Understanding & Analyzing Your Google Analytics Report

Google Analytics is a valuable tool that helps identify meaningful patterns, statistics, and recorded data regarding a website, blog, or landing page. More importantly, Google Analytics outlines who an audience is, where they are coming from, where they are going, and what they are clicking on. With copious amounts of data, it can be a challenge to understand and interpret it all at once. Read on to understand how to break down and decipher some of the most important aspects of a Google Analytics report.

Audience Overview

Audience Overview provides in-depth detail regarding the type of users that access a site. This data is especially valuable for marketing and sales departments that need to understand who they are targeting. With this important data, marketing goals can be tailored to target the existing audience, as well as discovering ways to attract new patrons. This section of the report also contains insight into new vs. returning users. This stat is quite useful when paired with the performance of each traffic channel such as Direct, Organic, Social, Referral, and Other. The pie chart above can be found under the Acquisition tab. It is here where Google Analytics identifies which channels are securing higher volumes of new users. From there, data can be segmented even further. For example, if social media is associated with the highest new user traffic, then that segment can be broken down to determine which specific platform is connected to the highest percentage of new users. Audience Overview contains detailed audience behavior and is arguably one of the more important areas to study in a Google Analytics report

Source/Medium

Sometimes you need to know where users are coming from before you can get a sense of where they are headed. The Source/Medium section of the Google Analytics report does just that. This area highlights the origin of all site traffic. Where are users coming from? Is it organic traffic? Is it direct traffic? Are they clicking from ads? Are they referral traffic from blogs? All of these questions can be answered by the Source/Medium section of the report.

Bounce Rate

What exactly is the Bounce Rate? First we must define the word “bounce”. A bounce is a single-page session on a site. In other words, a bounce is when someone lands on your site, then immediately navigates away. Typically, this is triggered by ads or accidental clicking. Moreover, the Bounce Rate is the rate at which someone navigates away from the site. It is easy to assume a high bounce rate is a bad bounce rate; however, this is not always the case. Some sites are not content-rich and therefore are not designed for users to stay on pages for extended amounts of time. In this scenario, a high bounce rate is perfectly fine. On the contrary, if the success of your site depends on users visiting more than one page for extended amounts of time, then a high bounce rate would be less than ideal.

Acquisition Overview

Acquisition Overview gives you a quick overview of the top marketing channels that are sending visitors to a site. There are essentially five main types of channels: Organic, Paid, Referral, Direct, Social.

Organic traffic – these visitors have been referred by search results from search engines such as Bing or Google.

Paid traffic  – these visitors land on a site through search engine advertising (e.g. Google AdWords).

Referral traffic – this channel makes up visitors that have been referred to a site via links from other websites or blogs.

Direct traffic – direct traffic contains anyone that has sought out the website by typing in the exact URL into a browser.

Social traffic – visitors who have arrived at a site via a social networking site like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.

Acquisition Overview includes behavior and conversion details to help understand how well each channel drives conversions. This can be very helpful when allocating resources.

Why You Need Google Analytics

Not only is Google Analytics data useful for putting together a proactive online organic strategy, but this data is also useful for setting up highly-targeted digital advertising campaigns. Bigfin is able to link analytics to sales and conversion rates on any number of digital advertising campaigns. Whether you are running email marketing campaigns, display ads, search engine marketing campaigns or an e-commerce website, Bigfin can link reports to analytics.

Bigfin

Bigfin.com  is an industry leader in online advertising, SEO and custom web design. Our comprehensive digital marketing solutions include analytics reporting as well as social media management  on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, and other social outlets. Looking for mobile website solutions or help with search engine marketing? Contact us online or by phone at (425) 822-8200.