Q: Do you know or have benchmarks we could refer to when we look at all the Google Analytics data? For example is having a student on the web page for 3 minutes good or bad? We do have some history we can look at but I wondered if there something else we could compare all this data to? I figured if anybody knew you would! Appreciate your time and help.
A: Google Analytics can send you into information overload with all the data it provides. Hopefully, these tips will help you better navigate the statistics Google Analytics generates from your website.
In terms of benchmarks like “How many hits should my site get,” it varies from market-to-market. Instead, you should start with your baseline data and try to build from there.
1) Unique visitors – The total number of individual visitors to your site during a specific time period – not counting repeat visits by the same person. What you want to see is an upward trend over a period of time. If the number of unique visitors is not rising, you need to look at what marketing efforts you are using to push people to your site.
2) New visitors versus repeat visitors – this is a comparison of those who have come to your site only once and those who have come more often. A good repeat rate is 15%. If your repeat visitor rate is higher than 30 percent, you are not generating enough new visitors to grow.
3) Traffic sources – how your visitors are finding you (including organic traffic, referral traffic, and direct traffic). Direct traffic comes from someone who types in your URL. Organic traffic comes when someone finds you through a search engine such as Google. Referral traffic comes from a link on another website. The goal is to have 40-50% of your traffic come from organic search and 20-30% come from referrals.
4) Bounce rate – the number of new visitors who leave your site almost immediately after arrive with no other interactions. A high bounce rate can indicate problems with your website, such as you’re not providing the information people are looking for – or they can’t find it. This is also something that you should monitor over time – and take action if your bounce rate is not going down.
5) Length of page view – this is pretty straight forward, it’s how long the average person stays on a given web page. This number varies based on the size of your site. It’s best to compare this number against other similar size sites using the Google analytics tool.