Google Analytics is the “big brother” of your website. A free tracking tool, it captures a vast array of information about user behavior, processing it into reports that provide a full picture of what’s happening behind the scenes on your website. The reports help a business gain critical insight into its website and site visitors. Knowing what’s driving traffic to your website — and where visitors go once there — provides valuable information that helps a business make informed business and marketing decisions.
Information is power. Businesses invest a lot of time, energy and resources into driving traffic to their websites. Without reading the analytics, though, it’s impossible to measure if the efforts are working — and where improvements could be made.
Let’s look at a few of the most used and valuable analytics metrics and how they’re used to improve websites:
Audience Overview
This report is a basic snapshot of your site traffic, including users, new users, sessions, sessions/user, page views, pages/session, average session duration and bounce rate. These metrics aren’t the most telling for a site’s performance, but they offer data that could help make basic, informed decisions.
Acquisition Overview
How are users finding your site? This metric helps answer that by breaking down data by organic search, referrals, social media, paid search, display, email and direct. This metric also shows visitor behavior and the conversion rate based on how a person found your site. A conversion is “a user action that you count because you consider it important, such as a purchase, game level competition, or app scroll activity,” according to Google. Analyzing how people find your page and interact with it is valuable information because, in part, it can show you areas that need attention.
Behavior Overview
This report includes page views and bounce rate — which are also covered in the Audience Overview — but also: unique page views, average time on page, % exit and page report.
Conversions — While other reports include conversion data, this section — specifically “goals” and “e-commerce” if you sell things — is where you’ll find the most detailed, critical information.
Goals Overview
To utilize this, you must have already defined your goals in Google Analytics. This report contains: goal completions, goal value, goal conversion rate and total abandonment rate. All metrics are based on your specific inputted goals so that you can see the total number of goals completed during a specific time range. You can break this down further by “source/medium” or “goal completion location” to find where people are completing the goals.
E-commerce Overview
This report is a must if you sell online because it helps a business owner make better, more informed decisions based on individualized e-commerce data, including transactions, revenue from marketing campaigns, coupon codes and top sellers.
Reading analytics can feel intimidating at first. Fortunately, the internet is full of information, including tutorials, that can help you get started. If it feels too overwhelming or burdensome to tackle, reach out to professionals who know how to read website analytics and can help you gain critical insights into your website and campaigns.
