Google Analytics Reporting Tools is very useful for viewing your website’s traffic. In the previous article, we have described an overview of the Google Analytics guide For Beginners. You got the information about what Google Analytics is. What it can do? Why do you need Google Analytics? What are its benefits? And many more.
Once you start getting in Google Analytics data, you can start learning about your website traffic. Each time you log in to Google Analytics, you will be taken to your Google Analytics Home. The Home page gives you a summary of what is interesting about your data. Not wasting time let us go for deep information about the reports:
Audience
You can hover over a variety of areas on your Google Analytics reports getting more information.
1. Overview:
Overview reports provide a high-level summary of Metrics in one place. It shows no. of users, pages they visited in one session, average session duration and bounce rate.
a. Date Range Selector:
At top of the page, we have a date range selector. It allows you to set time period in which you want to see the report. By clicking on the dates, there opens up a calendar on the left where you can select your date ranges.
You can choose between date ranges like last week, last calendar month, or last 30 days. However, you can also set specific dates by clicking the start- and end-date fields and selecting calendar dates. If you would like to select an entire month, simply click on the name of the month in the calendar to the left.
Below the date range, there comes an option “compare to”. By clicking on it, you can compare the current report or the report from the date range with previous date ranges.
b. Segment Picker:
At the top, there is a segment picker. Segments are ways to look at a specific data set and compare metrics. The default segment includes all of the Users that visited your site in the given date range.
c. Duration Selector:
If you wish to view this data more specifically, you can change the data points to show hourly, weekly, or monthly, as well. This can be especially helpful when looking at large data sets.
d. Line Graph:
Below the duration selector, there is a line graph. By default, it shows data points for the number of users each day over the selected date range.
e. Metric Selector:
You can change the metric shown from users to a different metric by selecting the drop-down menu under the Overview tab. Analytics lets you compare this to a second metric over the same time period by clicking “Select a metric”.
f. Metrics:
There are a number of helpful metrics beneath the line graph:
- “Users” are the total number of users that visited for the given date range.
- “New Users” are the number of new users that visited for the given date range.
- “Sessions” are the total number of sessions for the given date range.
- “Pageviews” are the total number of times pages that included your Analytics tracking code was displayed to users. This includes repeated viewings of a single page by the same user.
- “Pages/session” is the average number of pages viewed during each session. This also includes repeated viewings of a single page.
- “Average session duration” is the average length of a session based on users that visited your site in the selected date range
- “Bounce rate” is the percentage of users who left after viewing a single page on your site and taking no additional action.
- “Number of sessions per user” is the average number of sessions in your date range per user to your site.
g. New vs. Returning Users:
To the right of the metrics is a pie chart illustrating the percentage of new vs. returning users.
h. Demographics:
This metric is arranged by language, country, and city of the user. You can view the top 10 metrics within the selected date range.
i. System:
This dimension contains information of the user by browser, operating system and service provider.
j. Mobile:
This dimension gives information about what mobile devices are users using to view the site by the operating system, service provider, and screen resolution.
You can click the full report link on each to see the full reports. Alternatively, you can click on any of the top ten links to see more details.
In the top left above the repot table, there is a “secondary dimension” option. By clicking on that, you can compare it with other dimensions. On the top right above the table, there are several different visualization options:
- The “data table” view is the default visualization for most reports
- The “pie chart” icon creates a pie chart based on your data.
- The “performance” view shows a bar graph of your data.
- The “comparison view” shows you a bar graph of the selected metrics or dimensions.
- The “Pivot” view creates a pivot table in which both rows and columns can show different dimension values for comparison.
2. Active Users:
Track active users for increments of 1, 7, 14, and 30 days, and stay abreast of the level of user enthusiasm for your site. The metrics in the report are relative to the last day in the date range you are using for the report.
3. Demographics:
The “Demographics” reports provide information about the age and gender of your users.
4. Interests:
Interest information gives you context for expanding your advertising into related markets (Affinity Categories), and for focusing your advertising on exactly the users who demonstrate a probability to consume your content or purchase your products (In-Market Segments, Other Categories).
5. Geo:
The “Location” report under “Geo” is one of the most useful Audience reports. Google Analytics can anonymously determine a user’s continent, sub-continent, country, and city through the IP address used by their browser. It is helpful to determine the region of the user. “Language” report gives you information about which language of the user creates traffic on your website.
6. Behavior:
Measure the gravitational pull of your site and the extent to which you are encouraging first-time users to return. You can also see the economic impact of new vs. returning users. You can look at this comparison over time to see how audience loyalty may be shifting. Consider your website objectives, as well as your marketing activities, when evaluating the mix of new and returning users to your site.
7. Technology:
These reports can help you understand what technologies your audience uses to consume your site content. With “Browser & OS”, you can know which browser your visitor is using, which operating system, which screen resolution, and more information are available.
8. Mobile:
You can use the “Overview” report under “Mobile” to see a breakdown of your traffic based on smartphones, tablets, and desktop devices. The “Devices” report lets you see additional details about the devices used to browse your site. This includes the mobile device name, brand, service provider, input selector, operating system, and other dimensions like screen resolution.
Acquisition
Acquisition refers to how you get website traffic. You can use the Acquisition reports to compare the performance of different marketing channels and discover which sources send you the highest quality traffic and conversions. This can help you make better decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts.
1. Overview:
Overview reports provide a summary of acquisition reports. The reports present data based on the source and medium of your users, along with other acquisition dimensions.
