Understand Google Analytics Reports for Small BusinessesDec92024

For those who still don’t know, Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google that provides detailed insight into your site’s traffic and performance. At HostingCT we believe it is the single best analytics tool for any small business. Google Analytics consists of reports that show you,

• How many people have visited your site
• Who is visiting your site 
• Which devices do they use to access it
• How people are getting to your site
• What keywords do they use to discover you in Google search
• See what visitors are doing once they are on your site
• Which pages and content perform well and which don’t
• Track conversions 

Google Analytics is a potent tool that can help small businesses improve their marketing strategy and optimize their site to allow your business to grow and thrive online.

Why every small business needs Google Analytics

 

1. It’s free
   Although Google provides Analytics as a freemium tool, all the features that your small business needs are unlocked from the start. You don’t need to worry about paying for anything unless you’re a marketing company operating at an enterprise level.
   
   
2. You get easy-to-understand reports 
   Even if you’re not a marketing expert, you can understand the data. We at HostingCT are here to help you get from data to informed business decisions.
   
   
3. Know more about your visitors
   With Google Analytics, you get details about your visitors and potential customers, like who they are, where they come from, what they do on your site, the devices they’re using, their behavior, etc. The metrics to focus on will depend on your business needs. 
   
   
4. Measure the performance of your content 
   You can track and measure how engaging your content is. It is not just about seeing where users spend the most time but also understanding the why behind it so that you can replicate your success. 
   
   
5. Identify issues on your site 
   Find out which parts of your website are underperforming. Track cart abandonments, why your visitors are not going through until the end of the check-out process. 

 

However, the biggest benefit of Google Analytics doesn’t lie in the data itself, but in the insights you can gain from it. You should use Google Analytics to make data-driven decisions about your marketing campaigns and website. When you can understand your visitors, the content they like, and how they discover your website, you can tailor your digital marketing strategy to:

• Grow your traffic
• Keep visitors engaged on your site
• Grow your revenue and business!

Overview of Google Analytics standard reports

If you are new to Google Analytics, the array of available features can be overwhelming. You might not know where to get started. So let's start with some standard reports. Your standard reports are listed on the left-side menu of your dashboard, and divided into the following segments:

• Audience
• Acquisition
• Behavior

Let’s get into each one of these reports, and see kind of insights you can get from them.

1. Audience reports

Audience reports tell you more about your site visitors or in other words your audience. It is important to understand the type of people who come onto your website, their spending habits and the time they spend to better streamline your strategy. Let us take a look at some of the data you can gather in Audience reports. 

• Overview: The overview report gives you a compact perspective on your site’s visitors. You can see the number of users, unique users, sessions, page views, bounce rate, and more. Information about language, demographics, devices used and more are also available here.
• Active Users:  This report gives you stats about the number of unique users who have visited your site over various time periods – 1 day, 7 days, 14 days, and 28 days. It’s mostly used to understand the success of campaigns while they’re running.
• Audiences: You can define your own specific audience that you want to track, like “current shoppers”, “users that view page X”, “users that haven’t purchased in the last month”, etc. To do this, you need to Enable Demographics and Interest Reports and create an audience.
• Demographics: As the name implies, this report lets you know about the demographic information of your visitors. You can learn their age and gender to help you tailor content exactly to their needs and preferences. 
• Geography: With Geo reports you can learn more about the language and locations of your visitors. This is especially useful for international brands, but not so much for local businesses.
• Behavior: These behavior reports break down your audience by how many times they visit your site, how much time they spend on it, and whether or not they are new or returning visitors. This is especially important for content-heavy websites that want to see how engaging their content is, and if the users keep coming back for more.

2. Acquisition reports

If you want to drive more traffic to your site, then you need to understand how users have reached your website in the past. The process of getting users to your site is called acquisition, and the section of Google Analytics that shows your stats about this process is named appropriately – Acquisition reports.

• Overview: Here you can have a glimpse at ABC data (Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions) for the top traffic sources grouped into channels.
• All Traffic: These reports will tell you everything you need to know about what drove visitors to your website (All Traffic). You will see your traffic broken down by main categories (Channels) and specific sources (Source/Medium). Referrals are websites that contain links that lead to your site (backlinks). Finally, Treemaps are a visualization of how much each medium contributed to your traffic.
• Google Ads: If you’re using Google Ads, you can track their performance and learn what people do once they click on them to get to your site.
• Campaigns: In this report, you can have a look at ABC data about your organic and paid campaigns. You can also analyze the cost of each traffic source.

3. Behavior reports

Behavior reports help you measure the performance of your pages and your content.

Sub-categories included in this report are:

• Overview: Have a quick look at key metrics like page views and bounce rates for each of your pages.
• Behavior Flow: It visualizes the path users traveled from one page or Event to the next. This report can help you discover what content keeps users engaged and also help identify potential content issues.
• Site Content: If you want to know more about the engagement of your content, this is the right place. You can measure some key metrics such as page views, average time spent on the page, bounce rates, exit %, as well as page value (for e-commerce).
• Site Search – Site Search lets you understand how much visitors use your site’s search function, which search terms they enter, and how effectively the search results create deeper engagement with your site.

Analyzing your performance is a key part of your digital marketing strategy. You need to optimize and improve your strategy based on your past results. Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool, that can provide small businesses with detailed insights into how the website is performing. You can make data-driven decisions about what already works, what needs to be improved, and what hurts your small business.

Do you need to activate Google Analytics but don’t know where to start? Tried Google Analytics but cannot get enough insights. At HostingCT, we set up Google Analytics and all the necessary reporting dashboards and use that data to help businesses transform their marketing campaigns across channels to garner outstanding results.  Reach out to our Google analytics experts today. You can join Paula for Working on Wednesdays for assistance on how to best act on the data you are seeing in Google Analytics.

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