Do you know how many people come to your website every day? Or how many go on to make a reservation or become a lead? If you have set up Google Analytics on your website, you may already have these answers and you can also see how well your website is performing over time.
However, Google is retiring their existing version of Google Analytics, in favor of Google Analytics 4 (GA4), on July 1, 2023. This change will have little to no impact on how your customers interact with your website, but it could have a serious effect for how your website’s performance is measured.
If you’ve already made the jump to GA4, you may already be seeing their new reporting dashboards populated with your website’s traffic. You will have also no doubt spotted a heap of new metrics being tracked too, primarily to do with each user’s engagement with your website. Some of these new reports include: engagement rate, events per session, engaged sessions per user and average engagement time per session. These new measures show that Google is putting a higher focus on not just how many are coming to your site each week, but what they’re doing once they arrive.
This pivot away from simple Bounce Rate reporting (the percentage of visitors that navigate away from your site without clicking or scrolling) and towards more specific activity tracking in GA4 is also a clear indicator that your website’s engagement levels are going to influence how well it ranks in Google’s search results. All the typical SEO (search engine optimization) foundations are still important: credible links from other websites, a fast page load and specific keywords dotted across your site. Looking past those however, the more you can keep people clicking or tapping through your website – for longer than a few seconds – the more likely you are to rank highly in Google’s SEO algorithm.
For more information, contact Calcumate
