SEO TIPS

By: Gabriel Gervelis

Understanding the Google Analytics dashboard

Google Analytics is a free program offered by Google that allows you to answer two main questions.

1) How are visitors coming to your website?
2) What are visitors doing once they are on your website?

Once you’ve installed the free Google Analytics program within the code of your website, if you don’t know how to use the program, there is no added value. Understanding the language of Google Analytics will empower you to get the most out of your SEO campaign.

The first thing you see after logging into Google Analytics is the dashboard. Understanding the terms used on the dashboard is key to understanding Google Analytics.

The Basic Google Analytics Glossary

Visits
The number of visitors entering your website. Keep in mind that visits are recorded by IP address, so this figure is not unique.

Page Views
The number of web pages within your web site have been viewed. This is the total amount of page views from all visitors within a given amount of time.

Pages/Visits
The number of pages the average visit generates. This is an average number.

Bounce Rate
How many visitors bounced off of your website. A bounce is a visitor that enters your website from any entry page, the exits the website with out visiting pages deeper within the site, or clicking on any links. For Example: a visitor that enters your website from a search engine, spends 35 seconds on that page, then exits with out clicking on any links is considered a bounce.

Avg. Time on Site
How long the average visitor stays on your website. You may want users to have a long time on site or short time on site depending on your goals.

% New Visits
How many of your total visitors are new visitors versus how many of your total visitors are repeat visitors.

Other Google Analytics Resources:

Mahalo Beta
This post shows how to install the free program, and other basic functions of Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Blog
This is the official Google Analytics blog, if you can’t find the information you are looking for here, you can’t find it at all!

Good luck with your SEO ventures!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 11:06 am and is filed under SEO TIPS, SEO Tips Glossary . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.