Bill Roth

Once you get Google Analytics set up, the next question someone usually asks is: What do I pay attention to? In my view, the following metrics are useful for a first timer. Consider this a kind of Google Analytics 101.

Visitors: Many people still focus on hits, which the number of times a particular file is pulled from a server. But it is more relevant to pay attention to the pages that people who come to your site actually see. Some people also still pay attention to page views. This is also inaccurate, 1000 page views is irrelevant if the same person loads a page 1000 times. You care how many unique people look at the page. This is the visitor metric. Google analytics give you a decent amount of visitor related data.

Bounce Rate. Bounce rate is a metric of how many visitors come to you site, look at 1 page for a short time, then go somewhere else. It is a measure of how dull and irrelevant your pages are. A high bounce rate is bad, but you will never get to a 0% bounce rate. Google analytics also gives you bound rate per page, so you can find your worst offender.