Which indicators should you follow as a priority on Google Analytics?
Posted: Sun Jan 05, 2025 8:17 am
Google Analytics is the most accessible tool to obtain your site's performance indicators. On the other hand, it offers a very large number of them and it can sometimes be complicated to know which ones to track in particular. Let's sort them out!
Google Analytics is a very good tool that we recommend to all our clients, whether they are beginners or more experienced in digital marketing.
There is, however, one negative point that we see quite frequently:
There is TOO much data available!
In itself, this is rather a good thing.
Except that this too often leads to 2 types of situations:
1 – You are using Google Analytics for the first time and faced with all the tabs and statistics, you quickly feel lost. You force yourself to use it but quickly give up because you spend too much time looking for your data here and there.
2 – You use Google Analytics regularly, but not efficiently. You understand the potential of honduras email list the tool and the information available and you want to track everything. It’s extremely time-consuming and not very efficient. The more indicators you track, the more time you will spend on it.
Do you recognize yourself in any of these points?
To solve the first point, I refer you to this turnkey reporting template that we have designed to make it easier for you to visualize and analyze your data.
the digital marketing reporting template
For the second point, we are going to take inventory of the most relevant indicators to follow on your Google Analytics account!
#1 – Real-time user count
This indicator is especially useful for checking that everything is going well on your site.
If you are used to fairly constant traffic and this figure remains at 0 for a certain time, this may indicate a problem (server down, deindexing, etc.).
If you have a media or e-commerce site with very high traffic, this data can allow you to monitor peak and low times in terms of visits in order to launch marketing and sales actions at the right time.
#2 – The number of visitors to your website
First of all, you should know that you will not see the word "visitor" on Google Analytics. The tool prefers the term "user".
This is the basic information when you want to track your web performance.
How many visitors does my site generate over a given period?
With Google Analytics, you can find this figure in raw form in the audience statistics
It can also and above all be combined with other data from the tool to allow you to identify the number of visitors to a particular page, or the number of visitors coming from Google or social networks for example.
Knowing the number of visitors to your site or a page allows you to calculate its conversion rate, a key indicator in any marketing strategy .
the calculation of the conversion rate
calculating the visitors > leads conversion rate
#3 – The number of recorded sessions
When we want to analyze the traffic of our website, there is often confusion between the number of visitors and the number of sessions .
In fact, you have to understand that a visitor can have multiple sessions. That is to say, the same user can – over a given period – make multiple visits to your site.
It is these different visits that are recorded as sessions.
Analyzing the number of sessions will give you an indication of your visitors' propensity to revisit your site.
This indicator is particularly relevant for analyzing your ability to attract, capture and retain an audience.
#4 – The number of page views
When you want to convert your visitors into leads, you will try to attract them with initial content, then send them to landing pages .
To do this, we will multiply the relevant content according to the stages of their buyer journey.
You need to create articles on complementary topics, link them together with internal links and call-to-actions (CTAs) in order to logically direct visitors to conversion pages.
The performance of these conversion funnels can partly be analyzed using Google Analytics.
If you see that the number of page views per session is very close to 1, then your funnels are probably not optimal.
The number of page views is also very useful to analyze on a per-page basis.
This will allow you to draw up a list of the pages and articles that generate the most visits to your site.
These are the pages that you will need to work on as a priority to improve your conversion rate, by judiciously placing relevant calls-to-actions there that link to your landing pages.
#5 – Traffic acquisition channels
Google Analytics gives you the ability to know precisely where your visitors come from.
Do they come mainly from Google searches? From your social media posts? From your email campaigns?
Let’s review the different acquisition channels tracked by Google Analytics:
Organic Search
As the name suggests, this is where you will find your organic traffic performance.
Organic traffic, also called natural traffic, is traffic generated “for free” as opposed to paid traffic.
It counts all visitors coming from search engines. Google of course, but also Bing, Yahoo…
By going into more detail, you will get the figures for each search engine as well as some indications on the queries typed by Internet users which led them to your site.
To get more detailed information about queries and your SEO performance, you can use another free tool from Google: Google Search Console.
Paid Search
Here you will find the traffic generated by your advertising campaigns on Google Ads or other networks.
