If you are a Webmaster regularly employing the use of analytics tools such as Google Analytics in your business analysis operations, you may believe that you know all that there is to know about your business website, however, the proper utilisation of performance analytics tools such as this can provide a multitude of vital data about your website that you may not have thought to be monitoring before. Data such as this could help you to identify the problem areas of your website, allowing for you to work to make your company site stronger than ever. All different business types will likely have varying goals for their company, but regardless, your aim should be the monitoring of these statistics to ensure that you’re getting the very most out of your digital marketing efforts. In this article, In Front Digital will discuss some of the most vital Google Analytics metrics to measure as to determine business success, such as:

• Average session duration
• Site speed suggestions
• Assisted conversions

We will also let you know what these statistics mean in connection to the performance of your business on a whole and how this information can be used to optimise potentially underperforming factors and improve your overall return on investment (ROI).

Average Session Duration

Average session duration metrics define the length of time that a user is seen to spend upon your site on average. This can be seen to have a direct correlation in regard to how interesting and relevant your website and its content is to your visitors. The more relevant, the more likely your users will spend a longer amount of time viewing your copy. If your overall interactions per visit are seen to be quite low, but average session duration is higher in comparison, this could suggest that your web pages offer too much information to users, resulting in a longer time being spent reading the page overall.

However, a significantly higher average session duration, paired alongside a relatively short interaction per visit could also be indicative of content that is confusing to your users.
So, how can businesses improve website engagement? When offering products or services to the visitors of your company website, ensure that any call to actions are easy to understand and are straightforward in nature. This will help to increase the amount of conversions seen to your site on a whole, as well as the length of time that your users are spending reading through your copy.

Site Speed Suggestions

Site speed insights for your business’ website can be viewed through the Google Analytics platform, making it easier for users to review the areas in which their site and its performance may need to be improved. It is quite easy to become focused solely on the design elements of our websites during the development process, honing in on the visual factors to ensure our site is visually appealing to visitors. However, the use of elements such as video and large, high resolution images, can work to be detrimental to the overall performance and speed of your company website. If specific landing pages for PPC, SEO, and other popular marketing activities have been created containing a large number of images and JavaScript elements, you will likely discover that the overall speed of these pages is noticeably slower than other, more basic, pages on your website.

By looking under the ‘behaviour’ section upon the Google Analytics platform, you will find the Site Speed Suggestions report for your business’ website underneath the ‘site speed’ dropdown. This feature will inform you of the most viewed pages on your site overall and their subsequent average load times alongside a score out of 100. Suggestions to improve the speed of each page can be found by clicking onto ‘X total’; this will subsequently open a new window and take you to view your Google Page Speed Insights report.

Assisted Conversions

It is vital that you know where the traffic to your website is coming from and whether or not it can be seen to be converting. However, assisted conversions can often be overlooked due to the fact that, in Google Analytics reports, Google will automatically assign the value of a conversion to the very last channel that the user was seen to enter you site from. This can be great for those looking to identify the channel completing the most leads to their site, but may not be so beneficial for those wanting to find the channel bringing in these leads. While Google automatically reports on last-click conversions, users of the Analytics platform are also able to see first-click interactions, helping you to determine where users are coming from and the paths that they are taking within their journey towards completing a conversion on your site.

To conclude, if you find that you are heavily relying on possibly incorrect and outdated knowledge of digital marketing and SEO techniques, you could be inadvertently working to greatly damage your online presence, subsequently placing you and your business website behind your competitors. The hiring of an experienced SEO agency with an expansive knowledge of the latest developments in search engine optimisation techniques should be heavily considered by those looking to get the most out of their Google Analytics account and greatly improve the performance of your company website.

Google Search Console

Data that can be found within Google Search Console can also be found within Google Analytics, with a combined data set for your top landing pages of both Google Analytics and Google Search Console data being made available to users. Through the use of:

• Clicks
• Impressions
• Click through rates
• Average position metrics,

users of the analytics platform will be able to assess how their pages are performing within the organic search results, helping them to determine whether any changes need to be made to their website’s pages as to encourage a higher number of clicks from their potential customers. You are also able to view any problems such as broken pages, slow page speed or mobile and usability concerns.