You may be using Google Analytics, but are you sure that you are using it to its full potential?
Google Analytics provides users with the ability to measure every aspect of a website, from unique visitors to referral sources, to bounce rates, device types, time on page, click through rates, and so much more. Knowing which reports analyzing can be difficult when you’re wading through so much data.
To help you out, we have put together a list of custom and standard reports. With this, you’ll be able to quickly draw actionable marketing ideas to improve your results. And get better insight into your marketing performance.
- Mobile Overview Report:
Considering that mobile internet users now outpace desktop, it’s fairly safe to assume that your mobile and tablet experiences need to be as good (if not better) than the one for desktop users.
If your mobile visitor numbers are growing, it’s a good sign that your website is healthy and will likely rank well in Google Search.
Accessing this report is easy to follow these steps.
- Step 1: After clicking on the Audience section, go all the way towards the bottom to find the Mobile > Overview.
- Step 2: Now select your primary conversion goal under the appropriately named Conversions section.
- Step 3: The first place to look for discrepancies between devices is in the engagement or Behavior section.
Significantly lower numbers on mobile and tablet (vs. Desktop) is your first clue to a poor mobile experience.
- Traffic Acquisition Report:
It’s important to know what channels are producing traffic to your website. When looking at a specific date range for this report, be sure to compare to the previous year to see how your traffic compares to the same dates last year. This way you can see website improvements over a particular time.
This report is especially important if traffic is down since it will help you see what channels have changed.
“Referrals” tab (Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Referrals). This will tell you which external sites are driving traffic to your site.
- Audience Behaviour Report – NEW VS. RETURNING:
Getting a user to come to your site for the first time is great. Getting them to visit again is even better. After all, it is the returning visitors who usually end up becoming readers, followers, and customers.
This standard report in Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your users are coming back to your site.
You can find it by going to the Audience -> Behavior -> New vs. Returning in your Analytics account.
Why is this significant? Returning visitors are more engaged in your content, and they’re more likely to take an action such as filling out a form or making a purchase, than a new visitor.
- Landing Pages – Bounce Rate:
It’s important to know which pages people are visiting and spending time on versus pages where they land and immediately leave. It’s best to view your top landing pages and analyze which ones are contributing to your website’s high bounce rate. Once you identify the pages that are causing users to leave, focus on fixing those pages to keep users more engaged on that page such as adding more targeted content, images and a call to action.
Find the report – Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.
If the report shows that some pages have a substantially higher bounce rate than others, you can take steps to make high-bounce-rate pages more engaging.
- Top Search Pages Leaking Visitors:
As we’ve seen so far, visitors don’t always do what we expect them to. And they don’t always find what they’re looking for.
That’s evidenced by high bounce rates, especially on important pages that are bringing in a ton of traffic to your site.
Finding those pages that (a) rank highly, (b) bring tons of traffic, but (c) fail to convert them could give you another quick boost of new leads or customers.
- Step 1: Start by locating your most popular content under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages.
- Step 2: Now we’re going to use another filtering or sorting tool to make this information more relevant. “Bounce Rate” and “% Exit” in the Explorer tab.
- Step 3: This will give you a visual comparison between the bounce and exit rate for all your pages. You can drill down further to get this data for each page.
Use this report to find pages with low engagement and detect UX problems on your site. For example, if visitors are exiting a three-page article after reading only the first two pages, there’s probably something that is causing them to leave on the second page (too many ads, bad copy, a distracting link in the sidebar and so on).
Conclusion:
Don’t worry about running A/B tests. And don’t waste time with a new page or content creation.
First, go back and fix all the stuff that’s not working. The poor device experiences. The high potential pages or posts are hidden from the world on Google’s page. And the popular pages that people are leaving immediately in droves.
Next, connect the dots by getting people from the most popular pages and paths to your pages that convert (or assist conversions) the highest.
Raw data, by itself, is meaningless. But using these five simple reports can help you layer in context and gain actionable insight that has the power to increase leads and sales literally overnight.
