Top 10 Google Analytics Reports for Small Business

Top 10 Google Analytics Reports for Small Business

ACQUISITION OVERVIEW

This report tells you how people found your website – whether they came via organic search (using a search engine like Google), referral (they clicked a link from another website), direct (essentially, a pool of “unknowns” – it can be when a customer inputs your URL into the address bar, or when a link isn’t properly tagged, or someone goes from a private, secured website to an unsecured site), social (from Facebook or Twitter, for example), or paid search (which is advertising, like using Google’s Search Network).

MOBILE OVERVIEW

One of the most definite insights into internet use over the last decade is the rise of mobile devices to access the internet. In 2017, 73% of the entire population accessed the internet through their mobile phone, and roughly 60% of all traffic to the top 10,000 sites is mobile traffic. By 2021, mobile internet usage will reach penetration of 86.5% in the US.

DEMOGRAPHICS OVERVIEW The introduction of demographics reports has been cause for huge excitement in the analytics community. Through this, you can see the gender split and age ranges of customers on your site (usually a subset of the data). Google gathers this data through the third-party DoubleClick cookie, and looks at things like Google Account details, social media profiles, and browsing activity to determine demographic information.

You do have to enable the collection of the demographic data within your Google Analytics account, but once you do, it can be invaluable in informing your marketing activities, and giving you the scoop on exactly who your online customer is – and this may differ from your instore or face-to-face customer. By learning more about the people who visit your site, you can adjust it to better suit them.

SEARCH CONSOLE – QUERIES One of the most commonly-asked questions about analytics is “what do people search for to get to my site?” Unfortunately for many site owners, about six years ago, Google encrypted the search data so that search terms are replaced with “(not provided)”. They did this to protect the privacy of a site’s users, but it also encourages people to sign up for Google’s AdWords product – search terms are easy to find in Google AdWords.

CONTENT DRILLDOWN

This report really starts to get into what customers are actually doing on your site – you can see your most popular pages (or products), how long people are staying on each page, whether it’s the last page they visited on your site, and how many unique pageviews of each page occurred. And within this particular report, it also shows you the information from a “category” level – so if you have various sections on your site, you can see which of those are resonating with your customers.

TOP EVENTS One of the limitations of Google Analytics is that it doesn’t automatically set up tracking of important data like PDF downloads, newsletter sign-ups, or banner clicks.

This needs to be set up separately from the basic GA install, and can either be added to each link or click, or (more easily) via Google Tag Manager. Once it’s done, however, you can access the Event reports and get information on how many downloads of product manuals you got in a particular week; how many people clicked the first banner on your home page versus the second banner; or how many people clicked on your referral links.

The Top Events report divides the events into Category, Action, and Label, which are all determined during set up. You might have a category called PDF, one called Videos, and one called Links. The Action may be Download, or Play (Pause/Stop, etc); or Click. The Label is generally the File Name or some variation that makes the event easily identifiable. Most important is the total events, but unique events also tells you how many unique events occurred within each session.

GOAL OVERVIEW One of the most important (and often overlooked) aspect of Google Analytics is goal set up. Even if you don’t have ecommerce facilities on your site (in fact, especially if you don’t have ecommerce), you will still have specific actions that you want your users to take when they visit, like creating an account, making an enquiry, registering for a free trial, or even something based off an event, like downloading a particular paper. You can (and should) still set up goals for purchases as well.

Adding a goal value to each of your goals will also “unlock” some great insights in other reports too, like giving each of your pages a value, showing how important (in a monetary sense) they are to your business. It can also show which of the acquisition channels (e.g. organic traffic, social networks) are having the greatest effect on your goal. For each goal, you can also set up a funnel, with its various required steps, to give you insight into where users are dropping off. Again, this isn’t just for ecommerce conversions – it can be for sign ups (is the process too complicated?), quizzes, free ebooks – anything where there are a number of pages as steps to follow.

DAY OF WEEK/TIME OF DAY

This is a custom report, but you can easily download a template so that the hard work is already done for you.

With this report, you can get an understanding of the most important days and time of day for your online customers. Knowing when they visit the site can help you with advertising (target your advertising to the times when people are already logging on to your site), pop-up sales, and timing of maintenance, as well as the effect of other marketing, like any TV or radio advertising, email newsletters, or referral site campaigns.

ALL CAMPAIGNS

This is a custom report, but you can easily download a template so that the hard work is already done for you. With this report, you can get an understanding of the most important days and time of day for your online customers. Knowing when they visit the site can help you with advertising (target your advertising to the times when people are already logging on to your site), pop-up sales, and timing of maintenance, as well as the effect of other marketing, like any TV or radio advertising, email newsletters, or referral site campaigns.

ALL CAMPAIGNS

When customers click on a link to come to your website, you should add parameters on to it that tell Google Analytics what the link is about. For example, if you set up Facebook advertising, it will ask you at some point to include your destination URL – the page link that customers will end up on. Best practice for doing this specifies adding some information to the end of that URL that passes information along to your website that includes the source (Facebook), the medium (ads), and the campaign name (Spring_sale). Some services, like MailChimp, do this for you automatically.

BEHAVIOR FLOW

The Behavior Flow chart shows how customers move through your site, which works as a fantastic snapshot of the user journey. Beginning with the landing page (the first page a customer visits on your site), you follow the most popular user paths, with less popular journeys available as an minimized group of pages. This chart also shows the number of sessions that ended on each page as a percentage, to give an “at a glance” view on where you’re losing your customers.

Is Google Analytics Helping Your Business?

If you aren’t currently using Google Analytics to optimize your marketing efforts, your missing out on free analytic data that is extremely valuable to your business.

You can start tracking things like where your traffic is coming from, which marketing efforts are working, what pages were viewed, when your website is busiest, and more. Get in touch for a free consultation:

https://bit.ly/389pmWJ