More Metrics

Once you've got the hang of the key Analytics metrics, there are some additional tools in Google that will take your site from an average performer to a top performer. These metrics are important because they help you tweak your site and be a smart content designer.

Average Pageviews

This metric measure how many pages, on average, your visitors see everytime they come. This is important because it measures the stickiness of the site. The more pages your visitors view, the better.

New Visits

This number measures the percentage of new visits to the site. Where most of the numbers in analytics have a definite positive or negative meaning, this one doesn't necessarily do that. This number will give you an idea of how many new people will come to the site, or how loyal your visitors are. Some sites like e-commerce site might attract a large number of new visitors and some sites like community sites, might enjoy a low rate.

Browser Capabilities

Not a specific metrics but a grouping of metrics. Analytics programs keep track of things like JavaScript versions, the size of your visitor's monitors, Flash Plug-in versions, operating systems and more which will help your web designer/developer with creating and updating the site.

Loyalty

Loyalty metrics show you how visitors act when they visit your site. How many users do you have that visit more than one page? How many of them stayed for more than 20 minutes. This metric shows some of the other numbers broken down into different category, which breaks down some of them more clearly.

Top Content

Top content shows you the top performing content of your site, you can break this down in different ways. The default way shows you which pages in your site are performing the best, but especially for dynamic sites, the page names might be meaningless, so you can also break down the report so that the content is listed by title.

Another tip is to do a search with keywords to see how a specific channel is working. For example, you might want to see how all of the pages with the keyword "sport" in their URL are performing, you can type that into a search and even add that search so it appears on your homepage.

Top Landing Pages

Top Landing Pages are the pages that people arrive through. Not everyone on a website comes through the homepage. People may bookmark specific pages or perform a search on search engines that takes them directly to pages other than your home page. The homepage will probably be your best performer here, but it's important to know what, if any other pages people are coming directly through.

Top Exit Pages

This would show the last pages people see on your site before moving along to another website. This is good to see if there's something you can do on those pages to keep the visitors navigating through your website.