Google Analytics can give you meaningful insights into the performance of your website. For every marketer, Google analytics has become an important tool for data analysis. However, analyzing data can become quite challenging at times. In Google Analytics you will find multiple reports offering analysis of the various aspects of your website. Data analysis is important to measure the success of your website or other marketing efforts. It can show you where you need to improve or optimize your website to get maximum results. Also, giving you more information about your user behavior to help you understand your users better.
Some of the reports in Google Analytics are more important to monitor compared to the others. Every business has different goals and based on these goals you would track your metrics. That being said you need to ensure that you are not missing out on any important data from these reports.
Knowing which report to analyze can seem confusing at first, especially if you are just getting to know this platform. In this article, we will discuss some important Google Analytics reports that should be a part of your data analysis.
Here are the top 10 Google Analytics reports that you need to monitor to get the most out of your data analysis.
Acquisition Overview
You can start your analysis with an Acquisition overview. In this report, you will see a pie chart that gives you a percentage breakdown of channels from which your traffic is coming to your website. It shows whether your visitors are coming from Organic Search, Referrals, Direct Channel, Paid Search, Social Media, and more. This is an important section that determines if any marketing campaigns you have launched are working or not. For example, if you are running paid ads for your products or service, you can find out how many percentages of users these paid ads are sending to your website.
Channels
Explore these statistics further by going to All Traffic > Channels. Here, you see the actual numbers of users, new users, sessions that each channel has brought. With Bounce Rate and Average Session Duration, you can track the engagement of these users after they come to your website. If the Bounce Rate is high it means that users are leaving the page without interacting. This section will also show you the number of conversions each channel has contributed in getting. This can also encourage you to optimize your website if you are not getting enough traffic as expected from organic search. All these insights are relevant to help you track the effectiveness of your paid and organic efforts.
Audience Overview
The audience overview will give you a bird’s eye view of the audience coming to your website and how they are interacting. A graph will show you the flow of users visiting your website over a certain time period. Select any other metric you want to compare it with like bounce rate or session duration. On the right, you will see a pie chart showing the percentage of new and returning users. Below the graph, you can see the total number of users, new users, sessions, bounce rate, session duration, etc. This report is useful as it can give you a quick glance at the users and their engagement with your website. When you scroll down you will have access to certain demographic and mobile information to review. The best part about this report is that it consists of important snippets of information from other reports in one place.
Demographics & Interests
Demographics reports provide data on the age and gender of your users. Interests report shows the interests of your audience like online travel and purchasing activities. These reports together give you valuable insights into who your audience is. Through this information, you can create content, advertising, and marketing campaigns specifically tailored for the.
Identifying the demographics and interests of potentially valuable customers is useful in targeting campaigns as well as selecting audiences for remarketing campaigns. For example, if you have an eCommerce website, you can determine user groups that have high conversion rates. Content-focused sites can track users with higher engagement, through metrics like session duration or pageviews. Both these reports include engagement and conversion metrics that will help you build a complete image of your high-value customers
Location
To view location reports, go to Audience > Geo > Location. The location report shows you the areas where your users come from. It is important to know that you are getting users from locations that you are targeting for any marketing or advertising campaigns. The regions that matter the most for you are the ones where you provide your products or services. Along with your target area, it is good to know if users from other regions exhibit interest in your business. This is different for each business as some businesses might provide products or services in multiple regions, while others are just based in one region. Either way, it is good to keep monitoring this report.
Mobile
Your customers are likely to use more than one device to access your website. Mobile is more convenient as people can look for any information quickly. In the mobile report, you can see the statistics of various devices like desktop, mobiles, tablets that your audience use. You can see which device the majority of your audience is using to visit your website. Also, which device has the most conversions. This information is extremely valuable when it comes to user experience. Your website must be user friendly not only for desktop but also for mobile. If a good number of users are also using mobile to access your site, then you need to improve your user experience for mobile devices. If you are running paid ads some users might also click on your ads from their mobiles; hence you need to make sure that your ads are optimized for it.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are important aspects of your website. These are the pages through which your users enter your website. If you are running paid ads and after clicking on them your users will be sent to the landing page where they are likely to convert. To locate this report, go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages. One important metric that you would want to look at here is the bounce rate. Take a look at the landing pages that have a high bounce rate. This means that users are leaving those pages without any further interactions.
You need to make sure that the important pages where you want users to convert do not have a high bounce rate. If it does, there might be multiple reasons why users are not taking any action. Maybe the page is slow, links are broken, or it's not engaging enough. Create a great user experience on these pages for your users, which will encourage them to interact and convert. Monitor this report frequently to get insights into the performance of your landing pages.
Site Speed
The site speed report determines the speed of your webpages. This report can be found under Behavior. In the Overview itself, you can find data about the speed of your website. With this report, you can determine how quickly your visitors can see your content and interact with it. Take a look at the Avg. Load Time metric to get an idea of how your pages are doing. If your website is slow and takes longer to load, your users might grow impatient and exit it. To avoid this, look at the site speed and improve your web pages so that they load quickly.
Goals
Goals report can be found under Conversions. It gives you a breakdown of all your goals that you have set up like form submissions, downloads, specific interactions, etc. In Overview, you can see the number of goal completions, conversion rate, goal value, and all the goals that you have set. In this report, you can also see the pages that are driving conversions along with the channels. You can compare your goal completions with different metrics. By comparing one time period with another you can see which month or week had more goal completions than the other.
Multi-Channel Funnels
In Analytics, conversions and eCommerce transactions are associated with the last campaign, an ad that referred the visitor, search right before the conversion. But how did the prior searches, website referrals, or ads contribute to the conversion? And how much time passed between the initial interest of the user and the final purchase? The Multi-Channel Funnel reports give you answers to these questions and more by giving you information about your marketing channels and how they work together to create conversions. For example, many users might purchase a certain product on your website. But they may have come across your brand on social media or a blog when they were looking for certain products. This report shows you these previous interactions that led to sales.
In the report, you will see that channels are credited based on the role they play in conversions. The Assisted Conversions report determines how many conversions each channel helped initiate, assist, and complete. The Top Conversion Paths report shows you the conversion paths your users took until the purchase. Time Lag and Path length reports show how long it took for them to ultimately convert. A Multi-Channel Funnel report can help you see the contribution of each of your channels leading up to conversions.
Deciding which reports you need to monitor depends on what works for your business and customers. These reports can help you cover a lot of different areas that give you information about user behavior, website, channel, any marketing or advertising campaigns, and more. Monitoring them will let you successfully track your data and get the maximum use out of it.
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