Web Podcast - Episode 29: What is Google Analytics?

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Hey guys, Episode 29 today, and we're talking about website statistics.

So there's basically various ways you can track what people do on your website and how many people view your website or what they're doing on it. So in another episode I talked to you guys about HotJar, now, hotjar.com is a website where you can setup heat mapping, and also user recording so you can record what the visitor's doing on your site, and you can also do heat maps and see what part of the page people are clicking on the most, so obviously, the redder of the circle around that link, for example, the more people clicking it, the greener the link, the least people clicking it, but people are clicking it. So you can do those two for tracking, what users are interacting with on the page. But for more of an analytical data, such as how many people are visiting? where they're coming from? What pages are they going to? How long are they staying for? What browser are they on? What device are they on? That's where you use a tool that collects analytics about your website, and the one that we always use is Google Analytics.

Now Google Analytics is free to use so if you just Google it, Google Analytics, you'll be able to set it up. But basically, what you need to do is set up an account and put your website in, put a few details in and then it gives you a piece of code. That code goes into every page on your website where people will visit so make sure it is on every page. When someone visits your site, that code there basically sends information back to Google, which allows you to then log on and report with that data. So you can go to Google Analytics after the first few days and start seeing people visiting your site. Over time, if you had going for a year, for example, you'd be able to see who's coming to your website every day, over a whole year and you can look at and you go, Okay, look, you know, Christmas time, we had double the amount of hits we normally do and we got double the amount of sales or maybe we've got double the amount of hits, but our sales didn't go up, so you can sort of start looking at data and going, Okay, these are our busy periods, and we're getting more sales or these are our quiet periods and we're not getting as many sales or we're getting lots of people but no people are inquiring so why is that? It's really important, you guys use Google Analytics to sort of see where your website's at, the good thing to do is you use it as a benchmark. So as of today, you might setup and say, Okay, well, at the moment, on average, every month, we're doing 100 visits or we're selling $1,000 worth of stuff so let's tweak our website and try a few different things to see if we can increase that. You can also use it to benchmark things like your SEO or your landing pages, so you can set up a landing page for a specific product and then you can setup ads that go to it or you could organically get the page to rank on Google and then you can basically get people going to that page and using Google Analytics. You can see how many people land on that page, how long they stay on it for and where they go next or whether they bounce and they leave the page straightaway.

So there's a few interesting little features of Google Analytics statistical information so I'll go over and just quickly describe the main statistics that you'll be sort of tracking on your site, so when you open up Google annex, you'll see these. So here, I'm looking at one of my clients sites and I've got different options here in Google Analytics, down at the side I've got Home and then I've got Reports in Real Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior The main one you'll usually want to look at is just how many people are coming to your site. The end of the day, we want to know how many people coming to our site, as you get more experience at how this all works, you can for yourself, go and figure out what all the specific bits of information mean but sort of get started quick dummy sort of guide.

First we've got our users, so you'll see on Google Analytics, you can see how many users are coming to your site. Now users are people just coming to your site in general so that could be Joe Bloggs down the road. He comes to your site on Monday and he also comes back on Thursday. Now, Mr. John Doe, who you've never met before, he might come to your website on Thursday, so that there is three separate visits but they're actually are still only two people or two users. So users are the number people coming to your site, regardless of how many times they return. So this site has 4200 users visiting it in the last 90 days so it's quite a good number for this site. If we go to the next option, you'll probably see there's one called Sessions now Sessions is every single session that that person comes to your website, so the guy that I mentioned before, wasn't John Doe it was the other one, Joe Bloggs, whatever his name was, he came twice, he came on Tuesday and he also came on Thursday. So that is two sessions, so it's one user doing two sessions.

