Kick-starting your digital marketing efforts for your newly launched website? There are probably a few insights about your site that you’re going to want to know right from the beginning. And the best tool to get you started with data analytics is of course, none-other than Google Analytics which you can set-up for free.
If it is your first time using Google Analytics, you might find the number of menus and various customizable options quite frightening. No worries. This is what this post is all about; to get you started on the basic reports, which apparently are also some of the most important insights you’re going to need.
#1: Channels
This report shows you where your website traffic is coming from. In other words, how your prospects are discovering and taking interest in your website. You can access this report from the ‘All Traffic’ report under ‘ACQUISITION’, by clicking on the ‘Channels’ sub-menu as shown in the figure.
Organic Search is basically traffic coming in from search engines such as Google and Bing. As for Direct, you can assume is traffic coming directly to your website (keeping in mind though, that it include some traffic that are not being tracked properly by default, such as QR codes, WhatsApp and potentially anyone using Chrome’s incognito mode while browsing). Referral is traffic from people clicking on links to your website from other people’s website. Paid Ads is the default channel grouping for any PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Ads you may be running. As for Social, it’s basically traffic coming in from Facebook, Twitter and other common social media channels
#2: All Pages
You can access this report from the ‘Site Content’ report under ‘BEHAVIOR’, by clicking on the ‘All Pages’ sub-menu. This report shows you how individual pages of your website is performing in terms of pageviews (number of time the pages are viewed), average time spent on browsing the page and other data insights at page-specific level.
#3: Landing Page
The landing page is the first page that visitors arrive on your website. To see which pages are best at capturing traffic, go to the ‘Site Content’ report under ‘BEHAVIOR’, and click on the ‘Landing Page’ sub-menu. There is a lot that this report can tell you. For example, if the bounce rate of certain pages are high, you may want to do an audit of those pages because it means, while these pages are doing a good job at acquiring traffic, they’re not able to retend that traffic.
Besides these 3 standard reports, there’s much much more you can get out of Google Analytics, such as identifying on which pages are your website visitors dropping off the most and problem pages in the conversion funnel, or adding eCommerce values to each conversion. Stay tuned for more Google Analytic tips from us, or get in touch with one of our enablers if you would like a personal run through of each report and discover how to create custom reports specifically for your needs.