Understanding The Most Common Google Analytics Terms

Google Analytics is the best way to form your online marketing strategy.

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Google Analytics is the best way to form your online marketing strategy. From learning how people find your site to where they go when they arrive, how long they stay, why they leave, and more, Google Analytics can tell you almost anything you need to know about how your website and content are performing.

Armed with this information, you can modify your content strategy, enhance the user experience with web design updates, and better execute your social media marketing campaigns.

As wonderful as Google Analytics is, it poses a few problems. Perhaps one of the most challenging aspects to using Google Analytics for the first time is trying to figure out what all those terms mean.

Whether you’re ready to get started with Google Analytics for the first time or you’re struggling to make the most of this tool, here are a few common terms that are surely worth knowing.

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Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a measurement of visitors who only visit one page before leaving or ‘bouncing’ from your site altogether. In general, having a high bounce rate isn’t good. It means that particular visitor wasn’t able to find what they were looking for. A high bounce rate means you need to take a fresh look at the layout of your site or you need to rethink your content.

Events

Events are things like ad clicks, video views, platform usage, and the like which can help you understand how your target audience interacts with your website and whether or not the campaigns you’re running are effective at all.

Conversions

The term ‘conversion’ isn’t all that uncommon. It indicates that a person has moved on to the next stage in your sales funnel either into a reader, follower, or buyer. However, there are two different conversions, and you may not know they exist.

Macro conversions are the most sought after because the end result is monetary. It means someone made a purchase of some kind. Micro conversions reflect a small step made in the direction of a macro conversion. For example, a visitor signed up for a newsletter or downloaded a case study.

Conversion Attribution

The conversion family of terms doesn’t end there. You also have to worry about conversion attribution when using Google Analytics. It measures and rewards the effort to acquire new clients by helping you determine what caused the conversion.

Last-click attribution refers to the last click a visitor made prior to conversion. Meanwhile, linear attribution refers to which of the steps in the conversion process gets the most and least attention.

There are many more terms to consider. So many, in fact, that we could spend all day writing about them! If you need a little help learning about everything that Google Analytics has to offer, give us a call. We’d be happy to help you understand how to use this program to your advantage.

Shaan Nicol

I help business owners increase profits by bringing their vision to life with a world-class website and gold-standard website support. Let’s connect!