With its multitude of dashboards, dozens of reports and masses of data, getting the most out of Google Analytics isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. The sheer volume of options and abundance of figures can be off putting for those new to the tool.
If you’re just setting up Google Analytics for the first time, or committing to making more use of this treasure trove of marketing data, the number of options can be intimidating. Knowing which reports are most useful out of the sea of possibilities can significantly cut down on wasted time and frustration.
Here, we’ve taken a deep dive through Google Analytics and identified the three most useful reports to set up and use. These reports are the ones that will be most beneficial to your digital marketing services and help you make informed decisions every step of the way.
Audience > Mobile
With mobile browsing more prevalent than desktop internet usage, the mobile audience report is one to keep to hand. This will show you what portion of your audience accesses your site from a mobile device along with other useful insight such as which operating systems and devices your site performs best on. Keep this report close to hand when considering mobile optimisation as part of your digital marketing services investment.
Behaviour > New vs Returning
The New vs Returning audience report can be found under the behaviour tag in the audience category. This report will show you how much of your web traffic is from repeat visitors and how much of it is from users finding your site for the first time. This report is particularly useful if you invest in digital marketing services because it can be used to measure the impact of your marketing activity. Within this report you can perform several line-by-live comparisons for key metrics such as time spent on page and bounce rate. This will make it easier to quantify the quality of your web traffic.
Behaviour > Behaviour Flow
Knowing how your visitors move through your site is incredibly useful. It will aid you not only in user experience optimisation, but will show you where you’re leaking traffic, which pages aren’t performing as well as they should and where users back track. The Behaviour Flow report is more visual in nature than the other reports on this list which are all numbers-based, making it easier to interpret. This report is invaluable for content planning, conversion rate optimisation, site auditing and traffic acquisition efforts.
