The client guide to Google Analytics

So you’re paying an agency to track and analyse your SEO data so why do you need to know anything about it? It never hurts to have a basic grasp on what is happening with your website traffic as this will inform your other strategic goals.

Understanding the Google Analytics Dashboard 

Google Analytics incorporates a dashboard that outlines everything that has materialised on your site – much of this involves numbers which can seem intimidating. Let’s put this aside for now and focus on the following: 

• Sessions – A session in Google analytics terms is simply what has occurred on a site in a particular time frame – this is generally 30 minutes but you can amend this to make it what you prefer. You can use sessions to monitor how many interactions you’ve had on your website, for example. 
• Bounce rate – This is the % of visitors who have left your site after viewing only a single page. This is vital information as it will give you an idea of how easy your site is to use at first glance and what kind of a first impression if conveys. Other reasons for a high bounce rate could be that your site is not ranking for the right keywords or that you are not offering relevant information, the site is too slow or the design is flawed. 
• % New sessions – The % of new sessions is the number of first-time visits to your website. By running an SEO campaign, the % of new sessions should be high as your site should be rising in organic rankings. 

Check the effectiveness of your SEO provider 

As you have access to your Google Analytics you can check your site’s daily performance using the dashboard and this takes a mere few minutes to do. The ways you can analyse your SEO provider’s performance are: 

• Check users flow – check which pages your users visit the most and who is where geographically – this data will inform who to target and where in the world. 
• Check organic traffic. 
• Compare date ranges – compare last month’s performance with this month’s – bare in mind that there are times of year where your users are more likely to visit your site than others (for example there is often a big difference in visits if you are a fashion retailer between the months of December and January for obvious reasons!). 

If you would like help with your SEO, Hooked On Media offer several packages for businesses of all sizes – contact us to find out more.