I watched multiple episodes of the “Google Analytics for Beginners” online course. The episodes covered basic reports in Google Analytics.
Basic Reports
Google Analytics offers several overview reports for a variety of categories. I discuss overview reports in my post, Daily Learning: 1 May 2020. Today, I learned about three basic and important report categories: Audience, Acquisition, and Behavior. Each category has its own overview report and several sublevels.
Audience Reports
Audience reports contain information on a website’s users. There are many reports in the Audience category and a few of them include,
- The “Active Users” report shows the number of users with at least one session in several timeframes: 1 day, 7 days, 14 days, and 30 days.
- The “Demographics” report shows data like age and gender. Advanced configurations are required to allow Google Analytics to track this data. You may have to update the privacy policy on your website to permit tracking demographic data.
- The “Interests” report shows users’ preferences for different types of web content. Similar to the “Demographics” report, advanced configurations are required for Google Analytics to track user interests to populate this report.
- The “Locations” report displays a geographic heat map showing users’ location.
- The “New vs Returning” report shows the percentages of users who are returning users and who are new users.
Acquisition Reports
Acquisition reports provide data on how users arrive at a website. These are great if you’re contemplating channels to expand to and when you’re measuring the effectiveness of your recent efforts. Some reports in this category include,
- The “Source/Medium” report shows the acquisition, behavior, and conversion data for users from different sources and mediums.
- “Mediums” are categorical traffic sources like Organic, CPC, Referral, and Email.
- “Sources” provide further data into a Medium. For example, Organic [Search Engine] may be the Medium, but the Source may be Google or Bing or Yahoo.
- The “Referrals” report displays all the websites that have links referring to your site.
- The “Google Ads” and “Search Console” sections contain more reports. You can populate and view these if you link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads and Google Search Console accounts.
Behavior Reports
Once a user has been acquired, Behavior reports show how that user interacts with your website.
- The “All Pages” report overviews metrics like Pageviews and Bounce Rate for user behavior across all of your pages.
- The “Landing Pages” report shows acquisition, behavior, and conversion data for the first page that users see when they enter your website.
- The “Exit Pages” report shows the pageviews, number of exits, and percentage of exits for the last pages that users see when they are on your website.
- The “Speed Suggestions” report rates the page speed for each page of your website. It also makes suggestions to improve page speed.
There are many more reports in Google Analytics. The sheer volume available can be paralyzing when you’re beginning to navigate Google Analytics. I recommend you set a timer for 30 minutes and just hop in. Start exploring reports and getting a feel for what each report shows.
If you find yourself returning to a few reports more than others, consider making a dashboard to highlight those that you use the most. I talk about the basics of making dashboards in Google Analytics in my Daily Learning: 4 May 2020 post. I hope it helps.
The featured image is by Isaac Smith on Unsplash.
