How to use Google Analytics?

Do you get your monthly report from Google about your website and how it has performed over the last month? But have absolutely no idea what any of it actually means?

You can kind of gauge if it is bad or good / better or worse than last month - but that’s only because red = bad & green = good?

You’re not alone.

So let us put it simply for you:

Home View

Here you will see your overview of the activity on your website over the last month has been. You can change the time period you are looking at too, for example comparing the last 3, 6 or 12 months.

The basic stats and what they mean:

• Users = Total amount of individual user sessions to your site
• New Users = New users that haven't come to the site before
• Event Count = "Events" are actions taken by users on your site for instance clicking a button, scrolling, entering a form etc.
• Live traffic = How many users are on your site in the last 30 minutes.

This is valuable information as it will help you to understand how well your website is working for you.

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Detailed Reporting View

This view will give you a deeper understanding of how people are finding your website. Maybe you are active on social media and your main leads are coming through that, or your keywords are on point and your main source is people organically finding you. Yay!

• Where does your traffic come from?
• Direct; People clicking directly on a link that leads to your website.
• Organic Search; People coming from Google, Bing, Duckduck Go etc.
• Referral; is when someone is brought over from clicking a link on an external source like another website.
• Organic Social; the same as search but for people on social media clicking through to your website.
• Email; when someone clicks on a link inside your email that leads to your site, this would usually be in your email signature.
• Insights?
• Insights are Google AI-generated stats that might be interesting or helpful to guide you to help make better content and display it correctly for your audience.

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How you can use Google Analytics

It is all well and good now that you have all this information and data - but what are you supposed to actually do with it?

Well there are only 2 approaches; firstly - ignore it. If things look like they are tracking along well and smoothly, you’ve got a consistent flow of traffic, you have work coming in and you don’t feel the need to do anything with it. Yay that’s great!

Alternatively, maybe you don’t love the results, you can see there is a trending drop in website traffic overall and aren’t sure your website is doing its job for you. In that case, in order to break it down a wee bit further, consider these questions:

• What pages are getting the most hits?
• What keywords are people actually searching for?
• Is the area you’re putting more effort into paying off? E.g. posting lots on social media, sending a weekly email to your subscribers, networking etc.
• Is there a clear customer pathway on the page people land on the most?
• Are your Call To Actions clear?
• Have you updated your website recently? Added / adjusted any text or images?

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Working through those questions should give you a few ideas on how to boost your SEO. If not however, then book in a call today to have a conversation about how we can help, or simply download our DIY your SEO guide!

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Overall, interpreting your Google Analytics data can help you narrow down where you need to focus on for boosting your SEO. But at the end of the day, it is simply a set of data that you choose how much you use it (or don’t!)

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Jason’s (the tech-whizz!) main tip is to "Just explore all the menus and look-up what doesn't make sense to you! You will learn the ropes by playing around a bit more, finding what works for you and what needs improvement."