Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides data about your website, and digital marketing efforts. It allows you to track all the traffic on the website, and what sources directed that traffic.

So, how does this help your business?

By utilizing the five Google Analytics reports listed below, you are able to track and analyze digital data, boost your ROI on digital channels, and gain a better understand of how your customers interact with you online.

1. Top Traffic Channels

Google Analytics provides you with 5 default channel groupings in your reporting. The channels are: Organic, Paid, Direct, Referral, and Social. When you identify the quality of traffic from these channels, you can effectively determine where your marketing efforts and budget should be placed.
If your paid search campaign has a high bounce rate, this is an indication that traffic coming from paid search is not being directed to pages that are relevant to their search query and/or the ad they clicked on. Similarly, if your social media traffic has a low bounce rate, users are viewing lots of pages on the site, and converting, this suggests that more effort should be put into growing your social presence and driving that traffic back to the website.

 

2. Popular Landing Pages

Google Analytics identifies what pages are the most popular on your website. More likely than not, your home page will be number one. However, your top ten pages with the most visits can give you insights into what products or services your customers are most interested in. With this information, you can begin to highlight these pages on the website, and make it easier for clients and potential clients to find what they are looking for.

 

3. Goals and Conversions

Goal tracking is one of the most important tools on Google Analytics. By setting up goal tracking on your shopping cart, contact form, or applications, you can track, not only how many people are completing your goals, but also what digital marketing channel led to the conversion.
Goal tracking is crucial for the evolution of your strategy. It is important to analyze, review and track every aspect of your digital marketing strategy in order to effectively determine where your marketing dollars and efforts should be placed.

 

4. Keyword Traffic

Google Analytics provides keyword traffic data for organic and paid search traffic. It is crucial to have Google Search Console (recently renamed from Google Webmaster Tools) installed on your website in order to get the full scope of keywords being used to find your website.

When you access your organic keyword traffic and search queries, you are able to determine two things:

1.. The top organic keywords that are driving traffic to your website
2. The top keywords that result in your website showing up on the search engine results page.

With this information, you can fine-tune your SEO strategy to target these keywords more aggressively, and drive more traffic back to your website.

 

5. Device Traffic

Another essential report on Google Analytics is the Device Traffic Overview report. This report details whether your customers are access your website through desktops, mobile phones, or tablets. In addition, you can gage the user engagement on each device by looking at the bounce rate, time on site, and pages/session.

By analyzing these factors, you can identify whether the experience from a desktop, mobile, or tablet device is positive or negative, and make updates accordingly. Likewise, looking at your goal completions and what devices produce the most conversions can help you determine which device provide the most seamless conversion process.