But what do sessions actually mean?
Google Analytics is about so much more than just session counting!
Yes, you can also begin to learn more about who your users are; the demographics of them, the geographical locations, ages, sex etc. But that’s nothing!
How about beginning to understand which of your pages perform best; which generate the most conversions and which result in most users leaving your site? Forget bounce rate. What does that really tell you?! If your content is long-form and your user reads from the very top to the very bottom of the page, is engaged in what they’re reading and spending considerable time engrossed in the content, but they then leave the site, Google consider this a bounced visit. In reality, that user came to the site and found exactly what they were looking for, were fully engaged and found everything they needed to find. In this instance, a metric like scroll-depth of the page would be far more informative. Did the user read all of the content or just half of it? Thinking about what is important to your audience is key.
Goals and Values
Google Analytics has other ways of determining how a page performs. It can tell you the exit rates for all of your pages, so helping you determine which pages work, and which don’t. You can set up goals and values dependent on the objectives of your website, and you can really begin to understand what your users do when they come to your pages.
Event Tracking
Setting up event tracking on aspects that make a difference to your organisation is key. You can measure scroll depth, video plays, downloads, ecommerce transactions, particular button clicks, audio downloads and so much more. It is essential in determining engagement of users; where your site is successful and where it fails to deliver, as well as being a great platform from which to compare channels' performance.
Google Tag Manager
At Beyond Your Brand, we use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to implement the tracking of our sites. GTM is a tag management system that manages JavaScript and HTML tags used for tracking and analytics, all in one place. It requires a simple set up, and then, as they say, the world is your oyster! (Or, perhaps in more analytical terms...your metrics are your pearls!).
