By Kelly Myers
As you know, Integrity Marketing Solutions sends a report once a month with your Website’s Google Analytics. You click on the link in the email, and you are taken to your Google Analytics Dashboard to evaluate a handful of numbers.
What do these numbers mean? Are these numbers normal?
In the next few weeks, I’ll be identifying, defining and discussing what goes on in Google Analytics and the additional platforms we use to track your marketing performance and what they should mean to you.
First, let’s talk about Traffic within Google Analytics.
Your traffic overview is the first chart to appear when opening your Google Analytics dashboard. You’ll see there are a handful of “Channels” in the beginning column. A channel is the source from which your traffic originates. For example, Organic means the website traffic comes from search engines like Google or Bing. Direct Traffic refers to when a visitor typed your web address into the browser’s address bar directly. Other popular channels include Social, Referrals and Email. Don’t panic if the latter of these channels aren’t on your Google Analytics. The ideal goal is for your website’s main source of traffic to come from the Organic and Direct channels.
In the column to the right of Channels is Sessions.
One session means one visit to your website. It includes all interactions a user may have on your website once they arrive. On average, most IMS clients have around 300 sessions per month. If your number of sessions is around 300, consider your website to be in good standing. If the number of session your website is receiving is well below 300, consider the factors. Are you a new firm? Have you recently bought a new domain? When is the last time your site was updated? Have you postponed upgrading your website to a responsive design? These can all contribute to low session numbers.
The next column you’ll see on your Google Analytics dashboard is New Users. The number of new users your website receives is correlated to the number of sessions. Typically, the number of New Users to your site should account for over half of your overall sessions. For example, if you have 300 sessions for the month of March, the number of new users should be over 150. If you feel this number is too low, please reach out to IMS through the support ticket system.
Now that you know what kind and how much traffic your website should be receiving, next time I’ll discuss what those website visitors are actually doing on your website.