The 5 metrics in Google analytics you need to be tracking on your chiropractic website

What does Google Analytics tell you?

If you have a chiropractor website, following your metrics can tell you a lot of things. While there are a variety of different metrics you can track, some are more useful than others. Knowing how visitors to your website behave when they get there can help you refine your website and make the necessary changes you need to.

These are five metrics in Google Analytics that
you want to pay special attention to.

1.   Traffic sources

Where your inbound traffic comes from is one way to determine how people are finding your website. A variety of different traffic sources may indicate that many different people are talking about your business. If you get a lot of traffic, even having a smaller number of sources is fine.

Here, in this metric, you can find answers to
these questions:

• Are people seeing your content on social media?
• Do search engines provide much traffic to your site?
• Are other websites linking to yours?
• Are any visitors going directly to your website by typing in your website address into the address bar?
• Are the wrong types of websites giving you traffic?

Not all traffic is created equal. Some website traffic sources may carry a large amount of authority in a particular niche–if it’s a relevant niche, then that’s a great thing. For instance, respected health websites can be great traffic sources for your brand. Sites with a bad reputation or covering the wrong niches for you aren’t as helpful and might even inflict damage on your brand.

2. Bounce rate

It’s great to get strong traffic on your website. But what your site visitors do next matters. Are visitors going to your website and immediately leaving? This could be a sign that they’re accidentally visiting or that your website isn’t offering enough value for the people who visit.

Bad or weak traffic sources could also be part of the problem. If the traffic sources are completely unrelated to your site, then
you can end up with visitors who don’t appreciate your website at all.

If, for instance, in your free time you post a comment on an automotive website and it links back to your website, you may have a few people clicking that link and arriving at your site without realizing that they’re headed for a chiropractic site. They then immediately leave, causing a higher bounce rate.

3. Average session duration

If website visitors spend a long time reading your website content, it probably means that they’re finding relevant information. That’s great! But it could mean that they’re not finding what they’re looking for and having to hunt around to find it. This is why it often helps to dig deeper using multiple metrics as your guide.

Going back to our lost visitor example, someone spending a lot of time on your site and not finding the right information will probably also move around to different pages. So if you have high page views consistently across each section of your website along with longer average session duration, it’s possible that you’ll need to survey your visitors to get
an answer or work on addressing any CX (customer experience) issues that may be present.

4. Page views

Google Analytics keeps track of your page views for each different page on your website. You can use this metric to retell the story of how typical visitors experience your website.

You can address these questions with your page
views metrics:

• Where do visitors start viewing your website?
• Where might visitors be leaving?
• Do your visitors normally view every page?
• Is it possible that visitors have to reload any particular pages? This can create duplicate views of the same page.

Knowing which pages are more popular, relevant for other sites linking to yours, or potentially causing problems for visitors or for you can help you make the right adjustments and improvements to your site. It can also help you learn more about your audience and how they use your website.

5. Exit pages

Your exit pages metric will tell you where you lose visitors. Even if the rest of your website is really strong, a page that loses your visitors’ attention or frustrates them can do damage to your website’s overall profile. You may need to redesign a page if the attrition rate seems too high to you.

Alternatively, maybe you have strong traffic and your website is performing well. If this is the case, you can still learn something from looking at your exit pages. Find out where on your site your visitors go last. This may be the page answering their questions, or could be a contact page.