Google Analytics is packed with thousands of insightful metrics and analytical combinations to help marketers measure their website visitors’ behaviour. You could be there for hours.

To help you plan your marketing efforts and understand your visitors browsing patterns, here are some top metrics to help you track your website traffic.

Traffic Source/Medium

The Traffic Source describes where your visitors are before they arrive on your website, and the medium tells you how they got there. Together, these metrics can inform where your time and resources on marketing should be spent.

Tip: Try using the segment feature to find out more about your visitors, such as whether they are new or returning, which pages they’ve visited and if they take an action, whether that be to sign up for your newsletter, register for a challenge event or making a donation.

Make the most of mobile traffic

Mobile content consumption is rising year on year. Users spend 69% of their media time on their smartphone and 47% of emails are opened on a mobile device, so it’s important to consider mobile devices in your reporting.

Are your supporters opening your emails or making a donation on their smartphones? Are they spending a long time on your website, viewing more than 3 pages and making donations easily on mobile? You can find out by going to the Audience tab in Analytics where you can see Average Session Duration, Pages per Session and Transactions by Device.

Tip: It’s worth ensuring your website is mobile-friendly. Take a look at your site speed, and make sure your pages display clearly on different devices.

Bounce rate: useful or useless?

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your website and immediately leave. It’s a common misconception that a high bounce rate is a bad thing. Many believe it indicates that your visitors can’t find what they’re looking for, so leave your website without browsing other pages. However, it is also likely that they have found what they’re looking for therefore leaving without needing to do anything else.

It’s important to consider page type when reviewing bounce rate. A blog or information page gives users content to read, which might be all they were looking for, so leave your website without visiting another page. This is not a bad reflection of the page content, it shows that users are finding exactly what they wanted and leaving.

Tip: Use bounce rate to analyse the behaviour of your visitors’ and whether they’re leaving your website from a page you would expect.

Assisted conversions

Assisted conversions track user behaviour over time. This is crucial to understand the full picture of your marketing activity.

It’s important to distinguish between assisted and last click. Assisted refers to any channel that a user has been served an advert on that is on the conversion path, but has not resulted in a conversion. The last click is, as you might imagine, the channel that a user is on when they convert.

For example, a donor might have seen your advert on Facebook and clicked on it to visit your website, but then later typed your brand name into Google to donate. In this example, Facebook would be the assisted click, Google would be the last click. It’s important to include this in reporting so that Facebook performance isn’t undervalued.

The Top Conversion Paths report is a great visual report that shows all of the unique paths your visitors have taken that has led to a conversion. You can see how channels interact with each other along your conversion paths, which can inform your future marketing strategy.

Tip: When evaluating digital campaign it’s essential to consider assisted conversions in your results so that you give credit where it is due.

If you have any other metrics that are essential to track your website traffic then tweet us @JGCauses or comment below.