Display
This section also includes traffic from advertising campaigns. But this time, it is only the traffic generated by your campaigns launched on the Google display network.
Referral
This group includes all traffic coming from third-party sites (referring sites).
That is, visitors gained by clicking on links displayed on other sites and pointing to one of your pages.
By clicking on the details, you can even know the name of the referring site as well as the page from which the link was clicked.
Very useful for identifying sites that offer you quality backlinks for your SEO strategy work.
Social
No big revelation here. You will have understood that this is the group containing all the traffic generated by links clicked on social networks and leading to your site.
These could be links in your own posts, on posts from other accounts, or clicks on links on your profile pages.
What is interesting is that by clicking on the details, you will have visibility of the traffic generated for each social network (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc.).
Note that if you have a YouTube channel, Google Analytics considers the platform as a social network. This is where you can analyze your traffic generated via YouTube.
E-mail
In this section, Google Analytics groups together traffic coming from a click on a link contained in an email.
You will be able to follow the impact of sending a newsletter or an emailing campaign on the traffic of your website.
Direct
Suffice to say that this category is the most obscure on the list. All visits that come from a source such as:
A visit following a click on a link bookmarked or suggested by your browser
A visit generated by a click on a digital document (pdf or other)
A visit via scanning a QR Code
A visit via a link in an SMS or on a messaging application like WhatsApp.
…
Direct traffic also often includes visits for which Google Analytics was unable to identify the precise source for various reasons.
Other
I won't draw you a picture either. All visits that don't fit into one of the previous sections fail here.
#6 – Conversions on your website
This is the crux of the matter: attracting visitors is good, but if they leave as they arrived, it won't really have any impact on your turnover.
If you don't have tools that allow you to track the performance of your landing pages and your marketing actions in general, you can set conversion goals directly on Google Analytics.
A conversion can be a newsletter subscription, a download, a contact request… It all depends on your strategy!
#7 – The geographical origin of your visitors
If you have an international business, it is certainly useful for you to know the share of traffic of your site for each targeted country.
Similarly, if you operate in France but are targeting specific cities, this information is critical to your marketing strategy.
Google Analytics gives you this information.
You can even combine this data with the performance of a particular page to analyze where visitors are coming from.
Google Analytics is a very good tool that we recommend to all our clients, whether they are beginners or more experienced in digital marketing.
There is, however, one negative point that we see quite frequently:
There is TOO much data available!
In itself, this is rather a good thing.
Except that this too often leads to 2 types of situations:
1 – You are using Google Analytics for the first time and faced with all the tabs and statistics, you quickly feel lost. You force yourself to use it but quickly give up because you spend too much time looking for your data here and there.
2 – You use Google Analytics regularly, but not efficiently. You understand the potential of honduras email list the tool and the information available and you want to track everything. It’s extremely time-consuming and not very efficient. The more indicators you track, the more time you will spend on it.
Do you recognize yourself in any of these points?
To solve the first point, I refer you to this turnkey reporting template that we have designed to make it easier for you to visualize and analyze your data.
the digital marketing reporting template
For the second point, we are going to take inventory of the most relevant indicators to follow on your Google Analytics account!
#1 – Real-time user count
This indicator is especially useful for checking that everything is going well on your site.
If you are used to fairly constant traffic and this figure remains at 0 for a certain time, this may indicate a problem (server down, deindexing, etc.).
If you have a media or e-commerce site with very high traffic, this data can allow you to monitor peak and low times in terms of visits in order to launch marketing and sales actions at the right time.
#2 – The number of visitors to your website
First of all, you should know that you will not see the word "visitor" on Google Analytics. The tool prefers the term "user".
This is the basic information when you want to track your web performance.
How many visitors does my site generate over a given period?
With Google Analytics, you can find this figure in raw form in the audience statistics
It can also and above all be combined with other data from the tool to allow you to identify the number of visitors to a particular page, or the number of visitors coming from Google or social networks for example.
Knowing the number of visitors to your site or a page allows you to calculate its conversion rate, a key indicator in any marketing strategy .
the calculation of the conversion rate
calculating the visitors > leads conversion rate
#3 – The number of recorded sessions
When we want to analyze the traffic of our website, there is often confusion between the number of visitors and the number of sessions .
