“Marketing has gone from being a cost or expense to an investment,” says Martyn Sraw in Business Week Magazine. And, just like your 401k, you should be able to evaluate your return on investment (ROI), and the easiest way to evaluate your ROI is from a report. According to eMarketer.com, the internet has become a choice place for advertising for two main reasons:
1) it’s measurable
2) it’s where people are increasingly spending more of their time
Google Analytics is used by 57% of the 10,000 most popular websites according to Alexa Internet, and the best part is that Google Analytics is FREE!
First and foremost you need to know if you have the Google Analytics tracking code installed on your website. Here is a quick list of instructions to make sure your tracking code is installed:
- Log in to Google Analytics at http://www.google.com/analytics.
- To the right of the account that you want to check is an “Edit” button; click it.
- The top right of the gray bar that says “Main Website Profile Information” is a “Check Status” link; click it.
- Under “Tracking Status” it will tell you if your code is installed and give you instructions to add tracking if it is not installed.
- If you would like more help or more detailed instructions, click here.
Google says that you should see reports when you login to your Google Analytics account within 24 hours of installing the tracking code. Once the reports have started, you need to know what they mean! So, we’ve put together a glossary of words and phrases you will see as soon as you log in to your Google Analytics home page.
Visits are the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any further activity gets counted as another visit. If somebody leaves your site, but returns within 30 minutes, Google does not count it as another visit.
Bounce Rate is a good way to measure how relevant the information on your pages is for your users. For instance, if people are finding your home page by searching for “lions” and then hit the back button on their browser immediately, they probably don’t see information relevant to lions on your home page.
Page Views, simply put, is how many pages each visitor has viewed on your site. If somebody hits reload on a page it is counted as another page view. If somebody navigates away from a page and comes back, it is counted again. Google says that the average amount of page views per visitor for a website is 3-5. The more pages a visitor views, the longer they’re staying on your site. So if you can hold a visitor’s attention longer, you’re doing great!
Average Time On Site is just taking the overall time that visitors spent on your site and dividing it by the total number of visit. This statistic is very important as it tells you how useful your users find your website.
Statistics Tips:
- Compare data for specified time periods to view the trends for your website
- To see how your website statistics compares to others in your industry set up benchmarking in Google Analytics
Visit the VEM Global™ Web Analytics page to see how VEM GlobalTM tracks your analytics for your campaigns!
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