Google Analytics

Google Analytics is Google’s free web analytics package and has become the industry standard. It is hugely powerful, supplying website owners will a vast array of metrics about their website.

Google Analytics does not just collect data from your site. It generates reports to display that data intelligently. These reports are what you can use to gain critical insight into your site and the people who visit it. Google Analytics contains a wealth of built-in reports which you help you understand your website performance. You can also build your reports or segment built-in reports to drill down on performance.

Real-time Reports

Real-Time reports allow you to watch activity as it happens on your site. The reports are updated continuously, and each hit is recorded seconds after it occurs. For example, you can see how many people are on your site right now, which pages or events they are interacting with, and which goal conversions have occurred. Reports include:

  • Locations. The geographic location of your active users.
  • Traffic Sources. The sources that referred the users who are on your site right now.
  • Content. Pages/screens viewed during the past 30 minutes.
  • Conversions. Real-time goal completions.

Audience Reports

Audience reports give details about your visitors and their behaviour.

  • Demographics. Age and gender.
  • Interests. Shopaholics, foodies, fashionistas.
  • Location. Where visitors are located.
  • Language. Language spoken.
  • Behaviour. How often visitors come to your website.
  • Technology and Mobile. The technology used to view your website, e.g., browser type.

Acquisition Reports

These reports give information on the channels that drove traffic came visitor behaviour by channel.

  • Traffic sources. e.g., Paid Search, natural search, referral
  • Google Ads. Data from a connected Google Ads account
  • Search console. Data from a connected Google Search console related to your natural search performance.
  • Social. Traffic from social networks

For each channel, the merchants can drill down to see metrics such as bounce rate, pages per visit, revenue and conversions.

Behaviour Reports

Behaviour reports tell you about performance of content on your site.

  • Most popular pages on your site.
  • Landing pages. Most entry pages on your website
  • Exit pages. Most common points of exit
  • Site search terms. Top search terms from internal site search
  • Site speed. How fast your website loads

Conversions

These reports measure how well your site encourages users to meet predefined goals (or conversions). These can be events such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase.

Goals

The goals report summarises your goals, including the number of completions and the conversion rate for each. Goals are user-defined actions you want to track. You can set both micro and macro goals to understand what activities contribute to overall outcomes, for example, the various stages of the checkout process.

For your goals, you will be able to track the following metrics.

  • Goal Completions. The total number of conversions.
  • Goal Value. The monetary value of conversions
  • Goal Conversion Rate. The rate of conversions out of all sessions.
  • Abandonment Rate. The people who did not complete your step-by-step goal / # of people that started your goal.

Ecommerce

The Ecommerce reports enable you to drill down on your sales to understand which products and promotions drive performance.

  • Product Performance. Product level sales data
  • Sales Performance. Transaction level data
  • Marketing. Performance of promotions and coupons

You must add the eCommerce code to the pages of your site to access this data. This sends additional transaction-level data to Google Analytics.

Multi-Channel Funnels

The customer journey to your website may often be via an indirect route. They may interact with your business on various other sites before making a purchase. For example, they may click on a paid search advert and then go to a cashback site before buying.

The Multi-Channel Funnel report investigates how different channels feed into your funnel. This includes:

  • Assisted Conversions. Where a channel was on the conversion path but was not the last step
  • Top Conversion Paths. The top routes to conversion, e.g., Paid Search > Organic Search
  • Path Length. The number of interactions in a path.

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