In fact, you have to understand that a visitor can have multiple sessions. That is to say, the same user can – over a given period – make multiple visits to your site.
It is these different visits that are recorded as sessions.
Analyzing the number of sessions will give you an indication of your visitors' propensity to revisit your site.
This indicator is particularly relevant for analyzing your ability to attract, capture and retain an audience.
#4 – The number of page views
When you want to convert your visitors into leads, you will try to attract them with initial content, then send them to landing pages .
To do this, we will multiply the relevant content according to the stages of their buyer journey.
You need to create articles on complementary topics, link them together with internal links and call-to-actions (CTAs) in order to logically direct visitors to conversion pages.
The performance of these conversion funnels can partly be analyzed using Google Analytics.
If you see that the number of page views per session is very close to 1, then your funnels are probably not optimal.
The number of page views is also very useful to analyze on a per-page basis.
This will allow you to draw up a list of the pages and articles that generate the most visits to your site.
These are the pages that you will need to work on as a priority to improve your conversion rate, by judiciously placing relevant calls-to-actions there that link to your landing pages.
#5 – Traffic acquisition channels
Google Analytics gives you the ability to know precisely where your visitors come from.
Do they come mainly from Google searches? From your social media posts? From your email campaigns?
Let’s review the different acquisition channels tracked by Google Analytics:
Organic Search
As the name suggests, this is where you will find your organic traffic performance.
Organic traffic, also called natural traffic, is traffic generated “for free” as opposed to paid traffic.
It counts all visitors coming from search engines. Google of course, but also Bing, Yahoo…
By going into more detail, you will get the figures for each search engine as well as some indications on the queries typed by Internet users which led them to your site.
To get more detailed information about queries and your SEO performance, you can use another free tool from Google: Google Search Console.
Paid Search
Here you will find the traffic generated by your advertising campaigns on Google Ads or other networks.
Display
This section also includes traffic from advertising campaigns. But this time, it is only the traffic generated by your campaigns launched on the Google display network.
Referral
This group includes all traffic coming from third-party sites (referring sites).
That is, visitors gained by clicking on links displayed on other sites and pointing to one of your pages.
By clicking on the details, you can even know the name of the referring site as well as the page from which the link was clicked.
Very useful for identifying sites that offer you quality backlinks for your SEO strategy work.
Social
No big revelation here. You will have understood that this is the group containing all the traffic generated by links clicked on social networks and leading to your site.
These could be links in your own posts, on posts from other accounts, or clicks on links on your profile pages.
What is interesting is that by clicking on the details, you will have visibility of the traffic generated for each social network (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, etc.).
Note that if you have a YouTube channel, Google Analytics considers the platform as a social network. This is where you can analyze your traffic generated via YouTube.
In this section, Google Analytics groups together traffic coming from a click on a link contained in an email.
You will be able to follow the impact of sending a newsletter or an emailing campaign on the traffic of your website.
Direct
Suffice to say that this category is the most obscure on the list. All visits that come from a source such as:
A visit following a click on a link bookmarked or suggested by your browser
A visit generated by a click on a digital document (pdf or other)
A visit via scanning a QR Code
A visit via a link in an SMS or on a messaging application like WhatsApp.
…
Direct traffic also often includes visits for which Google Analytics was unable to identify the precise source for various reasons.
Other
I won't draw you a picture either. All visits that don't fit into one of the previous sections fail here.
#6 – Conversions on your website
This is the crux of the matter: attracting visitors is good, but if they leave as they arrived, it won't really have any impact on your turnover.
If you don't have tools that allow you to track the performance of your landing pages and your marketing actions in general, you can set conversion goals directly on Google Analytics.
A conversion can be a newsletter subscription, a download, a contact request… It all depends on your strategy!
#7 – The geographical origin of your visitors
If you have an international business, it is certainly useful for you to know the share of traffic of your site for each targeted country.
Similarly, if you operate in France but are targeting specific cities, this information is critical to your marketing strategy.
Google Analytics gives you this information.
You can even combine this data with the performance of a particular page to analyze where visitors are coming from.