6 essential Analytics reports to make your life easier
Google Analytics is a comprehensive analytical tool that collects data about user activities on the website. Thanks to its little JavaScript code, you can find out which pages are visited most often, where users come from or what they click on.
In this article, I describe six Google Analytics reports that you will be using continuously. They provide essential information about your website traffic and checking them quickly becomes a habit. Remember that only the combination of data from several reports gives the complete picture.
So, open your Analytics account and let's start exploring :-)
Note: Remember that the reports show data for the selected period (except for the "Real time" report). You can find the date range at the top of the report page on the right. Choose the period interesting for you or compare two different time periods. By default, Analytics shows data for last seven days until yesterday. Today's data will appear in a few hours, but it's best to check it the day after because it takes time to process and assign data to the appropriate places in a large number of reports. The exception is the Real Time report set.
For your convenience, each report name is a link to the appropriate section of this article. You can always jump into the one which interests you right now, without the tiresome scrolling.
Source / Medium
All pages
Exit Pages
Goals
E-commerce
Real-time
Source / Medium
Where can you find it? (left menu) Acquisition > All Traffic > Source / Medium
What is behind these words?
Behind the "source" there is information about the domain from which the user came to your domain, for example google.com or bing.com, if he found it in a search engine, or a website name, i.e. YourFavouriteBlogger.com, if he clicked on a link in an article at your favourite blogger site. If he typed the address directly into the address bar (perhaps he has your site bookmarked or remembers your site address), the source will be described as "direct". Fun fact: some domain names appear in different versions, like Facebook: it can be saved as l.facebook.com, m.facebook.com, or facebook.com.
"Medium" means a type of traffic, such as unpaid ("organic"), referrals ("referral"), paid ("cpc") or direct ("none").
The “organic” medium are entries from search engines, for example Google, Bing or Baidu
“Referrals” mean for a visit redirected from other domains, for example yellowpages.com, YourFavouriteBlogger.com
“Cpc” results are sessions that were started by clicking on your paid ad, for example, created in Ads or on Facebook.
And "none" stands for direct inputs.
Source and medium appear in the list giving full information about the session origin, therefore they are written with a slash as "source / medium". In the table in the report, each row is dedicated to one of them.
Important:
If you have a lot of sessions marked as "direct / (none)", make sure that your Analytics is correctly implemented in your website code. If there is more than one Analytics script with the same ID in the code, each of them will send information about the page view. The result will be an overestimated number of page views in reports and information about direct entries, because technically it will look as if the user entered from yourdomain.com website to yourdomain.com website.
What will you check here?
Here you can see how many users, including new ones, have started sessions on your site from a specific source / medium. For example, if there are 5 users overall, including 4 new users, and 10 sessions, you can immediately see that you are getting new recipients and one of them has already returned several times.
The "Behaviour" data can tell you how visitors use the pages. A 100% bounce rate equals to one page visited during a session. In such case, the average session duration will always be 0:00:00. The lower the bounce rate, the more sessions with multiple pages are displayed. At this point, you can answer the question of whether your recipient behaves the way you intend them to. If you have a one-page site, your reports will always show one page per session. However, if you want your client to see the product and follow a certain path of placing an order, then there should be more pages. And when there are more, then it is worth checking which ones are the most visited, in the Behaviour > All Pages report.
Important: A bounce rate of 0% is very worrying. It may indicate a double implemented Analytics code.
Conversion columns show you whether the goals and/or E-commerce you set up were met in sessions from specific source/media. Note that in the header of this column, you can choose which conversion you are currently checking. You can only choose one at a time.
Tip: Use the Secondary Dimension.
When viewing reports in Google Analytics, you can also check additional information by clicking on the "Additional dimension" button, which you will find above the left column of the table. You can add one dimension at a time from the categories Time, Users, Acquisition, Social, E-commerce, Advertising, and more. Very practical if, for example, you are interested in what time users from ads come in most.
Where to next from here?
There are more reports providing data on the origin of website traffic. When expanding the Acquisition menu, you will see different reports for Google Ads, Search Console, Social Networks, and Campaign Traffic.
You can read more about this in the Google documentation.
All pages
Where can you find it? Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages
This report collects data on individual pages, i.e. individual URL addresses, such as mywebsite.com/contact, mywebsite.com/offer, etc.
What will you check here?
Each row of the table is data for one page. They are ordered from the one with the most views to the one with the least views. If it's more important to you, which page was viewed the longest, click the "Avg. time spent on the page” and the report will be arranged according to this parameter. Other metrics include pageviews, bounce rate, % exits, and page value.
What is the most important here? First of all, you can find out which pages are the most popular among your audience. Keeping in mind which pages you are directing users to, for example by posting a link to an article on LinkedIn, you immediately check how many times they were viewed, and the average time spent on the page gives you an idea of whether the article has been read (over a minute, depending on length of the text) or just "blindfolded" (within a dozen or so seconds). If you are particularly interested in whether your article has really been read, you can configure an appropriate event triggered by the Google Tag Manager. Detailed instructions are available on the gtmnotes.com blog.
The Exit Percentage shows you what percentage of users have ended their visit on this particular page, which can also be important information to you. Also, I recommend using the Exit Pages report, which is described below.
Tip:
By default, only address paths are shown and the domain name is omitted. Therefore, for the website https://mywebsite.com/contact you will see "/ contact", and for the home page with the address https:// mywebsite.com only "/". If you have subdomains or cross-domain tracking, use a filter that displays the full URL. You can find setup instructions here.
Where to next from here?
Further reports on the content of the website, that is, individual pages, are broken down by subject: content analysis, landing pages and exit pages.
Exit pages
Where can you find it? Behaviour > Site Content > Exit Pages
Apparently, the most important thing is not how users start their visits, but how they finish. This is certainly true for websites. From the page on which the user has completed the visit, important conclusions can be drawn about his experience and the construction of user paths on the site. There is no reason to be happy if the exit page is a destination address that you linked from somewhere else. Let’s suppose that a store advertises its Christmas products and customers find their way in from the announcement to the "Christmas 2020" category page. If the category page is also an exit page and the bounce rate is 100%, then something clearly didn't work. Also, leaving the product page is not the dream of the store owner, because the ideal is to end the visit on the order confirmation page. However, you can collect users who have viewed these pages on the remarketing list and target them with a special ad group that will convince those who hesitate to complete their purchase.
Tip:
If a website has a lot of views but a very high bounce rate, then take a look at it. Maybe something is broken and the page does not load properly? Use a secondary dimension to check the devices on which it was displayed. Perhaps the mobile version or a specific operating system does not work? Ask yourself questions and check it, and if you don't know what to check, write to me on Fb.
What will you check here?
This report includes data on the number of exits from a given page, the number of times it was viewed, and the percentage of exits from that page in relation to all its views.
Where to next from here?
Check the All Pages Report to see how long those pages were viewed. If you're measuring conversions on your exit pages, check your goals and/or E-commerce reports to see if any of them were completed.
Goals
Where will you find it? Conversions > Goals > Overview
A conversion is such a user interaction with your website that is valuable (not necessarily financially) for you. An example of a conversion for a blogger is reading an article, for a store owner a purchase, i.e. displaying an order confirmation pag