Your Most Important Audience Metric If you only pay attention to one screen in Google Analytics, it should be this one: the Audience: Overview screen within your local city's account. Audience: Overview is the best place to check in on the health of your site, especially as it pertains to users (devices), sessions (visits) and page views (total number of individual pages viewed). All three of these stats are important, but the one that we recommend paying the closest attention to is your count of sessions (aka visits), as total sessions is the best indicator of how valuable our site is to the local market. In general, we value sessions more than users -- since we can't be that valuable to someone if they only use us once, and we also value sessions more than page views: Since we want to help people find an awesome event as easily as possible, we don't necessarily equate more page views with greater success. In fact, a high number of page views in a given session could indicate that a user isn't finding what they're looking for. The best indicator of how we're doing is how many discrete visits we have -- and that's why we pay the most attention to sessions. Comparing YoY Statistics are meaningless without context -- and so now that we've identified the most important audience stat, we have to figure out what it means. The best way to analyze your site session growth is by looking at it "year over year" -- meaning: comparing this time period to the same time period, last year. This tends to be more helpful for event-focused media properties like us, since so much of our traffic will inevitably be seasonal and affected by big announcements. To compare your data to the same time last year:
What year-over-year (YoY) session growth should you hope to see? Red (no growth) is bad; 30% YoY growth is very good; 60% or higher is excellent (aim for that!). Traffic Sources Another especially useful screen in your local Google Analytics account is Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Channels. This is the best place to understand:
User Demographics Google Analytics uses cookies to collect demographic information about your users. Here are some especially relevant sections: Audience -> Mobile -> Overview allows you to see your traffic breakdown by device. Audience -> Demographics -> Overview allows you to see the age and gender breakdowns of your users. Please note that Google does not collect age information on minors. Need to calculate your LDA% for an alcohol client? Take half of your 18-24 percentage and subtract that from 100. Now that you know a bit more about your audience, it's time to discover what they're into! Let's dig into Using Google Analytics To Drive Meaningful Growth (Part 2: Your Content). |