Google Analytics for Dummies
Published On: 12-31-1969 05:00pm
Comments: 0 - Hits: 40
Category: Selling
So now that Google Analytics is set up and your views are filtered out, so you are just seeing visitors data- what do you do with it all? There are lots of graphs, charts and terms you might not be familiar with. What does it all mean and what can you do with this data?
This top graph is the most common- it gives the number of visitor in a day, it updates once a day and if you mouse a dot, it gives the exact number. The default view is by day. I think everyone looks at that first, is it, is it down? You can expect highs and lows, if you ran a give-away, your views will probably rise. I've had really big spikes on a singular day, I found out later I was featured on a really good blog. But in general it gives you an idea of your general traffic.
Another cool things is to compare present views with those from the past. Click on the arrow next to date and check the box labeled compare to past. The default is comparing the present month span with the one before it. If you want to compare different time spans, when you click compare, you can change the date of both spans. You can change the length of time as well as the when. How are your views when you compare to 6 or 12 months ago? Have they improved, stayed the same, went down? What's different? Are you doing anything different? Don't just look passively at views or changes, try to determine the cause. One word of caution, don't panic if you have a low day or even a week, you can't control everything.
Just below the line graph are some figures. The first is the total number of visit in the time you are looking at (if you were comparing to past, there would also be + or - percentage change).
Page views are slightly different, it shows how many pages where looked total by those 1066 visitors, giving you the next figure pages/visit. Obviously no one can look at 2.56 pages, but there were enough people who were interested in my store to look at more than the one item they searched for. A higher number is better here.
Bounce rate means the percentage of people who looked at one page and left. For a store, a lot of people just browse, just one thing and leave. You want this to be lower but as of yet, the lowest I've seen it for my store was about 61%. I don't know how that compares to yours or if that is good or bad.
Time on the site is just that, but I don't really bother with that. Someone can get up and get a cup of coffee while on your site- you just don't know.
Next is the percentage of new visits. This is the number of visitors who have never been there before. It lets you know how many new visitor found your site. If your number of total visits remains fairly constant, it lets you know about how many repeat visitors you have. On the flip side it tells you if your site is being found.
This pie chart lets you know where your views are coming from in general. Artfire is set up so if a visitor goes to Artfire and then finds you, it will be counted as direct traffic, as well as if they came directly to your shop.So you can think of this as being Artfire searches.
Blue is for search engines. This is the percentage of visitors who found you in any search engine. This is a good indicator of how visible you are outside of Artfire. Good SEO and pictures will get you more views this way.
Lastly is referring sites. This means visitors are coming from a link on another site- whether it is an ad, your Artfire Rapid Cart or Kiosk, a link on someone's blog - anything that referred the views to your site.
Now what? This is a quick lesson in reading the data on Google Analytics, but the important thing is what you do with this information. Use it to gauge your changes, not compare to someone else's shop. Next I'll go over how to use this data to help improve your shop.
