Understanding Your Page Visits Data

So you're looking at the past month's worth of data, seeing a graph of how many pages were viewed each day. What does it all mean? There are lots of interesting facts you can learn from your data which will help you improve your marketing plan.

Look for weekly patterns. Perhaps the majority of your visits happen Monday - Friday, but you don't get many pages viewed on the weekends. This tells you your visitors are looking during the weekdays, probably while at work (but we'll verify this later). Do most of your visits happen on a Monday? If you send out a weekly or monthly email/newsletter, be sure you send it on Monday when your customers are thinking about you, instead of on the weekend when they're away from email, as your newsletter will get buried in all the messages they receive over the weekend.

Want to know more about when they're looking? You can easily create a custom report in Google Analytics to show what time most people are looking at your site. On the left, click "Custom Reports" (you may not be able to do this if someone else set up your website reporting, just ask your webmaster to do this for you.) In the Metrics block on the left, look under Site Usage and drag Pageviews over to the first dotted metric box. In the Dimensions block under Visitors, drag Hour Of The Day to the first dotted dimension block, and Create Report. Now based on the timeline selected (a month by default, but you could select just one day if you wanted to look at a particular day), you can now see which hours of the day your site receives the most traffic. Google uses a 24 hour clock, 08:00 is 8am, while 23:00 is 11pm. Are your visitors looking at your site during working hours, or when they're at home? What does this likely mean about who your visitors are and what they're looking for?

Look at spikes in your daily pages viewed. Can you correlate an event to a particular spike? Maybe your newsletter or a brief email went out on a certain day. Softer spikes over several days may correlate to a mailing. Did you make a big announcement on a particular day? Do you receive more visits leading up to an event at your facility? Filter your data to show only for a particular day/date range of one of your spikes, then look at the top pages viewed for that timeframe. Are they the same top pages as you see each month, or were they looking at something in particular? Look at the search phrases for that time as well - were your visitors looking for something in particular, and does that correlate with the pages viewed the most?

Look at monthly trends. You can set GA to show you everything from the past year, and view it by month instead of day. Some months will have more pages viewed than other months - does this correlate to sales? If you promote outdoor activities, your winter months likely have less visitors, does the data reflect this? Why or why not?