Getting Started with Google Analytics

Using Google analytics can be a intimidating experience for the uninitiated, and consequently many business owners forego it altogether. This is a mistake. Making friends with this marvelous tool is the first step understanding how and why your website is performing the way it is, and gives you remarkable insight as to how to correct things going forward.

We’ve distilled this down a bit here, and offer you a menu of 5 useful reports you’ll want to keep an eye on. These 5 will help you the most, not only from an organizational standpoint but also with a practical, useful insight into what you can do to improve page performance.

5 Analytics reports to keep an eye on
Search queries – This is one of the easiest ways to use Analytics keyword data, You need to have your Google Webmaster account connected to your GA account to make this work, but you need to do that anyway. Once done, this report provides you with the keywords you are ranking for, how many impressions they’re getting, number of clicks, and your click-through rate.

Mobile usage – Knowing how well your pages are doing with mobile devices is important data to know when nearly 50% of all traffic is originating from these.

Referral data – This report shows you which sites are sending you referral traffic. This is good to know, for if that traffic slows in the future you may want to look into why it is happening.

Session data – This has to do with the amount of time a visitor spends on your site. This is important data to know, as the length of time a visitor is actively engaged on your site has a great impact on your page performance in the search rankings.

Raw page views and exits – This is how many times your pages are viewed. Closely related is the pages where visitors exit the site from: you want to know this and investigate why.

So now you have a few reports to get you going with Google Analytics. It can do so much more, but for now, let’s begin with these.