Read Analytics Data : Read Audience , Aquisition and Behaviour Statistics

Your digital content is your passport to success.

A lot of thought goes into your content… But how do you know that it’s having the desired effect on readers and their behaviour? Google Analytics is an invaluable tool for tracking the progress of your website, the content on it and the campaigns you're running. However, its interface can seem intimidating. Here we’ll demystify Google Analytics and help you to get the maximum insight out of its sophisticated reporting tools and use that information to put yourself in the driver’s seat.

You tailor your content with their needs in mind. You ensure that it is SEO-friendly and reaches their eyes, has UX that encourages them to spend longer on your website and the content itself provides value for them. It helps them to solve a problem that they’re likely to encounter or provides them with information and offers that are meaningful to them.

Reading Analytics Data:

When you start digging into your analytics, it's important to know what you're looking for. You can spend ages pouring over reports, but unless you approach your data with the right questions, you won't gain any meaningful insights. Stick to the objectives you defined earlier and try to determine if your content is performing above or below expectations. Here are a number of the most important reports you'll find in the left side menu in Google Analytics. Each one helps you see your data from a different angle.

Your dashboard gives you a comprehensive overview of your website/ page’s performance within parameters established by you. By default it is set to a 30-day window, although you can change this to a 12 month period if you want a more macro perspective.

The Reports menu on the left-hand side of the dashboard gives you access to more detailed reporting. Let’s take a look at the areas covered and the insights which can be gleaned from them.

Audience:

An overview of Audience report

Your audience overview gives you comprehensive insights into who’s accessing your website. Click on it and you’ll see charts that represent the following data: • Total sessions – Your reach. The amount of visits you’re getting. An increase will show in green while a drop will show in red. • Total users – How many individual users are accessing your website. • Page views – How many page views per visit. Are users jumping off after spending time on one page or do they move around your site architecture. • Average pages per session – How many pages do readers view on average? • Average session duration – Lower times don’t necessarily mean poor performance. It can merely speak to your website’s efficient UX and UI. Moreover, long session durations don’t mean users are engaging with your content. They could just be getting a sandwich. You can also get plugins that measure scroll depth for long form content. • Bounce rate – High bounce rates can point to problems in your back end. Long page load times are a common reason for high bounce rate. Anything above the average of 50%, may be cause for concern.. • New vs returning – An increase in new traffic usually means your social or content campaigns are working. • Geo – Find out where in the world users access your website from.

Here's more for unpacking the Audience report.

Acquisition:

An overview of Aquisition report

It’s always important to know where your users are coming from. This can tell if your co-branding venture is paying off, whether the influencers or bloggers you’ve aligned with are linking back to you or whether your social campaigns are effective. The acquisition reports show whether users came to you through: • Direct Hits- They typed your URL into their search bar and came to you directly. This means they possibly saw it on a billboard or a business card or somewhere in shudder. Or they have bookmarked your page for future reference. Both are good signs. • Organic- They found you by clicking a link on a SERP related to keywords associated with your business. • Referral- A click from a link on a blog post or another website is a referral and usually means that your blogger outreach, influencer marketing or link building activities are working. • Social- Users came to your website by following a link on social media.

Here's more on the acquisition reports in case you want to dive deeper.

Behaviour Statistics:

An overview of Behaviour Statistics

Behaviour reports provide an insight into how users behave on your website. It’s a great way to determine what content is working and what isn’t. Here you can see your top performing pages, best performing landing pages and most common exit pages (where users jump off). Keep in mind that exit pages are completely unrelated to bounce rate. You can’t expect users to stay on your website forever but it’s important to ensure they’re jumping off where you want them to. By checking out the “user flow” report, you can gain insight into how users navigate through your website and this can inform changes you make to your UX strategy.

Behavior Flow The Behavior Flow report lets you see the path visitors commonly take on your website—from the first page they view to the last page they visit before leaving your site.

An overview of Behaviour Flow

All Pages: You can use the All Pages report to quickly see your top content along with the average amount of revenue each page generates. This report helps you determine what content performs best on your website.

The All Pages report displays the top pages on your website based on traffic, as well as each page’s pageviews, unique pageviews, average time on page, entrances, bounce rate, % exit and page value. Page value is the Transaction Revenue + Total Goal Value divided by Unique Pageviews for the page or set of pages.

Landing Pages: The Landing Pages report lets you see the top pages on your website where visitors enter.

An overview of Landing Pages

Exit Pages: The Exit Pages report shows the last pages people visit before exiting your website. These are the pages you want to look at to see what you can do to keep visitors on your website longer.

An overview of Exit Pages

Conclusion

While Google Analytics can be a little bewildering to beginners, it is an extremely comprehensive, flexible (and completely free) tool that affords you valuable insight into the performance of your website and its constituent pages.

Take the time to get to know it and you’ll always be in the driver’s seat!