There is a very important thing that can make or break the success of your website.  It is analytics.  Unfortunately, many business owners are underutilizing their analytics or not even looking at them.

In our previous post, What is Google Analytics and Why Do You Need It? we told you that Google Analytics is a great way to monitor how much traffic your site is getting and where it is coming from.

We gave you a step by step guide to setting up your account and installing Google Analytics in our post, How to Set Up Google Analytics on Your Website.

Now it is time to learn more about how to use analytics and the reports that are offered.

Five Report Suites

There are five report suites inside Google Analytics that will provide you with different types of information.

Some sites may not use all of these reports.  The five different report are:

• Real Time
• Audience
• Acquisition
• Behavior
• Conversions

Let’s examine each of these.

Real Time

What is happening with your site right now?  This report gives you the answers.  It provides live information about how much traffic you are getting and what people are viewing.

Audience

What questions do you have about your audience?  This report tells you how old your visitors are, what gender and what they are interested in.  It provides demographic information about where they are located, the type of device they are viewing your site with and which browser they are using.  It is amazing what all you can learn from this report about your audience.

Acquisition

Have you ever wondered how people found your site?  This report gives you those answers.   It provides the keywords they used in a search, the links they came from and more.  This information will help you know what keywords to focus on.

Behavior

This shows you which pages are most popular.  It also shows the path your viewers take on your site.  It provides information about page load times as well as how long people are staying on each page.

Conversions

This one is predominately used if you are selling something on your site and want to know if your copy is converting.   But it could also be used for email signups, etc.

Each of these reports can be used for different things, but all help you to increase your traffic.

In our next post, we will begin showing you how to use the basic reports.