Google Analytics Breakdown

 

Google Analytics will be one of the primary tools you use to ensure your website is performing well. It can provide you with some great data but can be a bit overwhelming as it has many different metrics and views to monitor.  

So if you are new to Google Analytics and want a quick overview to help you understand, find and extract the data you are looking, here is a brief guide on the main sections of this analytical tool:

1) Real Time

The Real Time section shows us what is happening on your website right now. It gives you various data to help you understand who your visitor is such as where they are from, which pages they are viewing, how they found you, etc.

This information is of course interesting but is hard to respond to, so isn’t likely to be overly useful to you. However, if you are running a marketing campaign and want to see the immediate impact it is having, then this tool can be useful.

2) Audience

This is the section you will probably use the most as it provides a general overview of your website. It shows you how many people have visited the site, how many pages they viewed, average time spent on site, the bounce rate and more.

This section provides you with a much more in-depth analysis of your audience, enabling you to see where your audiences is from, their age, gender, the devices they are accessing your website from and how they use your site.

If you want to see how your audience is engaging with your website, this is the section to check out.

3) Acquisition

This section is a breakdown of where your traffic is coming from. This can be very helpful to determine what online marketing methods are working for you, such as SEO, AdWords and Social Media.

The Channels section gives you a more in-depth report on where your traffic is coming from, for example, giving you the metrics from specific social networks.  

4) Behaviour

This section is an analytical review of your website itself. Here you can look at the performance of each individual page and see what pages perform the best and worst. This information can be very useful as it will show you what pages your audience engage with and what pages need to be worked on.

5) Conversions

If you have something you want to track the conversions of like an online form or a newsletter sign up, then this section will be useful to you. Here you can track the number of conversions made on your website, what time they happened, where the visitor came from, etc.

 

You can really spend hours looking through your Google Analytics and analysing the data but however you use Google Analytics it will give you clear metrics into the performance of your website.