If there is one thing that the business owners look out for always, it is the data. For any website, where does the data come from? What helps the business owner to transform the consumer data into actionable business understandings.
Well! The answer is Google Analytics. Google Analytics Metrics, an eminent web analytic service provided by Google helps to track and report your website traffic. It is a platform that is inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. This service has been provided by Google ever since the year 2005. It is useful to measure your ROI basis your brand advertising and be able to track your video, flash applications, and various social networking websites. Google Analytics is useful for your websites in the following way:

• Collection of data from the website automatically
• Creation of customization reports
• Integration with other tools and platforms
• Measure internal website search
• Reasons for bouncing from your website
• Be aware of your audience
• Understand the content type suitable for your website
• To track your goal path

To be able to analyse all these, Google Analytics metrics provide you with various information that provides you with relevant data on your website performance for a specific time. The feature of your website that Google Analytics metrics refers to is called a dimension.

Most of the business owners have their world around this. For a business owner and a decision-maker of big business, you would be aware that owning a website is very important for your business. For this, you would be having a well-designed website created. Once your website is in place, you make use of the website analytics data to check on the website performance and basis that you can update your website for better results. 

Having said this, let us see the most important Google Analytics metrics for your business:

• Traffic – Gone are the days when there are many customers that line up external to your store to get their hands on a new entrance. That is when you are aware that your product is effective in the market. But times keep changing. Over the last decade, there are fewer customers in the offline store and now the online store visit has increased. That is, your customers keep visiting your website more often than the retail store. Because of this, Google Analytics metrics play an important tool for your online store. 

Google Analytics metric provides you with actionable website data. These data help you to make clever business and marketing decisions. The most important Google Analytics metric is website traffic. This Google Analytics metric tells you the number of people who visit your online store for a specific time. In case you are increasing your website traffic through ways like a content blog or Google paid ads, this Google Analytics metric plays a useful role for business owners to check the website performance with regards to the visitors.

• Traffic Source – For a business, you need to advertise in many places. So, you might be curious to know from which source you have received traffic to your website. The Google Analytics metric that gives you the data is the Traffic Source. Every day new media channel consumption comes on its way that can be used for your business promotion. The current business owners have many ways to get people into their business. Using this Google Analytic metric, you can find out the source from where you get more traffic to your website. Using this, you can target those people to a greater extent and be able to convert them to leads. For that area where you had advertised and the source is not found in the metric in Google Analytics, then you can target those sources in a different way as what you should do more to get them to your website.

There is not an exact combination to use this and it is based on your audience and business domain. But it makes you aware of your campaign’s performance concerning your website traffic. You can get details like whether you are getting enough people to visit and view your website pages, are they spending a significant amount of time on your website, and so on. Hence, Traffic Source is considered one of the most important Google Analytics metrics as it shows the correct source of the traffic into your website. It provides an easy method to know as to through which channel there is more traffic to your website.

• Average Time Spent – This Google Analytic metric helps to identify the average time a user spends on your website. For a traditional business, the foot traffic to the store helps the business owners to connect with the customers and find out their preferences. When online commerce is concerned, this Google Analytics metric guides the business owner to analyse the time that a user spends on the website. This will show the website performance with regards to your content. In case it shows a low duration of audience retention, then you need to review your content strategy to something that would fit in your audience’s interest.

• Average Pages Per Visit – For a traditional business, the shoppers would go to the store and then choose the products that they require. When the products are to the fit of the customers, they would spend more time visiting every section of the store to find out their needs. The same holds good for online stores as well. In case a user spends long duration on a web page, then it can be decided that they liked the products on that web page. This data is recorded in the Google Analytic metric called the Average Pages Per Visit. In the same well-ordered dashboard, it indicates the average number of pages that a visitor would navigate before he or she makes a purchase or leaves the website. When it is used well, it would help you to design the exact navigation structure for your website.

