In Episode #356, Eric and Neil discuss the 7 metrics you ought to monitor in Google Analytics. Tune in to learn how you can use these metrics in Google Analytics to drive more traffic to your site and increase your ROI.
Time Stamped Show Notes:
- 00:27 – Today’s topic: 7 Metrics You Ought to Monitor in Google Analytics
- 00:37 – First metric is the bounce rate
- 00:54 – You can check which pages are causing the bounce and do necessary adjustments
- 00:59 – Second metric is the search traffic
- 01:01 – You can monitor it daily and make weekly comparisons to see the trends
- 01:21 – Neil started adding different languages on their website
- 01:56 – Third metric is the conversion
- 02:02 – You should be looking at where your conversions are coming from and if you’re hitting your goals
- 02:22 – Fourth metric is the time on site
- 02:42 – Check your time on site alongside your bounce rate
- 02:53 – Fifth metric is the site speed
- 03:00 – Site speed is a ranking and experience factor
- 03:20 – Sixth metric is social referrals
- 03:46 – Neil won’t spend more money on Facebook ads for USA because of its strict algorithm
- 04:12 – Seventh metric is pages per session
- 04:30 – You can pull lessons from the well performing pages and duplicate them for your other pages
- 04:39 – That’s it for today’s episode!
3 Key Points:
- By paying attention to the metrics, you can track your progress and make the necessary adjustments.
- First study the social platform where you want to have paid ads to make sure your money doesn’t go down the drain.
- Set goals for your business to see if you’re on the right track.
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Full Transcript of The Episode
Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School, with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sui.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: And today we are going to talk about seven metrics you ought to monitor inside of Google Analytics. So, the first metric I like to look at is my bounce rate - are people bouncing off my page immediately when they visit it? Do I need to deliver a better experience? So I look at my bounce rate, basically I'll look at my landing pages as well and other pages that I have to make sure that, more or less, things aren't out of whack and when one page has an extremely high bounce rate, and the others don't.
Neil Patel: I like looking at search traffic and I monitor it daily. I compare it week over week, so today's Monday I compare it over today's this Monday over last Monday, and what that tells me is that things are [inaudible 00:01:14] if they're going in a downward trend and this is really important because the developer will make a silly little mistake. With my website recently, I have so many different languages, we started redirecting people. So if you speak German and that's your primary language, we direct you to the German language of our blog. What ended up happening is the developer also redirected the Google bot, that caused them to index our German post using English title-tags and meta descriptions and it caused all of our traffic to tank. I picked it up within three days of our traffic tanking, if I didn't monitor it on a daily basis, I wouldn't know that and it would be too late and then our traffic will pretty much go down to close to zero, and then I would be like, what the heck, where's all the revenue in the business.
Eric Siu: Alright number three is I like to look at my conversions - duh, right, if I hopefully have some kind of gold conversions or eCommerce conversions set up on your site but you should be looking at your conversions over time, where are they coming from exactly? Are you turning in the right direction? And so on and so forth. So there's a lot you can do, slice and dice around, you know, your gold conversions or completions and your eCommerce conversions, so just make sure you're monitoring them.
Neil Patel: I also like looking at my time on site, I can continually do tests on a weekly basis, so try to increase it. The reasons being is, if it gets high enough and you have strong loyalty, your user metrics increase and your search engine and rankings drastically increase. You're also much less likely to get hit by I would say a Google Panda penalty. So continue look at your time on site, because if your time on site and your bounce rate are through ... Well if your time on site is low and your bounce rate is through the roof, eventually your rankings are going to tank.
Eric Siu: Number five, I like looking at my site speed. So, site speed, you go to behavior, you go to site speed, take a look at how things are going because site speed is a ranking factor and more importantly it's an experience factor, right? If your site speed is out of whack, something is bogging things down, you should be looking at it and should be making adjustments to it, because, well, again, think about how your experience affects other people, right, how they will remember you. Oh yeah, Neil, he's got that slow site.
Neil Patel: Number six, I look at social referrals. This is really important if you're spending money on social media. For example, I used to spend a ton on Facebook advertising just to buy Facebook fans. What ended up happening is my Facebook traffic went all the way up to two, three hundred thousand visitors a month, which is a shit ton of Facebook traffic, all the way now down to roughly thirty thousand visitors a month. This just shows that Facebook has been tightening up their algorithm. For that reason, I will never spend any more money, at least within the US, to buy Facebook fans.
