The question of how often you should be checking your website data via Google Analytics is often asked. After all, business people usually are pulled in 10 different directions at once. Plus, data is boring, right?
Let’s explore how often you should consider checking your analytics data.
The Top 5 Reasons Companies Use Google Analytics
There are several reasons to become familiar with and regularly track your Google Analytics data, namely to monitor:
1. Traffic analysis: To understand how many visitors are coming to your website, where they’re coming from, and how this changes over time
2. User behavior insights: To learn how visitors interact with the site, including which pages they visit most, how long they stay, and their navigation paths
3. Conversion tracking: To monitor and improve the rate at which visitors complete desired actions, such as making purchases or signing up for newsletters
4. Content performance: To identify which content resonates most with your audience, helping inform future content strategy
5. Technical performance: To assess website speed, mobile responsiveness, and other technical factors that impact user experience and search engine rankings
How Often Should You Look at Your Google Analytics Reports?
There is, of course, no one-size-fits-all answer to this question.
How often you look at your Google Analytics data is largely dependent upon several factors, including (but not limited to):
- How much the success of your business depends on website traffic quantity and quality
- How much money you are spending overall on driving traffic to your website each month
- How much money you are spending right now/lately, relative to your usual spend
- How frequently you make changes to your website, such as adding new sections or features – or changing page layouts
- Whether you have been experiencing website performance issues recently, such as slow page load speed times
- Whether you have received complaints about your website’s functionality from employees or customers
- Whether you are actively testing specific changes to your messaging for better engagement
- Whether you are running A|B tests on specific landing pages to compare performance
- Whether you have launched a new location or expanded into new geographical regions and want to check for engagement in those areas
- Whether you are actively benchmarking your site’s performance against other sites
Depending upon each of the above potential realities and situations your website and business are facing today, your need to frequently check analytics data will vary.
Some companies check monthly, some weekly, some daily. Others check more frequently when running special online campaigns, and then less frequently at other times.
What Specific Data Points Should You Check?
Google Analytics offers hundreds of dimensions for you to monitor. If you are fairly new to Google Analytics, we suggest starting with:
- Sessions
- Engagement Rate
- Events per Sessions
- Sessions Duration
- Most-Visited Pages
Of course, if you are running special promotions, you’ll want to focus on the affected site pages in more detail.
Get into a Regular Cadence of Checking Your Analytics
Apart from when you run special campaigns, it’s wise to set a schedule and check your analytics frequently and regularly.
For specialized reporting that you can easily share with others, consider connecting Google Analytics to Looker.
Got more questions? Reach out to Ambient Array today!