• Top Pages – In a traditional business store customer would get the chance to feel the product that would induce them to purchase it. This convenience is not there in the online stores, but there are many other senses that are present to appeal to. It has indeed become a game of content marketing. So, the content type should be unique that would interest your customers so that they can purchase from you. Online stores have started to get into this and have put a great content strategy in place. They have started to place more information on the website. Many contents like how-to videos, blogs, and live model videos have started to get great attention here. So, to find out which page works and which does not, the Google Analytics metric, Top Pages, provides you with this information. The information that it provides is the bounce rate, traffic, duration, etc. 

• Exit Pages – As you can see in the traditional store, customers leave the store when they find that they are not getting what they require, even in the online store customers would leave the page in case nothing is feasible for them to purchase. The online store does not prefer this and should keep a track on which web page does not have customers retained in it. For this, the Google Analytics metric, Exit Pages tells you which page has caused most of your traffic to exit. It would indicate whether it is your service page, menu page, or a new product page. When you analyse the trend, it is time to check with its content for those pages to get more visitors viewing the page. 

• Bounce Rate – This metric in Google Analytics indicates that your website’s bounce rate and it indicates that something on your website needs to be looked and altered. It tells that your website should have a better design and to improvise on your content. According to Google Analytics, a bounce indicates people who leave the website after viewing a single web page. The bounce rate varies from Exit pages, meaning that when a customer bounces it indicates that the page was not interesting to them and did not convey any insight about your brand. When a user exits a page, it means that they do not prefer your brand and did not find what they are shopping for. Bounce rate indicates that users leave due to bad display and content or you are not taking care of the funnel wherein the right people to be got to the website. When you have a proper content strategy in place, the bounce rate would be less and eventually, your business would grow.

• Unique Users And Returning Users – This is yet another Google Analytics metric. You must be aware of the 80/20 rule. It is indeed a known fact that almost 80% of your outcome comes from 20% of your efforts. This is a fact in the business circle as well. Here, 80% of your business comes from 20% of the customers. Most of this data is from repeat customers. This would mean that it is much easier and cheaper to hold that to convert new customers. In this scenario, it would be good for you to be aware of your website visitors whether they are new or are they returning ones. This Google Analytics metric will cover all these data.

• User Behaviour Flow – This is a top Google Analytics metrics that benefit your business. You should not only be aware of the campaigns that bring to you the most ROI, but also analyse on your website visitors and its behaviours. The Google Analytics metric, User Behaviour Flow tracks the way users flow inside your website by tracking the pages the users visit. This would include all the pages that the users start with to the pages that they have visited last before leaving and all the pages in between their stay. Using this information, you can make a smart marketing decision based on what information you require the users to check on to initiate a purchase.

• Location – In the current internet-driven marketplace, anybody can easily purchase anything from anywhere. Right from the product finding to review and getting it to the customers is all done online. Having a wide marketplace, you can easily expand your customer base reach. Sometimes, it so happens that when you grow more, you might be less visible. This is not a good sign for your business. Hence, using this Google Analytics metric, Location you can find out where all your customers are from. This is done using the location feature of the Google Analytics metric. 

• Site Speed And Recs – Yet another top Google Analytics metric is Site Speed and Recs. It helps you to understand your web page performance about its loading time. To get a better user experience, your website pages must be loaded quickly. Sometimes the fix for web page load is easy and sometimes it gets too technical. This Google Analytics metric gets you details on how long your web page takes to load and recommends you on the way you could improve on the performance.

• Social Traffic – Social media channels are a powerful channel of the brand to project itself. It pays to increase the amount of your website traffic. To find out which social channel gets you more website traffic, the Google Analytics metric, Social Traffic helps you with this. This metric on Google Analytics shows a collapse of your traffic from the various social media channels. This would allow you to find out the social media channel that best suits your business and gets you more website traffic.

Conclusion

Google Analytics metrics have many terms that have made the process of your website tracking easier. Google Analytics has made the process simple and putting effort to understand each metric in Google Analytic would help your website to grow.