Last week we gave an overview and in-depth analysis about Goals and Conversions, laying the foundation and how to set them up based on the goals of your business. This week we are going to talk about Google Analytics Reporting and specifically Acquisition Reports, Audience and Behavior Reports.
These are the reports that as a business owner you should pay attention to and revisit twice per month at a minimum.
First we’re going to talk about the Acquisition Report. The Acquisition Report helps a business:
- Understand how people find your web site, or app
- Helps you identify which sources are sending you quality traffic; meaning:
- Traffic that you want to come to your web site and do something such as view your products, consume your content and hopefully click and ‘buy’.
- However if you’re a brick and mortar business maybe you want people to view your products or services and then either call or visit your location.
- Understand where to focus and how to manage your advertising efforts.
Acquisition Reports can be broken out by:
- Campaign – Adwords or custom campaigns…Paid campaigns.
- Source – Where your traffic is coming from. It could be from a search engine (Google or Yahoo or Bing), a referring site (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube), a newsletter or someone who enters your URL or website name (direct)
- Medium – Organic, such as Google; Referral, such as from social media..Facebook, or None, or a direct search.
- Source/Medium – A view using both Source and Medium
- Other or More – Various attributes or properties from fields such as Acquisition, Behavior, Technology and Users.
The Acquisitions/All Traffic report identifies the sources all of the traffic that comes to your web site along with the medium
- Number of Sessions – Visits
- % of New Sessions
- New Users – Number of…
- Bounce Rate –
- Pages per Session –
- Avg Session Duration –
- And Conversions – If you have Goals set up in analytics.
In this example, the #1 source of traffic for the specified dates came from Google and the medium was organic; that means that it was a basic search, it was not a paid search using Google Adwords/keywords you designate.
There is so much useful information via the Acquisitions Reports we recommend you familiarize yourself with Overview and the All Traffic views to get a good understanding of the info this report can provide, then move on to more complex reporting.
Next we look at Audience reports. This report provides information on:
- Demographics & Interests– Including Age and Gender
- Geo – Including geographic Location and Language
***You have to have advanced tracking set-up to capture demographics, interests but Google makes it very easy and provides you with the proper tracking code that you copy over into the code on your website** - Behavior –
◦ New visitor’s vs Returning visitors
◦ Frequency and Recency – How
◦ And Engagement – How long in seconds was the duration of a visitors stay - Technology – Browser and Operating Systems used – Example: Internet Explorer and Windows OS
- Mobile – Including an Overview between devices on desktop, tablet or smartphone and
- Devices – iPad, Android tablet, etc
- Taking a look at Overview, it breaks down to:
- Number of Sessions during the dates specified
- The number of Users visiting your site at viewed at least one page
- Total Number of Pageviews
- Average number of pages viewed & avg length of each page viewed
- Average length of time on site
- Bounce Rate – Percentage of people that land on a single page and take no action or visit another page, they just leave.
- % of New Sessions – The percentage of all new sessions that were new visitors
Finally we take a look at the Behavior Report which deals with how visitors interact with the site’s pages. We’ll look at Overview and Behavior Flow….
- Overview – fairly self-explanatory – It’s an overall look at the most active pages on your web site that features
- Pageviews – The total number of pages visited.
- Unique Pageviews – The number of times a page was viewed at least once.
- Avg Time on Page: The average amount of time a visitor spent viewing a page.
- Bounce Rate: Percentage of single page visits that resulted in no action being taken and immediately left the page without viewing anything else on the site.
- Exit Percentage: Percentage of how often users exit from the page or pages sets they were viewing.
- And then finally we’ll look at the Behavior Flow of your pages.
This is configurable and in this case, the graph illustrates when visitors landed on a page and where they went after that, then after that and then finally when and where they exited the site.
The red areas indicate where the visitor jumped off of the page.
If you have a high amount of visitors dropping off a single page most likely it’s because: - The page was possibly hard to navigate
- Or the visitor didn’t know where to go from that point
- Or it wasn’t clear where to go.
So there you have it three reports and why we believe these are the most important reports to focus on when you’re getting started with Google Analytics.
This week’s Happy Hour Recap was filmed at The Willoughby Brewing Company.
