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Understanding Google Analytics Essay

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Understanding Google Analytics
Written by Janet Gershen-Siegel

When you build a website for your small business (or you have one built for you), it makes a lot of sense to add Google Analytics. This is a small tracking code which either you can add yourself or have a developer do so. In WordPress, there are several plugins which will add the code correctly; all you have to do is paste it in.
What’s all this data for?

The real use of data is to see which content on your website is working for your customers, and what isn’t. Furthermore, this sort of data can also alert you to webpages which aren’t working at all. Popular content should be nurtured and you should try to repeat it (without simply cloning it, of course). Unpopular content …show more content…

The basic report shows a percentage of new and returning visitors, along with sessions, users, page views, session duration, and what’s called the bounce rate.

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who came to your website and only looked at one page. As analytics guru Avinash Kaushik calls it, “I came, I saw, I puked.” But the truth is; a bounced visitor isn’t necessarily someone who hates your content or who landed by accident and then bailed. It can also be users who love your content but only had the time to view one page, or who got what they wanted from one page, and then they were done. Don’t expect this figure to really ever hit zero, but try to get it to decrease.

The other metrics are fairly self-explanatory. You will generally see more sessions than users because a user can have more than one session (visit) to your website.
Acquisition

The next major report section shows where your website’s visitors all came from. These can be referrals (that is, your site URL on someone else’s website), organic search (your site came up in search results), social (your URL was shared on social media and clicked), or ‘other’. You can click on any of these and get more of a breakdown. If you break down social, you’ll see referrals from not just Facebook and Twitter, but also reddit, Stack Exchange, Disqus (that’s a comments management plugin), and others.
Behavior

The next big report section shows more about what your website’s visitors

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