Top 4 Google Analytics Reports
Google Analytics is the most accessible web analytics tool out there. There’s a mixture of small businesses all the way to corporations that have adopted Google Analytics. It’s easy to implement and presents a holistic view of website performance. GA provides enough information to apply for every day marketing strategies. I’ll lead you through the reports where you’ll get the most value out-of-the-box.
Traffic Acquisition (Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels)
Traffic Acquisition categorizes your visitors into channels they used to enter your site. GA bases it off of the Last Touch Channel as default here. For instance, if the visitor saw one of your Google search ads and doesn’t immediately reach your page. Then, the visitor visits their social media page and goes directly to your page through a News Feed post. The Last Touch channel logic attributes the visitor to Social. You can look at the different attributions within GA’s interface through Conversions > Attribution > Model Comparison Tool.
However, the Channels report allows you to pinpoint marketing channels that can be further optimized. Usually, the Direct channel is #1 in proportion to the rest, but it depends on your site’s purpose. It averages around 50%, but can range from 30-70%. With 30%, you may look to enhance the site experience more to get repeat visitors. With 70%, there are opportunities to increase new visitors through other marketing channels. It works both ways, but neither is bad. Just leads to different marketing tactics. You can continue to compare all the other channels and relate it to your business goals to distinguish opportunities.
Page Behavior (Behavior > Site Content > All Pages)
The Pages reports lists out your site pages individually to the level of views. Views are the number of times a page loads onto the screen, so can be seen multiple times by one visitor. Pages outlines the distribution of traffic and lets you know at a high-level where your users are navigating. The homepage usually gets the most views, but aside from that, you can figure out what other pages are compelling. This gives you a general idea of your user group’s intentions – whether they use the site primarily for research or directly buy products and services. From there, you can dive in deeper into a customer flow, but that’s for another day.
Real-Time (Real-Time > Overview)
Real-time reports are obviously helpful for immediate decision-making. Content teams benefit nicely to understand the “right-now” traffic to react with additional posts and maintain momentum. However, it’s the most useful for ensuring analytics tracking is right. We can watch the code fire in the back-end, but real-time validates that the data is accurate immediately. It’ll show the current traffic and the high-level reports as to where it’s being attributed to. This can quickly shine light on some tagging issues before the data gets too contaminated. Its value is usually undermined, so now you know what it’s for!
Goals (Conversions > Goals > Overview)
Set these up as soon as possible. They’re extremely useful in understanding steps in your user journey. Doesn’t matter what your site is, you can at least see how many people are successfully using your site to its intended purpose. Ecommerce is pretty obvious with the cart, checkout, to confirmation. For content, maybe set up goals according to certain pages and entering in an email for ongoing subscription. It’s versatile, but clearly showcases the success value of your site.
Want to learn more? Contact us at info@polymetricdigital.com for a quick run-through of your data and how you can get the most out of it!