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Reviewing the Importance of Google Analytics Engagement Reports

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Reviewing the Importance of Google Analytics Engagement Reports 9583-daily-golden-nugget-863Depending on the nature of your website, you might want visitors to stay and browse through 12 pages, or you could be happy with them looking at a single page. It all depends on your business goals, and what you hope to accomplish with your site.

Reviewing the Importance of Google Analytics Engagement Reports The "Engagement report" in Google Analytics will show you how long people stay on your website and how many pages they are viewing. You can get to this report by clicking:

Audience -> Behavior -> Engagement

By default, the report will group all your visitors according to the number of seconds they stayed on your website. All of the people who only read 1 page of your site (i.e. those who bounce) will appear in the 0-10 second group. This will probably be your largest grouping.

The second largest visit duration grouping is probably 61-180 seconds. If that's what you see then your website is performing similar to other jewelry websites. Of course the goal is always to get them to stay on your site longer and look at more pages.

Jewelry websites with product catalogs will always show a huge number of Pageviews for visitors who stayed longer than 61 seconds. This usually represents the people who are taking the time to browse through your online catalog.

On the other hand, you will find that your Pageview numbers will be completely wrong if you are using a vendor supplied product catalog. Vendors like Veragio, Gabriel & Co., and ELLE have website scripts that will allow their catalogs to appear on your website. Your Google Analytics can't properly track those vendor scripts, which negatively impacts the reliability of this Engagement/Visit Duration report.

That incorrect tracking is another good reason why you shouldn't use vendor-supplied scripts on your site. It's always better to upload vendor products directly into the catalog that you manage.

Reviewing the Importance of Google Analytics Engagement Reports At the top of the Engagement report, you'll notice a link for Page Depth. Click that and you'll see a different grouping of website visitors according to the number of pages they viewed.

You will probably have the most number of visits showing as 1 page. If you have a product catalog on your site you should see most number of Pageviews for people who looked at 20+ pages. If you don't have a product catalog, you'll simply see a sharply declining number of Visits and Pagesviews as the Page Depth increases.

I've put together the accompanying chart so you could see the engagement pattern of visitors to jewelry websites.

Reviewing the Importance of Google Analytics Engagement Reports 8033-863-GA-engagement-chart

The blue and red lines show the returning visitors while the green and purple lines represent first time visitors.

If you study the 4 lines very closely, you will notice that the new and the returning visitors actually have the same engagement pattern. They all start at the same point, decline at the same rate and then spike up after 20 pages.

Some businesses will add a greater value to returning visitors, but according to this cart, you have an equal chance at converting both repeat and new visitors.

Some closing thoughts:

* Get your customers to stay longer by adding larger product catalogs.
* Replace any vendor created catalog with items in your own catalog so you can track it.
* Figure out what pages people are looking at and what causes the drop off over time.
* Figure out how to change your pages so they stay longer.
* Figure out if you can add some "conversion options" throughout the website, like a newsletter signup.

Check out your own Engagement Report and try to figure out how people are using it.



AT: 11/13/2013 10:09:40 PM   LINK TO THIS GOLD NUGGET
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