3 Types of Google Analytics Reports
If you don’t have a Google Analytics account for your website, I advise you to read this post and refer to the simple guide we created to get you started.
There are three necessary reports within the Google Analytics interface, and they are the following, audience report, acquisition report, and behavior report.
Audience Report
The data includes demographics, interests, language, location if they are a new or returning visitor (user behavior), and the device they used to interact with your website (mobile, desktop, and tablet). The audience report is pretty straightforward and helps businesses better understand the characteristics of their visitors.
Acquisition Report
The Acquisition reports help businesses to compare the performance of different marketing channels (organic, paid, direct, referral, and display) and discover which sources ( bring in the highest quality traffic and conversions.
Let’s dive into these different types of marketing channels:
- “Organic” identifies the traffic that arrived on your site through unpaid search.
- “CPC” indicates traffic that arrived through paid search efforts like Google or Bing Ads.
- “Referral” is the traffic that arrived on your site after the user clicked on a website other than a search engine.
- “Email” represents traffic that came from an email marketing campaign.
- “(none) “is applied for users that come directly to your site by typing your URL directly into a browser. In your reports, you will see these users have a source of “direct” with a medium of “(none).”
“Source” provides more information about the marketing channel. For example, if the marketing channel is “paid search,” then the source will be the name of the search engine, such as Google.
The data found in this report can help companies make better decisions about where to focus their marketing efforts.
Behavior Report
The Behavior report helps businesses review the performance of their site. It gives companies an overview of page views, unique page views, average time spent on each page, bounce rate, and exit rate. You can also review how the content is performing by page URLs, titles, search terms, or events.
As mentioned in this post, the problem with a traditional marketing strategy is the challenge that comes with measuring data because its in the offline world. Knowledge is power, and if companies don’t take the time to understand their analytics reports, they are setting themselves up for failure and missed opportunities. They won’t know how people are finding their site or what its visitors are doing once they get there. Most importantly, they won’t know which visitors are buying which products.
Google Analytics can be overwhelming at first, but don’t let that discourage you as it was the same way for me and everyone else in the digital advertising industry.
There is something businesses can do to minimize or even avoid feeling overwhelmed, and its to start with just ONE thing.
The reason why Google Analytics seems so complicated is that people tend to start clicking around and try to make sense of all of the dozens of different reports at once. That’s a path to confusion, frustration, and discouragement. If companies look at ONE report at a time and focus on making sense of what that one report is, they’ll learn useful information for better optimization of a companies strategy.
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