Know how you can understand your site performance from the visitor’s point of view thanks to Google Analytics. Don’t forget to check these 5 metrics daily.
For any webmaster, it’s not that easy to understand the performance of a site. If you have a site/blog you will always look to see a positive performance week by week and month by month. So how exactly will you calculate or know how much you have progressed in the chosen timeline?
You can’t just signify it by an increase in earning with your Google AdSense. It can be hard for any to understand an increase in performance of his/her site. But overall site performance can be tracked easily via Google Analytics tool and we present here 5 ways by which to do so.
Visitors Flow Visualization Report
It’s always difficult to find the right path visitors too through your site but Google Analytics team via the Visitors Flow tool have made it possible to make it understand it in an easy and simple way. Google Analytics Visitors Flow is one of the most visualized ways to understand the visitor’s activity on your site hence the performance can be easily tracked.
Located under Audience in Standard reporting, go Custom and then click on Visitors Flow, you are in. The Visitors flow visualization lets so see the volume of visitors on your blog/site by traffic source, region and by any dimension. Visitors Flow is quite useful to understand the promotion of a new page. According to Google Analytics terminology, a node represents a dimension by which you filter out visualization and connection are the path from one node to another, thickness showing the volume of traffic along that path.
Here, for example, I have filtered out visitors flow from Google Search on one of our network blog connecting starting pages to first interaction and then second interaction joined via nodes.
Real Time Visitors
One of the important tools to understands your site growth is to know how many users are online at a particular instant of time. The Real-Time visitors stats active pages, top referral, top social traffic sites, top keywords along with map location of the world where visitors are currently active. Furthermore, Real-Time tracking by Google Analytics team will come up with Events & Conversions(they are in Beta). I always have a look on how much users are active right now on my blog, thanks to Google Analytics.
Visitors by Mobile Devices
In the age of smartphones and thanks to the success of phablet phones, people are looking for information right on their handheld devices. In such the visitors to a particular site not just are from a desktop or laptop but they are widely spread to a large number of smartphones models. You can go through this report from Audience > Mobile > Devices and have a lot at one of my blog called Technos Amigos overview of mobile visiting devices. You can even sort this report by smartphone manufacturer, mobile service provider, mobile input selector, OS and accordingly by screen resolution.
Why it’s Important: It’s important to track this report because you should know much percentage of visitors you get from the mobile device and thus make your site mobile friendly. So your site is not just about desktop or PC site but how it looks on various mobile devices. This is why Responsive themes were introduced for making a site compatible with all devices existing.
Site Exit Pages Overview
Exit pages give us an idea of what was the page where visitors left your website. It can be tracked by going through Content > Site Content > Exit Pages. With each exists pages in the list, it shows exist percentage, pageviews to that particular page and finally the exit percentage.
Google Analytics Dashboard
And finally, important metrics can be checked directly via Google Analytics Dashboard. This is one real good page where you can arrange any of the Google Analytics metrics to be shown here. So with this, you might not need to visit each and every section of Analytics as Dashboard can be used to track it down easily.
Is there any other metric which you often track in Google Analytics. Do let us know via comments.