10 Google Analytics Reports you Should Track Regularly

Websites are crucial for any modern business. The significance of digital marketing to stay ahead on the World Wide Web is not a special privilege for today’s businesses; it is one of the primary requirements. You need to have a clear, robust digital marketing strategy to achieve business success and sustain among the fierce competition. Here’s where Google analytics reports provide an effective means to understand how your website is performing.

Google Analytics Metric – the Fundamentals

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that enables you to get precious insights about your website, how your digital marketing campaigns perform, and the levels of engagement and traffic. A Google Analytics metric provides crucial information describing the performance of your website or mobile app during any given timeframe in the past.

Google analytics reports help you to regularly review and ensure that your website or mobile app is functioning properly and facilitating business growth. In addition to having an attractively designed website and running strategically effective marketing campaigns, tracking your website’s performance regularly using Google Analytics reports is of paramount importance.

Key Google Analytics Reports That Need to be Tracked Regularly

The following are a few of the most important Google Analytics reports that you, as a business owner, must keep tracking regularly:

1.  Audience Overview Report

One of the default reports that shows up when you log in to Google Analytics account, audience overview tells you all about the people who visit your site– the audience. The audience section is an extensive one in Google Analytics, with fifteen sub-sections, each with different reports. The overview section provides information about your site’s current audience.

Audience overview shows you the number of visitors and sessions in the past month, the average time that visitors have spent on your site, the average number of pages visited by them, and the bounce rate (number of people who have left after visiting just one page).

You can also view a complete breakdown of site traffic by country, language, city, and technology.

You can customize the timeframe according to your requirement.

Read Also: How To Run A/B Testing With Google Analytics

2.  Mobile Overview Report

We have become a mobile-first world today. The number of mobile users has started exceeding the number of desktops and laptops. The Mobile performance report in Google analytics facilitates understanding how well your website is optimized for mobile devices and which areas need improvement.

The mobile overview report is an effective Google Analytics tool that enables businesses to tweak their sites appropriately and make it more mobile-friendly. It facilitates understanding the pain points and helps the website owners to take necessary steps so that visitors stay longer on the site.

An illustrative mobile performance report of a website is given below:

This sample report clearly shows that the site has a high bounce rate for Android. It indicates that so much has to be done by the developers.

It shows your website’s performance on different platforms.

Analytics makes you capable of seeing what kind of devices people use for viewing your mobile site and the channel they choose to enter. Identifying mobile improvement opportunities to your website using this report leads to increased traffic and better ranking.

Read Also: How To Set Up Goals In Google Analytics To Track Conversions

3.  Traffic Acquisition Report

The traffic acquisition report tells you things like whether people click on your ads, whether your guest posts generate traffic to your site, and how your SEO strategy works. In fact, this report provides more information and is considered to be one of the first steps in the reporting process by most of the marketers.

This standard report is available under Acquisition – Overview.

The traffic acquisition from social media reports gives you a breakdown of your specific traffic sources.

The ‘referrals’ tab tells you about the external sites that drive traffic to your website. By clicking on the referring site, you can also see the exact pages that the visitors used for entering your website.

From this report, you can figure out whether or not the traffic translates into tangible results that positively impact your business. Metrics such as goal value and conversion rate are indicative of the specific social media sites that you need to focus more on.

Read Also: 9 Reasons Why Your SEO Strategy Is Failing

4.  Content Efficiency Report

Content is touted to be the king; most of the websites have a fairly large volume of content these days. If you generate a lot of content, you are likely to find it hard to track. The content efficiency report is of great help to you here. This report makes the overwhelming task of tracking the performance of all of your web pages.

Business owners and marketers can identify which pages perform well and which ones require optimization, by using this report. This report helps to understand:

• Which content on the website is most engaging
• Who can be hired as subject matter experts
• What do visitors value the most as useful content
• Which content succeeds to deliver business or non-profit value
• Which content succeeds in converting readers into customers
• What content is being shared the most by the users

Read Also: 7 SEO Trends You Should Know In 2019

5.  Keyword Analysis Report

The keyword analysis report provides a list of the most popular keywords along with site visitor metrics, goal completions, conversion rates, and page load time for each of these. This excludes keywords encrypted by Google.

