What does all that Google Analytics data mean?
So, you've got Google Analytics installed on your website and you've figured your way around the interface as shown in one of my previous posts.
You can now produce reports and see lots of detailed statistics about who your website viewers are and what they're doing on your site. Great!
But what do all those statistics actually mean?
Sometimes Google Analytics' abundance of information can be a little overwhelming, and it's hard to know what figures are important and what's good or bad - especially if you've never run a website analysis like this before.
This video is part of a series produced by the Analytics team at Google, and it guides you through what the different statistics are and what they mean.
More importantly, you'll learn how to tell if your website is effectively achieving its goals and what that means for your business.
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Google analytics videos
Hi James, these videos have helped a great deal so that I think I know what to do when I log into Google Analytics. But I'd really like to know how to use the reports to attract more people to my website. How do these reports actualyl help me?
You still need to act on the info
Hi Beverley, thanks for the question!
The data you see in google Analytics is an excellent measuring tool, but a tool only. To be able to attract more people to your site you need to understand your readers or customers - who is currently visiting your site and what are they looking at? Where are they from? What search terms are leading them here? What pages are causing them to leave? Looking at the graphs and data from Analytics helps you understand these things.
Once you know this, you can target the content of your site more specifically to what people want to see. For example you might add more news articles on similar topics to the ones that are most read. You can also advertise your site in places (online and off) where your visitors are likely to see it, based on what you know about them.
So Google Analytics is more about gathering information, you still need to act on that info to make a difference to the results. How you do this is up to your business style, your audience and your personal creativity. Does that make sense?