Today, we will be talking about Google Analytics metrics that seem important but are not the right numbers you should be tracking. For this lesson, we will be using the Google demo shop analytics anyone can have access. Let’s delve into those metrics you shouldn’t be tracking!
· 1 · Page Views:
Most site owners brag about how high their page view numbers are. “I have over 70,000 page views!” However, here at Awsm Digital, we believe page views is a very wrong metric to track because it doesn’t translate to anything.
For example, if you are selling a product, you can’t say “100 people viewed this cup”. It doesn’t mean much. You don’t get sales by the number of people who viewed the product but by the number of people who bought it. We always educate our clients and prospective clients on why page views should only be tracked holistically but not as an essential metric.
· 2 · Average Session Duration:
The reason we don’t track this at Awsm Digital is that this metric is not entirely accurate. For instance, a user visits the homepage of your website, steps out for a while and comes back to continue navigating your site. How do you ascertain that the user stayed on your page? Google doesn’t know if you stayed on the website or how long you were out.
Average Session Duration is a misleading metric to track except you know the user’s behavior.
· 3 · Bounce Rate:
Website owners are usually worried about their bounce rate. Ideally, your bounce rate should be below 50%, but it is not a metric you should place too much focus. You should know that Google calculates bounce sessions every 25 minutes. For example, you visit our homepage and click on the first link. The first session starts counting, and then you step away for about 27 minutes. If you come back and visit another page, a new session begins, and the bounce rate will be much lower.
Bounce rate is the number of people who visited your website and left almost immediately. The metric doesn’t tell us a lot of things that’s why we don’t track it.
· 4 · Direct Traffic:
One other metric we don’t like to track is direct traffic, which a gets a lot of people excited. We know where organic search traffic comes from but we can’t ascertain direct traffic. We don’t know if the user typed awsmdigital.com or they have bookmarked the page, or I shared the link to my friend, and he just clicked on it. Finding the source of direct traffic is difficult. It’s not traffic we like to track by itself because one has to be careful.
So what do we like to track? CONVERSIONS!
Are visitors taking the necessary actions? That’s what matters. If we are selling cups and 100 people viewed it, how many bought the cups? That’s our primary goal, that’s the metric we want to track.
If they are no buying the cups, is there a secondary conversion? For example, signing up for the newsletter or mailing list or discounts. We don’t just focus on the primary goal; we also track the minor conversions. We set up your business accordingly so that you are looking out for the right metrics. Page views, users and other parameters come to play when we are tracking conversions.
We get paid when you fulfill your goal, which is getting more conversions. We believe conversions should be your primary tracking metric while bounce rate, average session, and traffic should be secondary.
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