Making Sense Of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool, and one I would recommend any business owner to use in conjunction with their website. Unfortunately, time and time again I see business owners set up their Google account, open Analytics, and become completely overwhelmed with everything there is to analyse. This is understandable, as there is so much information available it can be tricky to determine what’s relevant and what’s not.

Google Analytics Reports

Here is a quick list and guide through some of the most valuable reports you’ll find in Google Analytics.

1. Overview Report

As the title suggests, this will give you a general overview of all your website statistics. To access it, go to Audience, then Overview.  Everything is shown within a date range, so make sure the range entered is appropriate.

This overview gives you a snapshot of what has been happening on the website and how engaged the users are. By seeing how long they spent on the website and the number of pages they have visited you can get a good idea of their overall engagement. Have a look through all of the totals underneath the line graph.

To give a quick overview of the terminology;
Users tally the number of different people/computers that visited your site within that date range. 

Sessions are the number of times a user was actively engaged on your website. 

Pageviews tells you the total number of pages that were viewed.

Pages / Session tells you how many pages were viewed in the average session, and the Average Session Duration tells you how long the sessions usually were. 

Bounce Rate tells you the percentage of sessions where users came to the site, viewed only one page, and then left. Ideally, you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible, which means that your website is getting more engagement and is more likely to convert but sometimes there is a reason for a higher bounce rate if most people are likely to call your business. They can come to your website, find a phone number and leave again, so it’s not always bad. 

2. Geo Report 

This report shows you where your website visitors are coming from. To access it, go to Audience, then Geo, then Location. 

Click on a country, such as United States to get more information about the regions within that country that most of the traffic is coming from. 

You can also add a primary dimension so that you can see the cities instead of the regions, which gives a greater level of detail. This report will give you a look at the quality of the traffic from each different location. When you know where your top converting users come from, this can help you measure your marketing activities. 

3. Mobile Report

The mobile report will show how many people have come from different types of devices. Being able to compare the traffic you get from different devices can help drive your marketing strategy. To access it go to Audience, then Mobile, then Overview. If, for instance, you have a high percentage of traffic coming from mobile devices, it’s important that you make sure your website is properly formatted and optimised for both desktops and mobiles, and it’s really easy to navigate on a mobile device.

4. Source/Medium Report 

The Source/Medium report enables you to see where the traffic to your website comes from, this is probably my favourite report and the one I use most often. To access the Source/Medium Report, go to Acquisition, then All Traffic then Source/Medium. 

Google Organic is the natural results that you get from Google searches, and you can enhance this through good SEO, this will also include people searching for your brand name and finding you in Google. Direct Traffic is generally when people type your URL directly into their browser, but it can also include untracked email marketing campaigns, untracked Facebook ad campaigns, and links that people send to each other. You can also see the quality of each type of traffic by looking at the bounce rate and the pages/session columns. If the bounce rate is much higher from one source than from another, this would suggest that this source isn’t generating traffic from your target audience. If the pages/session is low then people from this source of traffic are generally less interested in your website than other sources of traffic. 

5. Landing Page Report

To see the most popular pages that people arrive at when they visit your website, you want to look over the Landing Page Report. Find it under Behavior, then Site Content, then Landing Pages. This will give you insight into which pages on your site are drawing the most traffic, and may illuminate some pages that aren’t being seen as much as you would like them to, suggesting a change needs to be made.

6. Goal Conversions

The last report I am going to cover is Goal Conversions. To reach this, go to Conversions, then Goals, then Overview. Here you can see results of the goals set up for your website (Goal set up is under Admin-Goals)

This is a great way to keep track of particular conversions and work toward more. If you have a Contact Us form make sure that it takes the user to a thank you page once they have filled it out. That way you can measure the number of enquiries that you get coming through the form. This will help you measure how many people are converting and will also let you know what Source they came from. This can all be tracked in Goal Conversions.

Just a quick note to help you compare your data from month to month or year to year, you can change the date range in the top right corner of Google Analytics. This will change all of the data to what is within that range.

While there are plenty of other useful reports that you can explore down the track, hopefully, this guide has gotten you through the initial overwhelming effect that Google Analytics can sometimes create. Just go through each report and you will not only become comfortable with the software but also learn valuable statistics about your website along the way.

The old version of Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) is being replaced with Google Analytics 4. If you haven’t upgraded to GA4 yet, you really should, you can find out more in our “Why You Should Upgrade To GA4“

If you want to learn more about Google Analytics and SEO so you can you generate more traffic to your website, take a look at The SEO School, an 8 module self-paced course to help your business get found online.

Karen Dauncey

Karen Dauncey has been working in SEO since 2003. She specialises in helping businesses get found online through Google using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) She is the founder and creator of The SEO School an online SEO Course to help teach business owners how to do their own SEO. She regularly delivers educational programs for both Local, State and Federal Government and is an advisor for the ASBAS Digital Solutions Program. Karen’s passion and commitment to help small business owners get found online is the driving force behind her online school, making SEO advice accessible to all with free resources and online courses.

Karen's wealth of SEO knowledge and practical digital marketing experience comes from running her own SEO and Google Ads agency, Blue Cherry Online Marketing since 2008. Karen has optimised over 1000 websites, managed millions of dollars' worth of spend on Google Ads and has a solid understanding of the constantly shifting industry of digital marketing and SEO. This gives her a unique advantage when it comes to being able to recommend the right online marketing strategies for your business. This gives her a unique advantage when it comes to being able to recommend the right online marketing strategies for your business. She was recently recognised as an SEO Expert for the popular course creation platform, Kajabi as well as appearing on ABC Radio
for her expert opinion on the ACCC's investigation into search engines.

Karen has attended search engine conferences in London, Stockholm, Adelaide and Sydney, and was also invited to attend a pilot Business Coaching Course at Google’s Head Office. She has a Diploma in Marketing from the Chartered Institute of Marketing in the UK.

She is also the co-owner of the Digital Experts Directory, an online directory for female serviced-based businesses to promote their business (with a great backlink for SEO).

To keep up to date with the latest in SEO, join her Facebook group The SEO School Community or follow her on Facebook or LinkedIn.