range at the top right corner, as this will determine how much data will be shown.
If you scroll down the page a bit you’ll see a table. This is a great place to start with as it gives you stats about each page of your website such as:
- Page Views
- Unique Page Views
- Average Time on Page
- Entrances
- Bounce Rate
- % Exit
- Page Value (we won’t cover page value since its a bit more complicated and requires additional setup)
Page Views
Page views shows you the number of times that a page has been viewed; including repeated visits.
To start, click the box/column which says ‘Pageviews’ – this will sort all your data from the highest amount of page views to the lowest. To reverse the order, simply click the header again. Remember this as it can be used to sort your data based on all of the headings that we’ll discuss in this article.
How is this useful?
Pages with higher views could be interpreted as pages that:
- Users are finding the most useful.
- Users are getting the bulk of their information from.
- Are performing well for SEO and are appearing in Google searches.
- Are pages that have high referrals from external sources, i.e. another website includes a link to your website in their content (more about how to figure this out below).
Taking it to another level…
Adding a secondary dimension gives you an extra layer of context for your data. For example, by clicking Secondary Dimension > Commonly Used > Source it adds another column, which breaks down your pages based on where users have come from, before landing on a particular page. If you see a URL that means that your page has been linked from someone else’s website, and that user came from that site.
Need help setting up Google Analytics for your business? Let the team at Enee help you out!
Unique Page Views
This is the number of times that the page has been viewed per session. Unlike ‘Page Views’ it does not include repeated views in a session.
What does this mean?
Pages with high unique views are most likely pages that most users are interested in when visiting your site.
How is this useful?
Note down what ones are ranking high and make sure that you are leveraging these pages and funneling your users to meet the goals of the website (more information on goals under “Bounce Rate”).
Average Time Per Page
As the name suggests this is the average time that a user is spending on a page.
What does this mean?
On pages where there’s a lot of information such as a specific blog page, or your products or services page, you want the average rate to be high. Why? This means that the user is taking the time to read and engage with the content on your page.
How is this useful?
Depending on your goals you could set a benchmark for the amount of time that you want users to spend on each of your pages. By viewing and comparing this benchmark to your results you’ll be able to determine which pages are successfully engaging your audience.
Taking this one step further you could create a duration goal to see how many of your users are reaching this benchmark.
Entrances
The definition of an ‘entrance’ in Google Analytics is the same as a landing page, the page that the user initially enters your website on. So the more users that enter your website through a particular page, the higher the number associated with it will be.
How is this useful?
Generally speaking, the most common page that users will enter your website on is your home page. If you find that there are other pages that are quite high up on the list, try to use this to your advantage by:
- Adding a “Call to Action” (CTA) on the page and directing your users through your sales funnel.
- Adding engaging content that will make them curious about your business and click through your website or your CTA.
More about CTA’s below.
Bounce Rate
This is the rate that a user is entering and leaving your website on the same page in one session.
What does this mean?
Simply – high bounce rates are bad. High bounce rates generally mean that the user has come onto the page and either 1) found what they wanted and left or 2) didn’t find what they expected and left.
The first reason may not sound bad – so they got what they were looking for, good for them! That’s true, but at the same time they may not have necessarily met your goal for them. Let me explain…
For any website, there should be an end action that we want all users to make (e.g. call you, get in contact via a form, buy your product or service etc). To entice the user to do this, we implement a “Call to Action” (CTA). This CTA could be a prompt to the website user to fill in the contact form, a button to entice the user to click and purchase a product or a button to sign up to your newsletter; whatever you want users to do.
So if users are, for example entering through your home page and then exiting on the same page without clicking around, it means that they may not be performing the desired action.
How is it useful?
Unless you have a one page website, you want to work to reduce your bounce rate percentages.
Some examples of things you could do to help funnel your users through to your website are:
- Put your CTA in prominent places on each of your pages to get your visitors to the places you want them to be.
- Research what your competitors are doing to determine what kind of information they are providing.
- Research what your target audience is looking for and add this information on your website.
Ready for a website refresh? Let us help you build a website that meets your goals!
% Exit
This is the percentage of users that exit your website from a particular page.
It is calculated by the number of times that it was the last page before exiting and divided by the number of times that the page has been visited. Because of how this is calculated, it will include bounces as well.
How is this useful?
If you find that pages like a ‘Thank you’ page or the contact page have high exit rates then it means that things are going well in this particular department.
If however you find that your important pages have high exit rates it may be time to assess if anything can be done to improve those pages.
In conclusion…
Google Analytics is such a powerful free tool, so the more information you have, the easier it will be to gauge how well your website is doing.
There are of course, many things you can measure and interpret in Google Analytics, but this is just an easy start to get things going!
I hope that this article has provided you with some guidance and confidence to dive in and try it out for yourself! If you need a hand with any of this please contact us and a member of our friendly team will be more than happy to assist!