Now the third one is Bounce Rate. The bounce rate is a number of people landing on the page and leaving straightaway, they don't click anywhere else, they land on the page and the exit so it could be someone landing on the homepage or it could be someone landing on a product page and going, Aw nah, it's too expensive or Aw nah, it's not the product I want. They leave. So this site's 43% generally you want to be ideally around 30 to 40% in my opinion, the lower you go the white, the better, obviously if you can get it down to like 5% then your fantastic. Now the bounce rates are not always a bad thing, some some pages have 80% bounce rate, some pages have 90% bounce rate and it's actually not a bad thing because they're pages like the Contact Us page, someone Google's your business and they click on your contact us page to get your phone number, they click on it, they leave but they've got your phone number. So analyze your page and go, Okay, what is this? Is it a product page? Okay, I want it low bounce rate, if it's a Contact Us page then, Hey, it doesn't really matter, people are getting my contact details, that's fine. So that's the bounce rate.

Then you've got Session Duration. That's self explanatory, In most cases, that basically just means how long is the person staying on the site during that session on average, so this site's got a two minute, twenty three average session. So someone might come and stay for 10 minutes, for example, someone might come and stay for 10 minutes, it just works out the average last 10 minutes, 10 seconds. So you know, you might find on this site here where it's two minutes, twenty three seconds, everyone's coming for a minute or two or three or four or five and it's just averaging it out. You can also drill all of these statistics down further, but for example, with session duration, you could go and look at how many people are staying on a mobile phone and it might be very low. People might on a mobile phone bounce straight away, you might have 80% bounce rate, in your Session Duration you might only be 20-30 seconds compared to two minutes on a desktop. So you've gotta then say, Okay, is my site mobile friendly enough? Or is it slow to load or is something not working right? That's where you can sort of analyze and go, Okay, the bounce rates real bad, what's going on here? Or it might be really good and you can say, Well, that's cool, the website's working perfectly on a mobile phone. Sometimes hard to achieve. So you've got to really analyze these statistics, because it's no use looking at them going Okay, well, that's where we're at. Nah, let's just leave it, let's see how we go next month. Put a plan in place and see what you can improve on.

So guys, I often get people confused with Hits, they think, Oh I've got 90,000 hits this month but no sales. What people don't realize is hits isn't actually the amount of people visiting the website, that's actually the amount of people visiting pages on the website. The statistic you want to look at is Sessions, that's really the main one, how many sessions have I had this month? That means how many people have came to the site and warped through it. One session could have 50,000 page views but it's still only one session and that's what we want to sort of consider. You're not really ever going to get someone viewing 50,000 pages on the website, those who have got plenty of time on their hands. But for example, this site has five average page views or hits per session, so the end of the day, people are buying usually once when they visit your website, so once per session, so you're not going to use hits as, How many sales hits Am I getting? That's not what you want to do, you want to judge based on how many sessions you're getting. So maybe last month, you got 500 sessions, which means 500 people came to your site in different blocks and view different pages on it. So if I've got 100 sales for 500 sessions, well that's very good. So you've got to sort of base it on that, rather than, I had 20,000 page views or hits and I only got 100 sales, you know. It's like, Well, Okay, I'm missing 19,900 so that doesn't make sense. So don't get confused by that, guys, just make sure you base it on the sessions.

You also want to make sure that, with the users, users have multiple sessions. If they come back, you ideally want to make sure your new users figure is differently high as well. So you might have 250 people come to your site this month and no new users, which means that they're just the same people coming back over and over again, which isn't a bad thing but obviously, people only buy so much or they only use your service so much, if they've already purchased it before and come back, so you want to try and make sure that you've got new users coming to your site every month. Now, this website here, I'm looking at had 288 users last week, and it's had 250 new users. So basically, it's saying that only 38 people are returning businesses to the website and 250 of those 280 we're brand new to the website so that's good, so that's new customers coming in the door and looking through your website, or new potential clients, or new potential followers, whatever you're sort of looking for. So that's where you want to base it off, your sessions and your users.

Anyway guys, that's the rays web design why podcast and I hope you found it helpful and join us again next time. Cheers.