Google started encrypting the search data since 2012. Sample of organic traffic keyword report:

The keyword analysis report gives deep insights into the details of your site visitors by tracking the exact performance of the unencrypted keywords. The report shown below analyzes all the available and popular incoming keywords. It gives complete information on visitor metrics and conversion rates, among other crucial factors.

This data can be used for figuring out which keywords work best for you and how many of these keywords are practically contributing to your specific goals. You will also get to know which keywords are required to be optimized in the future.

A tab measuring engagement is available for each keyword that is useful for content marketers. A tab showing the revenue metrics is available as well.

Read Also: How To Build Right Content Marketing Strategy For SEO Growth

6.  Landing Pages Report

The landing page report is one of the most impactful Google Analytics reports. It is easy to use and enables marketers to identify which pages on a website succeed to earn the most traffic.

Users may enter a site from various pages. While a few might directly type in your home page, others may find your page through search engines. Yet others might have clicked on any link shared on social media.

The Google Analytics landing pages report tells you which page your site visitors landed on when they had first entered your website. This data helps you to understand how users interact with your website normally. By getting insights into pages that attract visitors and the ones that have a considerably high bounce rate, you are enabled to take the necessary steps to correct that. You may turn the high bounce rate pages into engaging pages.

Upon opening, the landing pages report shows the most popular landing pages on your site, according to the number of visitors on each page over a specific period of time.

7.  New Vs Returning Visitors Report

Similar to getting new users to your website for the first time, getting returning visitors is crucial for business success. Normally, out of several visitors, it is the returning visitors that become followers, readers, and customers. The standard Google Analytics new vs returning visitors report gives you the percentage of users who have come back to your website.

If someone who visited your site within two years returns from the same device, Google Analytics marks them as Returning Visitors. There is a huge difference in the metrics for new visitors and returning visitors. Returning visitors tend to stay longer on your site. The bounce rate among returning visitors is low as well.

The breakdown of new vs returning visitors is a key audience demographic on Google Analytics dashboard. The new vs returning visitors report provides the behavioral data of the two groups. This gives you valuable insights into your site’s structure, content, and design, thus revealing new opportunities to offer value to your audience.

Read Also: Customer Experience Optimization Guide For 2020

8.  Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate Report

The bounce rate is the percentage of the site visitors who leave from the same page that they landed on without taking any action. Exit rate is the percentage of your site visitors who end up browsing more pages than one on your website before eventually leaving the site. The bounce rate vs exit rate report compares the bounce rate with the exit rate for different pages on your website.

By selecting ‘bounce rate’ and ‘% exit’ in the exporter tab, you may get to view the comparison visually for all your pages.

Using this report, you can identify the pages that have low engagement and UX issues.

Consider the example of a site. If visitors exit a 3-page article after they have read-only two pages, it means there’s some specific reason that causes them to leave midway. It may be a bad copy, too many ads, or a distracting link in the sidebar.

The report, by showing these details, enables you to make the necessary tweaks to your site. You can plan your strategy and prioritize those pages which you want to have lower bounce rates.

9.  Site Speed Overview Report

Visitors tend to leave your site if it doesn’t load within two seconds. The bounce rate is directly proportional to the site loading speed. Google Analytics Site Speed Overview report allows you to see how your speed has trended over time. You will be able to investigate which are your best and worst-performing pages by using this report.

You may find this report under Google Analytics>Behavior>Site Speed>Overview

Google Analytics provides recommendations about how you can speed up your site by making use of Site Speed.

The report looks like the one below:

The Site Speed Overview report provides average load time per browser and per page. You can see how fast your pages load in different countries as well. This enables you to optimize the specific browsers according to the report.

The faster your site loads, the better are your chances to gain global conversions.

10.  Navigation Summary

The Navigation Summary, another important Google Analytics report. It allows you to view the most common paths through which users enter the URLs on your site.

The report also facilitates see where your site visitors are arriving from and where they are going after having finished browsing your site. These details prove significant for understanding the user patterns. You can get an idea of which paths and pages need to be optimized and where you have to provide shortcuts.

The report gives you the ability to find out the questions that users have. If they keep clicking back and forth between different pages, you can understand that your content is not sufficient to answer their queries. You may optimize these pages so that your visitors will not land on your competitor’s page for better answers to their questions.

Wrap-up

Google Analytics lets you track several important metrics on varied aspects. You can get all the essential information for improving your website by using Google Analytics reports. These reports allow you to monitor the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies, the performance of your site, user experience, onsite content, and device functionality.