2. All Traffic:
a. Channels:
This report gives you information about your website, through which Channel grouping you got traffic. They are grouped into basic categories like organic search, direct, social, and referral. By clicking on a specific channel group, you can get detailed information about traffic.
b. Source/Medium:
This shows the sources and their respective mediums sending referrals, search engine traffic, and direct traffic to the site. By using the Source/Medium view, you can drill down to see the individual sources and mediums acquired the most customers.
You can explore which referral sources are responsible for driving the most traffic to your site by looking at the view. Use this information to make decisions about where you promote content.
c. Referrals:
A referral is reported when a user clicks through to your website from another third-party website. The referrals report allows you to see all of the websites (by domain) that are sending you traffic. You can also drill-down into the referrals report to view the ‘Referral Path’, which allows you to see the individual pages linking to your website.
The Acquisition section can integrate with your Google Ads account so you can track how your campaigns are performing in terms of acquiring customers. For Ads reports, you need to link Ads with an Analytics account. Use the Ads section to see how keywords are performing and to identify popular search queries that drive traffic to your site. Moreover, use this information to create more targeted campaigns based on popular queries and topics people are searching.
You can also integrate with the Google Search Console to see how your landing pages are performing. Certain pages are great at driving people to your site, but are low in the Google search results? Are certain keywords driving you to appear in search results, but resulting in a below-average click-through-rate? By integrating your Search Console data with Google Analytics, you can see all of this data and optimize your site to increase CTR.
Behavior
It is important to understand how Google Analytics calculates behavior data. If you recall, Analytics uses a small piece of JavaScript code on your website to collect data. Every time a user loads a page on your website, this tracking code creates a “pageview” that is reported in Google Analytics. Analytics uses this to calculate many of the metrics in the Behavior reports.
1. Overview:
When you first access the Behavior tab, you will again see an Overview. This view gives you a graph showing the amount of traffic your website received during the time period you’re looking at.
You will also see pageviews, unique page views, and average time on page, bounce rate metrics, and percent exit metrics. All of these metrics describe how a user interacted with your page.
- Pageviews: The metric shows how frequently each page on your site was viewed.
- Unique Pageviews: Number of individual people who have viewed a specific page at least once during a visit.
- Average Time on Page: The average amount of time users spend viewing a page.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page visits.
- Percent Exit: Percentage of users who exit from a page or set of pages.
2. Behavior Flow:
The Behavior Flow report visualizes the path users traveled from one page to the next page. Likewise, this report can help you discover what content keeps users engaged with your site.
3. Site Content:
It reports on how visitors interact with various pages on your site.
a. All Pages:
The All Pages report shows the top pages of your site based just on traffic numbers. Use this to see which content is performing best on your site.
b. Content Drilldown:
This report group’s pages according to your website’s directory structure. You can click on a directory to see the pages of your site within that directory. This is especially useful if you are trying to understand the performance of content in a particular section of your website. If you switch to the pie chart view, you can quickly see which sections of your site are most popular with your users.
c. Landing Pages:
It lists the pages of your website where users first arrived. These are the first pages viewed in a session. You can use this report to monitor the number of bounces and the bounce rate for each landing page. Besides that, a high bounce rate usually indicates that the landing page content is not relevant or engaging for those users.
d. Exit Pages:
This is all about where people are exiting your site. You will want to use this data to see where you are dropping the ball. Look at these pages and see if you are missing the opportunity to send users elsewhere on your site.
4. Site Speed:
The Site Speed reports show how quickly users are able to see and interact with content. Besides that, this deals directly with load time. You can identify areas that need improvement, and then track the extent of those improvements.
a) Overview:
In the Overview tab, you will find a snapshot of the average load time of all pages throughout your website. The browser also breaks this out.
- Average page load time: The average amount of time it takes for pages to load
- Average redirection time: The average amount of time spent in redirects before fetching a page
- The Average domain lookup time: The average amount of time spent in DNS lookup for a page
- Average server connection time: The average amount of time spent establishing a TCP connection for a page
- Average server response time: The average amount of time your server takes to respond to a user request
- And, Average page download time: The average amount of time it takes to download a page
b) Page Timings:
It shows how long your most visited pages take to load to the overall load time of your website. Slow load speed can be optimized using this report.
c) Speed Suggestions:
This report gives you advice from Google on how to optimize specific pages on your site. It also gives you detailed information for each page.
By clicking on Page Speed Suggestions, it will directly take you to Google Page Speed Insights. Here, it checks the page of your website and gives you suggestions for how to increase its speed.
d) User Timings:
The User Timings report lets you perform a detailed analysis of individual resource performance (e.g., images, videos, and buttons).
5. Site Search:
It shows how people are using the search function of your website.
- Overview: This report shows overall metrics for visitors who use the search box on your website.
- Usage: it shows the number of visits where the search box was used vs to when it was not.
- Search Teams: Gives detailed info about the search terms used on your website.
- Search Pages: It shows the pages where the search originated.
6. Events:
Events are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a web page. They can be, clicks on external links, video plays, resource downloads, etc.
- Overview: It gives a summary of the interactions you are tracking. These are tracked based on the event tracking code you set up.
- Top Events: It shows a report about the events with the most interaction.
- Pages: This report shows you the top pages where visitors interact with your events.
- Events Flow: It shows the path visitors take when they interact with your event.
Conversions
The Conversions section of Google Analytics is all about understanding how people convert on your website, which is essential to improving your conversion rate. It is reported whenever a user completes a goal or makes a purchase during a session. Each goal will report a maximum of one conversion per session, while every transaction is reported.
To Learn More, Read:
