What are the most important metrics in Google Analytics?
This tutorial explains how & where to find the most useful metrics in GA for Beginner-Level users working to improve SEO.
Total Sessions
Total Conversions
Total Conversion Rates
Organic Sessions
Organic Conversions
Organic Conversion Rates
Organic Landing Pages
Organic Landing Page Bounce Rate
Organic Landing Page Conversion Rate
Video Transcript:
Once you log into Google Analytics, you will probably be looking at a screen like this, you may or may not have this "Notice" up here at the top, this is about an upcoming change to analytics. If you do see it, you can just dismiss it.
The first thing we want to do is we want to come over to the left here, and we want to click on Acquisition. This is going to tell us how people are arriving at our website - how we are "acquiring" those visitors.
That opens up a drop-down menu, go ahead and click on all traffic, and then channels.
[0:30]That's going to open a graph, it'll probably look something like this. I think, by default, it chooses the last seven days but we want to grab data for the last month, so up here near the top, where you see the date, click on that. And then one of the custom ranges in this drop-down is the last 30 days. So let's go ahead and choose that.
This is going to give us basically the last month's worth of data - the most current information we have available. And we want to get the number of sessions the total number of sessions for the past month.
[1:00]So if we look down at this table below, you'll see the number of sessions in this third column from the left, take this first number, this is the first row and in bigger with a bigger font and bold. This number right here, that's the number we want to put in this first box over here on our form, right there. Now we want the total number of conversions for the for the entire website.
So that will be over here towards the end. If we have conversion setup and there indeed tracking, we'll want to go to this section here. And we want to do all goals, we might have several different different types of conversions, each one of those would be a goal, but we just want to find all of them. So for us, that's too, so we want to take to put it over here. Right there. And then we also want the total conversion rate, the goal conversion rate will be right here. For us, it's very small, since this site is not set up for conversions. And this is a percentage, you don't need to add the percentage sign.
[2:00]The next thing that we want to do is we want to get this same information here. We want to get that for our organic traffic. So it's pretty easy to do just over here, click on this where it says organic search. These are, by the way are the different channels. This is how Google breaks these down by default. But if you click on organic search will want to do the exact same thing. We get the number of sessions get the number of goal conversions, goal completions that we actually had zero coming from our organic search. So for us, that would be zero, and then this would also be zero.And then the next thing we want to do is we want to look at our landing pages. So steal from this page here, right beneath the date chart, you'll see the little row with some options, keyword source and landing page, click on landing page. And then what we'll do is we'll take this first one, that is our most popular landing page.
[3:00]We'll paste that in there. And then we want to get the number of sessions bounce rate and conversion rate for each individual page. So the number of sessions would be here 480 For this page, the bounce rate would be 75.42. And the conversion rate figure for us again, this this site is not set up for conversion to acquire conversions anyway, for us that this is going to be zero, and then do the same thing for the next four landing pages. So we'll end up with a list of the top five landing pages. You can see here, what those top five would be for us. Very often you will see here, the homepage. If you see a field here where it doesn't have anything, it just has a forward slash and that's it. That's your homepage.
[4:00]So over here, we would just you can either cut and paste, copy and paste or just do that for the home page. So that's it for this page. We have a nice little summary of what's happening with our website, how it's getting traffic, how it's performing.
And the next step would be to use this information to figure out exactly what and how we can improve it