What Is A Metric In Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is one of the world’s premier business-performance analysis platforms, thanks to the fantastic slew of excellent benefits it offers.

Using Google Analytics is highly beneficial because it automatically compiles reports based on data from your website, to give you a direct insight into your business. 

What Is A Metric In Google Analytics?

However, in order to see the benefits of Google Analytics for yourself, you’ll need to know how to use the platform to your advantage, and this can involve knowing all of the more technical terms that Google Analytics may throw your way! 

Ever found yourself wondering exactly what the term ‘Metric’ refers to? Are you finding yourself scratching your head in confusion even as you think about it now? You are definitely not alone.

Prepare to get all of the answers you seek as you read on down below!

What Is A Metric In Google Analytics?

Put simply, metrics are a way for data pertaining to your website to be displayed in a numerical fashion, to make them much simpler to understand. They are quantitative measurements that show you how your website is performing. 

For example, the number of website visitors who click off of your website within the first five minutes may be shown as a percentage, so you can get a clear sense if there is ever a problem with your website content, and whether you need to optimize your user experience to help keep users in.

Metrics can also be displayed as time values, so you can also get a sense of how long users spend on certain pages of your website, and even how long it takes for customers to decide to make a purchase if you run an online store.

Why Are Metrics In Google Analytics Beneficial?

Metrics in Google Analytics are highly beneficial because they allow website owners to optimize their websites and the content that exists within them.

If Metrics show that only 10 percent of website users are visiting a certain page on a website, then the website owner can focus on building awareness of that specific page, by improving the user experience.

Website owners can also use metrics to help the overall success of their website or online store.

Metrics can help to show how efficient web store funnels are, to see at what points during the customer journey some customers are choosing to opt-out of purchases so that the website owners can then focus on enticing customers and easing their anxieties about completing a purchase. 

Metrics also help you to find out how efficient your website is. You may notice that certain parts of the website are rarely ever visited because there are few internal links leading users there. 

This can help you to map out your internal links so that you can help your users more easily find certain content on your website.

It will also help you to determine if certain content is actually useful, so you can remove or add content as you see fit, based on whether specific content is proving effective or not.

How Do You Access Metrics In Google Analytics?

There are all manner of different metrics that you can access on Google Analytics, and it is just a matter of learning how to access them.

Metrics can help you to understand the devices people are accessing your website from, how long they are using it, and how many views each distinct page on your website has. 

Let’s take a look at how to access some of these different metrics.

What Is A Metric In Google Analytics?

Devices

If you want to see the percentage of users who are accessing your website from a mobile device, and how many are accessing your website from a desktop, then you will want to head to the “Audience” menu of Google Analytics, and then click on “Mobile”, before then clicking on “Overview”. 

This will bring up a simple page that displays your device metrics so that you can understand how people are accessing your website, and optimize accordingly.

If you find that the vast majority of users are accessing your website from a smartphone, then it would be valuable to invest time into making your website work efficiently on smartphone browsers!

Time On Page

Want to find out how long your users are spending on specific pages of your website? This can be incredibly useful, and in order to do this, all you need to do is head to the specific page on Google Analytics, and then click “Behavior”, then “Site Content”, “All Pages”, and then “Average Time On Page Column”.

This will bring up some simple metrics to show you how long, on average, people are spending on that specific page.

You can then easily compare the amount of time that users are spending on specific pages to then optimize your page content to incentivize longer times spent on a given page. 

Landing Pages

The term “Landing Page” refers to the first page that visitors to your website are led to. Generally, most websites would aim to have their homepage be the most visited landing page.

If you want to find out what people are seeing first when they visit your website, then you can use Google Analytics to see what is the most successful landing page.

In order to do this, simply head to the “Behavior” menu on Google Analytics, and then click on the “Site Content”, and then “Landing Pages” submenus in succession. 

This will show you the percentage of users who enter your website via specific pages. This is incredibly useful if you want to ensure that people are entering your website via the homepage.

It can also show you how people are being led to specific landing pages, so you can determine what methods users are taking to discover your website!

To Wrap Up

There you have it! Metrics within Google Analytics are actually incredibly simple and are a way for data pertaining to your website to be displayed in a quantitative way, so that you can more easily gauge the success of your website and how well it is optimized.

Metrics can be used to help you understand countless things about your own website, so make sure to use them to your advantage!

Jackoneil
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