Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics

31 May 2021 | Search Engine Optimisation, Uncategorised

  • Looking through pages and pages of data can be tricky, and website data can at times be hard to decipher. If you’ve ever been confused by analytics, you’re not alone, which is why we’ve done the hard work for you.

    Google Analytics is a useful tool that gathers data from your website, so you can learn more about your audience. Knowing more about the people visiting your website and their patterns will not only help you understand how your website is functioning but also assist in creating a target audience for your business.

    You may even find that a whole new demographic is visiting your website and buying your product or service!

    Here’s our beginner’s guide to Google Analytics, including the types of data you’ll see in your reports and how exactly to use this data to boost your business.

    Audience reports

    This section of Google Analytics covers all of the data regarding who visits your website. The overview gives a brief description of the number of users over time and select figures on their demographics, including the language used.

    The active users’ section goes into more detail concerning the number of users that have visited your website, breaking down the data into one day, seven-day, fourteen-day, and twenty-eight-day segments.

    The demographics, interests, and geo tabs give detailed reports on your audience’s age, gender, interests, language, and location. The behaviour tab can get a little confusing, but it essentially gives you information on how many users are new to your website and how many are returning visitors. Under this tab, you can also find information on the frequency that users are visiting your website and the average length of time they spend browsing your website.

    The technology and mobile tabs give information about the type of software and devices your audience uses to access your website. It gives you data on the different types of browsers, such as Chrome or Firefox, and whether they are using a desktop, mobile device, or tablet.

    How do you use this data?

    Demographics and the other information in the audience reports can be used to create an audience profile, and from this, a target audience. Suppose you find that the majority of users who access your website are, for example, male, in their early 30s, from Australia, and enjoy computers or video games. In that case, you are then able to use this information to create material that will target this demographic.

    Acquisition reports

    The acquisition section of Google Analytics provides information on the acquisition of your users, how you acquire them, how they behave on your site after acquisition and their conversion patterns.

    Like the overview in the Audience reports section, the overview in Acquisition reports gives a brief look at the data, including how users find your website, the number of users that have visited your website over the past week, and your goal conversions. The overview gives your top channels, showing the ways users have accessed your website, such as through organic search, paid search (for example, advertisements in Google), directly search for your business name, social media, or referral. The All Traffic tab goes into this data in detail, but the overview tab lays it out neatly and precisely for you.

    The Google Ads tab is where all of the data regarding your Google advertisements is collated. You can manage the different ad campaigns, see what search queries and keywords are getting the most clicks, and learn what time of day is most effective for your advertisement.

    The Social tab is also important for discovering how you acquire your visitors. It gives your information that connects your social media to your website, including how many people find your website via social media and how many follow the link to your website. It can show you what social media sites are the most important for your website based on how many users visit your website via social media and trace the path of which pages on your website they visit once they have arrived.

    How do you use this data?

    Finding out how your users are accessing your website or discovering your website can significantly improve your marketing strategy. If visitors to your website are using paid searches more than organic, then it may be time to invest more in Google ads. Likewise, if they tend to use social media more than a search engine, then amping up your social media marketing campaign may increase the number of visitors you receive.

    Behaviour reports

    Learning how your users find your website is essential but discovering what they do on your website once they have is equally important, perhaps even more so. If your visitors are reaching your page but are having trouble navigating it, or are not purchasing your products or services, then you may need to discuss these issues with your web designer and developer.

    The Behaviour Flow tab in Behaviour reports shows you the pathways that users take when they visit your site. Do they visit your about us section first, or do they browse your products? How many pages do they visit before leaving the site?

    The Site Content tab allows you to see the top pages on your website and how long users are spending on each page, on average. It also shows the most popular landing pages, which pages users are more likely to click out of, and the page views per week. The other site tabs are Site Search and Site Content. On-Site Search, you can see what keywords and terms users search for, which result in them clicking on your website and the pages they are searched upon. In Site Speed, you receive statistics on how fast your website loads and suggestions for how you could improve the speed of your website.

    How do you use this data?

    User experience on your website is essential to driving your business. If there are speed or navigation issues, this tab identifies these problems so that you can make your website more user friendly. Users are more likely to return to a website that is functional, fast, and easy to use, so if the data in the Behaviour tab shows that they leave a certain product page after only a few seconds, then it’s time to talk to your web developer about improving the speed, layout, and functionality of that page.

    Conversion reports

    At the end of the day, what matters for your website and your business, is converting visitors into customers. The Conversion reports tab gives you a selection of information relating to your goals as a business, specifically the goals set up in Google Search Console.

    Using Google Search Console, you can track a series of goals, including receiving a phone call from a client, a user visiting your website for a certain amount of time, or a visitor looking at any number of pages per session.

    In Google Analytics, you can learn information relating to these completed goals or conversions. In the overview, you can see how many conversions your website has received, what URLs they happened upon in the Goal URLs tab, and the path they took to complete the conversion using the Reverse Goal Path tab.

    If you want more specifics regarding your conversions, you can filter them by location, source (for example, if they came from a social media platform), and the landing platform that they visited.

    How do you use this data?

    Like in the other sections, knowing more about your audience and visitors can help you cater to the demographic that wants to buy your products or services, and knowing how visitors use your website can help convert them into customers. For example, if your visitors are more likely to use your about us section or products page to complete goals, it might be worthwhile including that link in your advertisements or social media.

    If you’d like to know more about getting your business off the ground using Google Analytics, contact our team today.

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