1. Real-time reporting.
As the name suggests, this feature provides reports on various activities as they happen. You can see:
• An overview showing the number of active users on the site right now.
• Location, i.e. where users are coming from.
• Traffic sources: keywords and URLs that led to visits to the site—excellent data for optimizing the segmentation of future strategies.
• Content: data that lets you check which landing pages on the site are being visited right now.
• Events: you can check which actions are being performed, such as ad clicks, file downloads, video playback, and all those other actions that involve direct user interaction.
• Conversions: direct actions involving a commercial transaction, data collection through a form, or any other selected action.
2. Audience.
This section shows all the data related to the audience, such as:
• Active users: shows the number of active users on the site over the last 7, 14, and 28 days.
• Demographics: mainly age and gender. For content marketing campaigns, it’s important to know the share of users of each gender so you can personalize the information.
• Affinity categories: you can find out what users are interested in—that is, the types of topics and commercial categories they’re most interested in—so you can segment campaigns and optimize their value.
• Geographic information: which countries are users from, and what language do they speak? In other words, knowing and using this data can lead to future conversions.
• Behavior: the number of new, returning, and frequent users visiting the site.
• Technology and mobile devices: this section provides data related to the type of device, operating system, and network used by the audience. Again, it’s worth using this information to improve your SEO positioning. For example, perhaps the site isn’t optimized for mobile devices. If Google Analytics shows that 70 % of the audience visits the site on a smartphone, you’ll have to get to work on the mobile version’s design right away.
• Overview: a summary of all the data described in detail in the previous points.
3. Acquisition.
This section provides a detailed analysis of everything related to the site’s web traffic. Among other things, you can find:
• Direct: the number of visits generated by Internet users who manually enter the address in their browser or visit from a bookmark.
• Organic: traffic generated naturally by search engines.
• Social networks: visits coming from links on popular social networks.
• Email: here you can see how effective your email marketing campaigns have been by analyzing the number of visits generated by this technique.
• AdWords traffic: to confirm how effective your paid advertising strategy is.
For each of these channels, you can find out the average session duration and bounce rate, which lets you analyze audience behavior and optimize your content marketing plan.
4. Behavior.
It’s very important to know how the audience responds to your content. You can find out by looking at the following:
• Behavior flow: simply put, analyze how a visitor moves from a page’s main category to a subcategory, then to another, and so on.
• Site content: shows which pages or landing pages are of greatest interest to the audience.
• Page load time: site speed is an important factor in providing the best user experience. So the data in this section should help you optimize this aspect.
5. Conversions.
This includes all the elements and metrics that measure commercial actions on the site:
• Goals and URLs: these are pages that let you measure a specific action, such as completing a purchase or confirming an online booking. You need to define them clearly to measure them correctly.
• E-commerce: in each section, you can see what’s happening with products and how the marketplace is performing.
• Multi-channel funnels: to find out how conversions are going based on the channel users chose, it’s worth taking a look at this section. Here you can determine where customers are coming from and which channel works best for the brand.
Google Analytics is a very useful tool for analyzing site data, which will lead to better SEO positioning and improve your business plan.
