I get it. If you’re a small business owner or marketing department of one, you don’t have time to become an expert in Google Analytics. And you shouldn’t. Because you’re already an expert on life coaching, selling real estate, graphic design, or whatever your wonderful business involves.
But Google Analytics (GA) is something that you should care about. It’s not merely a tool to learn about your website’s performance. It offers enormous insights into your business as a whole, such as who your customers are, what they like, and how your marketing efforts are paying off. Even a minimal working knowledge of GA allows you to learn a great deal about your web traffic, and in turn, your customer.
Before we get started, there are a few basic metrics in GA that you should understand first:
Now that we have the basic metrics, here are the 5 screens you should care about, along with the business questions they help you answer.
To Answer: Who is my customer?
You probably already know who your customer is, but wouldn’t it be nice to confirm that with website data? Perhaps your web visitor is slightly different from a word-of-mouth referral customer, and thus should be marketed to in different ways. The Demographics report will help you sort this out.
A good place to start is in the Gender report. Just beneath the Primary dimension, click to add a Secondary dimension and choose Age (use the search to find it quickly). Now your visitors are grouped by gender and age. You may be aware of which gender visits more frequently but breaking it down by ages can give you some interesting nuggets of information. To be clear, Google doesn’t know the age/gender of all traffic. In my examples, it knows about 40% of users. But, this can still be a useful approximation.
Examples of insights from this report:
To Answer: What does my customer like?
Demographics are one thing, but GA can go deeper than that. To find some clues as to what your customers’ interests are, use the Interests report.
Start with the Overview. This shows you the top affinities, in-market segments, and other categories of your web visitors. Affinities are interests and habits, whereas in-market segments are topics that people are actively researching and planning. Click on the name of each report in order to see the full report, where you can see more information about each group.
You may see topics like travel, rock climbing, or athletic shoes, for instance. I can’t tell you exactly what you’ll find in here because each business is so different and there are thousands of interest categories in Google, but you’ll undoubtedly see some unexpected topics here. These topics can inform your product, marketing and messaging decisions.
Examples of insights from this report:
To Answer: Where do my customers come from?
If there is only one report that a marketer knows in Google Analytics, the Channels report should be it. This report tells you where your visitors come from—organic search, email, social media, or referral from another website—and which sources are the most valuable.
This is the starting point for you to see the effects of all your marketing activities. And there’s much more beneath the surface. If you click on any individual channel, it will drill down one layer deeper to show you specifics within that channel. Click on the Referral channel to see the top websites that bring you traffic, and how well those referrals convert on your goals. Dive into the Social channel to see whether your recent influx of email newsletter sign-ups came from your witty Facebook post or from the more professional LinkedIn announcement. This report allows you to focus your marketing efforts on the sources that drive the most productive traffic.
Examples of insights from this report:
To Answer: How do I compare to my competition?
Wondering where your website stands against the competition? The Benchmarking Channels report is a great place to turn. Google asks you to choose your industry, location, and size in order to determine benchmark data from other similar websites. Then it compares your data to the benchmarks and color codes the differences.
This allows you to get a sense of how you stack up in terms of traffic and behavior compared to competitors broken down by channel. This can give you ideas on where your competitors may be investing their marketing dollars and allow you to decide if you want to join them in those channels.
Examples of insights from this report:
To Answer: How is my website serving my business?
Each of the first four reports looks at your website as a whole. This is the first report where we dig into individual pages on your site to see how they differ.
This is where you can start to understand what people are doing on your site. Which pages get the most traffic and the most time spent on page? From what page are people leaving most often? Which pages have the worst bounce rate? These answers will give you some clues as to what information is most and least helpful for your visitors.
Examples of insights from this report:
There you have it! These are the top 5 screens to care about as a GA beginner. I hope you find some great information about your business and start to feel more comfortable with GA in the process. This is of course only a fraction of what’s possible in the tool. If you’re interested in exploring deeper insights from your online audience and expanding your digital marketing presence, contact us to chat with our team.
Vladimir Jones is Colorado’s original independent, integrated advertising agency, with offices in Denver and Colorado Springs. We believe in brilliant brands and love making the world love them as much as we do.