Analyzing your performance
Google Analytics is a really powerful tool. If you have a website and aren’t using Google Analytics you are most likely missing out on some powerful insight.
There is an abundance of features within Google Analytics and wrapping your head around all of them can be quite daunting, and unless you have an ambition of becoming a full time web analyst, we don’t suggest you try. But some of the features are more straight forward and will be really valuable to you. In this Google Analytics guide we go through some of them.
Getting started with Google Analytics
The different reports within Google Analytics will focus on different background data, but within all of them you will usually be looking at:
Users – tells you how many visitors you’ve had to your site within the given timeframe.
Pages / Session – tells you how many individual pages, on average, your visitors engage with on your site.
Avg. Session Duration – let’s you know how long, on average, your visitor stays on your site.
Bounce-rate – For many people this is the one they keep the closest eye on. The bounce-rate tells you how many visitors come to your site, but only interact with the page they land on.
Analysing your audience
Once you’ve opened your website report you will see a series of items on your left hand side. Audience is a great place to start, when you want to gain a better understanding of your users.
Here you can filter your reports based on country, city, browser type and even mobile device. For most people the most interesting report will be country or city. Using those, you will see if you are actually reaching the audience you are intending to reach, at least based on their geography. You might also find that what you are offering seems to be very popular in a geographical market, you hadn’t thought to market to, and so uncover some hidden potential.
However, always remember to take an in-depth look at the different audiences. If the numbers look very odd, your visitor might be a robot, and then there’s no need to start targeting the Brazilian market.
Where did your audience come from?
In the acquisition report you will see how people arrive at your site. The report is structured into four sections – Referral, Organic Search, Direct and Social. This is a great place to see if your social media efforts are actually paying off, or to give you an indication whether you should sharpen up your SEO work.
Furthermore you can take an in depth look at each of the sections. This is great because you can get a feel for whether people are actually finding what they are looking for or not. It might be that one of your Facebook Ad’s are driving people through to your site, but if they bounce right off the site again, you are just wasting valuable advertising money, and something needs to change either with your ad or on the landing page.
Or you might find that people coming to your site through an Organic search are staying for longer than others and have a higher average of Pages / Session, indicating that you are actually targeting your SEO correctly, driving the right kind of traffic through. If you’re still not converting though, then it’s time to look even deeper. Which leads us to…
Behaviour
Behaviour flow is a really good tool. Here you can follow your visitors through from the page they landed on to the page where they’ve dropped off the site. You can highlight different paths through here depending on where people are geographically located, or from how they landed on your site. This is a great resource, to map out what works and what doesn’t work and weave out the weaknesses on your site.
Filters: Take your self out of the equation
Finally we’ll look at filters. For most of the reports you can filter your results, but you also have the option to set overall filters. For example, you can filter out your own IP address which is great if you don’t want to skew your own data.
You can filter out your own IP address by going to the Admin section of Google Analytics and then under View you’ll see the Filter option. Once opened you can Add new filter. Give it a name like Exclude own IP and then Select filter type. In this case it would be Exclude. In the Select Source or Destination drop-down you then choose Traffic from the IP address and in the Select Expression you select That are equal to, because you want to make sure that you only filter out your own IP.
In the IP address box that has now appeared you enter your IP address and then you hit save.
If you don’t know what your IP address is you can simply search for my IP address in google and it will come up.
We hope you’ve found this guide helpful – if you want to learn more about Google Analytics the Google Analytics Help Centre is a great resource.