Marketing Monday - The Crucial Google Analytics Tools

This is not going to be a comprehensive list of capabilities of Google Analytics - this is going to be the quick handful of tools you can use day one to see what's going on with your website.

These are the tools I used without any prior knowledge to see if users were staying on the website, which digital advertising was worth its cost, and to see where users were running into trouble.

#1 Non-Bounce Sessions

A Bounce occurs when a user comes to your site and either leaves quickly or does not interact with the page or any other page.

This means they didn't find what they wanted to find. So, either your page is coming up for a search term it shouldn't, you don't have the content you are supposed to have, or maybe your page is taking too long to load. Measuring to make sure you don't have any of these issues is very essential.

Audience -> Overview -> Add Segment -> Non-Bounce Sessions -> Apply

I have a pretty good non-bounce rate - but only because I'm the only one that visits

#2 Acquisition

Acquisition tells you where your people who are visiting your website are coming from. It will break down who comes to your website directly, who finds it through Google, and who comes from your social media. This is helpful when you're devoting time, energy, and money to several different kinds of campaigns and you want to see which are actually effective and which could be cut.

Acquisition -> Overview

It supposed to show a lot more sources - but I don't have any

#3 Behavior

Behavior tells you which of your pages is the most popular and then break down details about each of the pages.

This gives insights into which pages you think are important versus which pages visitors think are important.

Behavior -> Overview

Yes all of my pages are as popular as the rest

#4 Behavior Flow

This is where things get interesting.

Behavior flow tells you the path users take through your website. It tells you which pages lead to other pages, and from which pages people will exit your website. This means you can develop a strategy to duplicate elements from pages that are working and try to add them to pages that aren't working.

A relatively simple strategy is to add a link from pages where people usually exit to pages that are usually popular.

Behavior -> Behavior Flow

Clearly flowing from nowhere to nowhere

#5 Google Analytics Classes

There are several resources to learn about Google Analytics but the "Analytics Academy" I clicked is the introductory one I found helpful when working on greenparkrx.com

Discover -> Analytics Academy

These classes are very helpful and you can actually get certified - which looks great on a resume

If you need help setting up Google Analytics for your website you can start here.