BEGINNERS GUIDE TO 10 THINGS
YOU NEED TO KNOW

Google Analytics is an incredible
tool that helps you make your site great. Here are 10 interesting little tidbits that will make your site even more great. @AmberHorsburgh

1 Bounce rate: the amount
of people that leave your site after only viewing 1 page A high bounce rate is not always a bad thing

A Healthy Bounce Rate varies
from 10% - 98% Website type Example Ave bounce rate Service Task Rabbit or Rdio 10 - 30% Retail Amazon or ASOS 20 - 40% Lead Generation National LGBT Museum or Dadaab Stories 30 - 50% Content VICE or Huffington Post 40 - 60% Landing Page Every site 70 - 90% Blog The Sartorialist or Humans of New York 70 - 98% Source: Google Analytics

2 Unique Visitors show the
number of distinct individuals that come to a site

BUT beware! Unique Visitors are
not always people This metric counts the cookies dropped in a browser. Unique visitors does not equal unique browsers, people or computers.

3 Average Visit Duration is
thought to show how long people spend on your site on average

But, it is grossly inaccurate.
The way it is calculated underestimates the real length of time. It does not count the time a visitor spends on the last page they see. Page #1 Page #2 10:00:00am (T1) 10:00:30am (T2) Enters site Page #3 Exits site 10:00:50am (T3) Time spent on Page 1 = (T2 - T1) = 30 seconds Time spent on Page 2 = (T3 - T2) = 20 seconds Time Spent on Page 3 = (unknown) = 0 Seconds Time on site = 50 seconds

4 ‘Direct’ Traffic is usually
assumed to be people typing a site’s URL directly into the address bar

There are more sources of
‘direct traffic’ than meets the eye 9 common sources: 1. Visitor came through from bookmarks bar 2. Hyperlink from a Word or Powerpoint doc 3. Link was in Skype, G-Chat or AIM 4. Click-throughs from Mobile apps like Twitter 5. Link was in Javascript - this is a problem with banners 6. Link was in a flash application 7. Link was on an intranet 8. Redirect pages 9. Site was set as the users homepage or pinned tab

5 Referral traffic shows the
visits to your site from those that came from site sources other than a search engine

Referral traffic helps track improvements
in SEO Referral traffic shows number of backlinks exist to your site. Backlinks help you gain trust and reputation in the eyes of Google search engine. This helps SEO ranking.

6 Site Search shows the
most common things people look for in the search field on your website ** Obviously my site could do better with search

Site Search makes for great
content ideas This metric is a great indicator of what people organically want out of your site. Use these themes and keywords to create content for your site. This will be interesting to your audience

7 When measuring loyalty, most
people look at New vs. Returning users. But frequency & recency reports give a better snapshot.

Frequency & recency reports are
valuable to content sites, which exist to build long term readership and loyalty.

8 To find the best
type of content your site has look to your top Landing Pages from social traffic report

The top landing pages via
social referral show the content that is organically interesting to social audience. Repackage this type of content to get more use.

9 The maximum session time
= 30 mins. Users will be timed out after 30 mins.

This is important to note
if your site demands the attention of users for longer than 30 mins. E.g.: educational training sites and audio/video streaming.

10 Google Analytics is not
100% accurate

It does not catch data
if: The Analytics ID tracking code is not pasted on every single page on your website. People disable nd Javascript or disallow a cookies.

Sign-Up on to learn more
about Google Analytics for beginners. http://skl.sh/ 1bsUbR9 Use the discount code ‘riffraff’ to get 25% off.

Tweet to download. @AmberHorsburgh https://www.paywithatweet.com/
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