Understanding Basic Digital Marketing Performance Data In Google Analytics

So far, 2020 has seen a massive uptake in e-Commerce and general online usage, so we’d be surprised if digital marketing wasn’t at the forefront of most business’ marketing strategies. However, because of the sharp surge in online uptake over the past 3-6 months, understanding digital marketing performance data can be a real challenge for business owners and in-house marketing professionals as they seek to be agile and take advantage of opportunities.
In this article, we’ll cover the basics of digital marketing performance data available to you in Google Analytics. While by no means a comprehensive guide (there is far too much to cover in any one article), the data mentioned below ought to provide a decent overview of how your website is performing on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Audience Terms To Be Familiar With….

Within Google Analytics there are 8 key terms you should be looking at that will provide a decent overview of how your website is performing and also how successful your digital marketing campaigns are. It is also important to remember that you can change the date range within Google Analytics to find the best data to suit what you are looking for. We find taking a regular look at Year-On-Year and Month-On-Month data quite helpful, but there are a lot of date ranges you can look at and compare so it’s worth having a play around.
This digital marketing performance data can be found by heading into your Google Analytics dashboard and selecting ‘audience’ from the menu on the left-hand side. Selecting ‘audience’ will then bring up a series of options, you will need to select ‘overview’.
Below are the main Audience metrics you’ll find in Google Analytics

• Sessions – Total number of Sessions within the date range. A session is the period time a user is actively engaged with your website. For example, a single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and eCommerce transactions.
• Users – Users who have initiated at least one session during the date range and have visited your website.
• New Users – The number of first-time users during the selected date range that have visited your website. When you are running a campaign you should be seeing an uplift in new users, compared to another period in time.
• Number of sessions per user – The average number of Sessions a user has visited your website.
• Pageviews – Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed. Repeated views of a single page are also counted.
• Pages/Session – Pages/Session is the average number of pages viewed during a session. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
• Average session duration – The average length of a session before the user exits the site.
• Bounce rate – The percentage of single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page. A bounced session has a duration of 0 seconds. An average bounce rate is between 41% – 55%. Often a high bounce rate is an indicator that there may be something wrong logistically with your website, for example – has a long loading time, therefore people have jumped off of your site.

Acquisition Terms To Be Familiar With…

Acquisition refers to how users have come onto your website, this digital marketing performance data can be found by heading into your Google Analytics dashboard and selecting ‘acquisition’ from the menu on the left-hand side. Selecting ‘Acquisition’ will then bring up a series of options, you will need to select ‘overview’. Here are ways that they could come onto your website:

• Organic Traffic – refers to the people that have come across your website via a search engine (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.). They could have searched the name of your business, or keywords that appear within your website and are related to your business.
• Direct Traffic – Users that have gone onto your website by directly typing in your website domain.
• Social Traffic – refers to the people that have reached your website via social media, this is across all social media channels.
• Referral Traffic – Referral traffic describes the people who come to your domain from other sites.
• Paid Search – Paid search traffic is attributed from visitors clicking on a link in an advertisement or sponsored listing that a business has paid for in order to appear at the top of search results.
• Affiliates Traffic – Affiliate traffic is driven to E-commerce websites who have an affiliate programme. These are consumers that have come through an affiliates website with an incentive to shop for your products or services.
• Conversion / Goal Completion data – Conversion/Goal Completion data help you track actions by your website user, and are commonly used to track conversions or form fills on your website. This is very helpful as it allows you to see if your website is hitting its target objectives. For example, if you are an E-commerce business – your website needs to be tracking sales. Similarly, if you are a leads based business, contact forms will need a goal completion to be added to them too. Goals are found in a slightly different area of Google Analytics – you can find goal completions in the left-hand column, under conversions.

If you would like any help in making your digital marketing campaigns reach their full potential, or even to understand how your website is performing – feel free to message us via our contact form or email us at info@fuel-growth.com