At Digital Thing, part of our own website review we complete a monthly Google Analytics review to get an overview of our progress and look for opportunities to improve.
If you’re using Google Analytics for SEO, this guide will help you make the most of your analytics reporting.
Where is your traffic coming from
Get started with the overview dashboard, and change the date range to a minimum of 3-month range.
Compare those results to the same period last year to see if your progress has resulted in growth or decline.
With that in mind, pull up Acquisition > Channels to view where your traffic is coming from.
We get a lot of organic traffic, which is great, but we also want to look at other sources like direct, referral, social, and email. Next, click through organic traffic to see how your landing pages are performing. From here, you can view page impressions, unique views, and bounce rate, but you can also see how each of your conversion goals perform per landing page.
Finally, filter your landing page results to see which pages are converting at the highest rate.
Depending on the type of website you have, you may also want to compare mobile and tablet traffic against desktop traffic, which may let you know if you need to make your site more responsive. Pro Tip: Do this as a segment to really compare the deference between website engagement and also entrances.
Additionally, you can see how users are converting for mobile-specific goals on your landing pages.
What your users are doing on your website
Move over to Behaviours > All Pages and choose each individual page you’d like to view for more details. For us, we like to see how users are behaving on our home page.
You’ll be able to view the number of page views; ours is quite low since our blog performs higher, but usually you’ll see about 20% on most sites.
Look to see how long your users spend on your page with Average Time on Page. Entrances, which differ from sessions, will show how many users entered your website by using that webpage.
Review your bounce rate to make sure it’s not too high, otherwise you may need to make changes to your page.
Now that you know how users are acting on individual pages, review how they navigate through your entire website. Click on the Navigation Summary tab to see where users go from each page. For example, we found that users most often navigated from our home page to work page, digital services page, and contact page.
How you’re achieving your website goals
Finally, move over to Conversions > Overview to see the progress towards your preset goals; for example: ours is an email signup or contact form submission.
You can also view where those conversions are coming from e.g. direct, organic, search traffic etc. under Source.
Use Top Conversions Paths in order to see how many times a person will visit your website before they convert; this report is especially useful for e-commerce sites.