Eric Siu: Alright and number seven, last but not least, I like looking at my campaigns. So, you know, more specifically my campaign keywords, so I guess that not so much a metric. So, I'll talk about looking at my goal conversions in campaigns, actually we've talked about goal conversions already. Let me switch it, I like looking at my pages per session, right, so when I look at specific landing pages that are driving traffic, I like looking at the ones that are doing above average, because I can assume that the first page is driving some kind of behavior, whereas it's driving a really good experience and it's trying to get people to view more, so maybe there are some lessons I can pull from it, and something that I can duplicate from, you know, a successful page.
So, that's seven, right?
Neil Patel: Yeah, that's seven.
Eric Siu: That's seven, so that's it, and we'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review, so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.
Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.
Eric Siu: And today we are going to talk about seven metrics you ought to monitor inside of Google Analytics. So, the first metric I like to look at is my bounce rate - are people bouncing off my page immediately when they visit it? Do I need to deliver a better experience? So I look at my bounce rate, basically I'll look at my landing pages as well and other pages that I have to make sure that, more or less, things aren't out of whack and when one page has an extremely high bounce rate, and the others don't.
Neil Patel: I like looking at search traffic and I monitor it daily. I compare it week over week, so today's Monday I compare it over today's this Monday over last Monday, and what that tells me is that things are [inaudible 00:01:14] if they're going in a downward trend and this is really important because the developer will make a silly little mistake. With my website recently, I have so many different languages, we started redirecting people. So if you speak German and that's your primary language, we direct you to the German language of our blog. What ended up happening is the developer also redirected the Google bot, that caused them to index our German post using English title-tags and meta descriptions and it caused all of our traffic to tank. I picked it up within three days of our traffic tanking, if I didn't monitor it on a daily basis, I wouldn't know that and it would be too late and then our traffic will pretty much go down to close to zero, and then I would be like, what the heck, where's all the revenue in the business.
Eric Siu: Alright number three is I like to look at my conversions - duh, right, if I hopefully have some kind of gold conversions or eCommerce conversions set up on your site but you should be looking at your conversions over time, where are they coming from exactly? Are you turning in the right direction? And so on and so forth. So there's a lot you can do, slice and dice around, you know, your gold conversions or completions and your eCommerce conversions, so just make sure you're monitoring them.
Neil Patel: I also like looking at my time on site, I can continually do tests on a weekly basis, so try to increase it. The reasons being is, if it gets high enough and you have strong loyalty, your user metrics increase and your search engine and rankings drastically increase. You're also much less likely to get hit by I would say a Google Panda penalty. So continue look at your time on site, because if your time on site and your bounce rate are through ... Well if your time on site is low and your bounce rate is through the roof, eventually your rankings are going to tank.
Eric Siu: Number five, I like looking at my site speed. So, site speed, you go to behavior, you go to site speed, take a look at how things are going because site speed is a ranking factor and more importantly it's an experience factor, right? If your site speed is out of whack, something is bogging things down, you should be looking at it and should be making adjustments to it, because, well, again, think about how your experience affects other people, right, how they will remember you. Oh yeah, Neil, he's got that slow site.
Neil Patel: Number six, I look at social referrals. This is really important if you're spending money on social media. For example, I used to spend a ton on Facebook advertising just to buy Facebook fans. What ended up happening is my Facebook traffic went all the way up to two, three hundred thousand visitors a month, which is a shit ton of Facebook traffic, all the way now down to roughly thirty thousand visitors a month. This just shows that Facebook has been tightening up their algorithm. For that reason, I will never spend any more money, at least within the US, to buy Facebook fans.
Eric Siu: Alright and number seven, last but not least, I like looking at my campaigns. So, you know, more specifically my campaign keywords, so I guess that not so much a metric. So, I'll talk about looking at my goal conversions in campaigns, actually we've talked about goal conversions already. Let me switch it, I like looking at my pages per session, right, so when I look at specific landing pages that are driving traffic, I like looking at the ones that are doing above average, because I can assume that the first page is driving some kind of behavior, whereas it's driving a really good experience and it's trying to get people to view more, so maybe there are some lessons I can pull from it, and something that I can duplicate from, you know, a successful page.
So, that's seven, right?
Neil Patel: Yeah, that's seven.
Eric Siu: That's seven, so that's it, and we'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1: This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review, so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow, right here on Marketing School.
