Understanding Google Analytics Website Reports

By Gavin Kilgallon on Friday, 31 January 2025

Google Analytics (GA) is essential for all websites. It is a free, powerful tool that provides deep insights into your audience's behaviour, allowing you to see how many people visit your site, where they come from, what pages they view, how long they stay, and where they leave.

With this wealth of information, you can make informed decisions about website design improvements, content strategies, and marketing efforts. Google Analytics helps identify the most effective marketing campaigns, enabling you to allocate resources to high-performing channels. It also tracks user conversion rates, allowing you to optimise the user journey for better sales or engagement. Understanding Google Analytics is essential for enhancing the website's user experience and increasing conversion rates.

ID Studio integrates Google Analytics on all websites we design and build, ensuring our clients have this information from the moment their website goes live. If you need help, our web design agency can offer ongoing Google Analytics training and reporting as part of an ongoing website support and maintenance package.

In this article, we cover the fundamentals of this analytical tool and provide insights and tips on how to use it effectively.

Setting Up GA

You must sign up for an account to set up Google Analytics on your website. The process is simple:

Select the ‘Website’ for your property type.
Enter your website's name.
Enter the URL of your website.
Select your industry category and reporting time zone.
Click ‘Create’ to proceed.
Accept the terms and conditions.

Upon successful registration, you will be provided with a unique tracking code. This code needs to be added to your website's HTML. This should be inserted just before the closing </head> tag. Many content management systems like Umbraco, Kentico and WordPress have plugins to complete this task. ProcessWire, a CMS we sometimes use for marketing and showcase-type websites, has a dedicated section where this code can be copied and pasted.

Key Areas & Features

GA reports are divided into sections that can be clicked to view more in-depth information. A separate article will cover additional features like customisation, administration settings, and advanced features.

Real-Time Reports

Google Analytics offers a helpful feature known as real-time reports, which provides real-time insights into what's happening on your website at any given moment. This report allows website owners to monitor active user behaviour, including page views, traffic sources, and user locations as they occur. It's essential data for understanding the immediate impact of marketing campaigns, website updates, or even social media mentions. It enables you to make quick, data-driven decisions to enhance user engagement and optimise your site's performance. Whether tracking the effectiveness of a new blog post or checking the traffic from a recent email campaign, the real-time report gives you a dynamic view of your website's current activity. Within these reports, you can find information on the following:

Overview: The overview will report your website's recent activity. It shows real-time information, such as active visitors and basic user information.
Locations: Provides information on the location of your current website visitors.
Traffic sources allow website owners to understand where their visitors come from, which can help them determine whether specific marketing initiatives are working.
Content: This displays the pages currently being viewed. It can be helpful to see if content changes are working or if new pages are being viewed.
Events: The events reports display interactions visitors initiate, like playing a video.
Conversions: This area will provide information about the success rate of conversions, allowing for fine-tuning.

Audience

This segment of Google Analytics looks into demographics, interests, behaviours, and technology your site's visitors use. You'll discover the age ranges, gender, and language preferences of your audience, providing insights that will allow you to tailor content more effectively. Metrics like new vs. returning visitors, session duration, and pages per session provide insights into user engagement. You can also explore what devices and browsers your audience prefers, optimising your website for better performance across different platforms.

Demographics: This will provide information about your visitor's gender, age, location and language.
Interests: Google uses its vast data collection networks to ascertain user interests, such as fitness enthusiasts. It comes to this conclusion through numerous sources, such as search patterns, videos watched, ads clicked on, and websites visited.
Geography: This information will show the location of your website visitors. Google can show information such as country, region and town. Understanding this information can help create a more targeted and productive marketing campaign.
Behaviour: This will provide insights into how users interact with your website. Behavioural data includes page views, session times, bounce rate information, clicks, etc.
Technology: Provides information on the technical side of the visitor, including browser, hardware, device type, operating system and software technologies.
Mobile: The mobile section provides information about the mobile device used, such as its make, operating system, screen size, connection type, and browser.
User flow: This will show how site visitors navigate your website or app, the first page they enter the site on and the navigational path until they exit or complete a conversion. User flow can help find ‘friction’ points on the site.
Cohort analysis: Users are grouped based on their analytics, such as the first session on the site. It then looks at the analytics as a group, which can provide a better understanding.
Lifetime value (LVT): This is used to build long-term relationships and boost profitability. It generally shows the total expected revenue from a customer.

Acquisitions

The acquisition report section shows how visitors found your website. It details the channels through which they arrived: organic search, paid advertising, social media, direct visits, or referrals from other websites.

It shows the effectiveness of each traffic source, offering metrics like session duration, bounce rates, and conversion rates per channel. This report helps you pinpoint which marketing efforts are working, allowing you to allocate resources more effectively, optimise campaigns, and understand the ROI of your acquisition strategies.

All traffic: This area provides information on where your traffic has come from, such as direct URL input, google ads, search engines, social media, etc. It also provides session details.
Google ads: As the name suggests, it provides information relating to Google adverts being undertaken. It provides crucial information that helps marketing to understand the campaign's success, such as clicks, impressions, and bounce rate.
Search console: Integrating the GSC (Google Search Console) will provide additional data on searches, such as the terms used and top pages for results. Combined with analytics, this information can help improve SEO.
Social: This section provides information about how social media contributes to your website. It is a handy tool for understanding the effectiveness of social media initiatives. The information provided includes acquisitions, engagement, conversions, and referrals.
Campaigns: This feature allows you to understand and analyse various marketing campaigns. You can explore statistics such as traffic sources, dimensions, eCommerce tracking, and custom metrics.
Cost analysis: This tool is usually used when integrated with a third party, such as Google Ads. Helpful information includes CPA (cost per acquisition), returns, and click-through costs.
Multi-channel funnels: These funnels provide insights into more than one marketing channel, helping users understand how several marketing activities contribute to the website's success.
Attribution: Helps to provide a greater understanding of how marketing initiatives have performed in terms of conversions, sales, etc. It is a good idea to vary attributions to make educated comparisons.

Behaviour

The behaviour report section in Google Analytics shows how users interact with your website. These reports explore the pathways your visitors take, from the pages they land on to the content they engage with most. They provide insights into pageviews, average session duration, bounce rates, and exit pages. This is where you find out what site visitors do, enabling you to tweak both content and site structure for better performance.

Site content: Provides valuable information on pages (time spent, how they got there, where they left, most visited, etc.). Landing pages can also be included.
Site speed: Site loading speed is essential for good UX. The site speed section will provide an overview and information on loading time metrics. Some metrics included are load time, server speed, and downtime.
Events: This is another way to understand how site visitors have acted, such as page views, downloads, or watching a video. This is a great tool to help understand interactions.
In-page analytics: This part of GA will soon be removed. Its features are available in other sections that provide similar information.
Behaviour flows: The behaviour flow will show how visitors have navigated through your website, allowing you to visualise the journey.
User flows are similar to behaviour flows, but they look more deeply at the individual user session than general behaviour.
Site search: This will show you the terms visitors use whilst on your site. Understanding these terms can help you understand important content.
Experiments: This is an excellent feature for A/B testing, allowing website owners to test various versions of their site.

Conversions

The conversion report section is your hub for measuring how effectively your website turns visitors into customers or achieves other defined goals. This segment looks into the specifics of goal completions, including form submissions, purchases, video views, or any custom goal set within your analytics. It monitors conversion rates, the journey to conversion, and the worth of each conversion, providing insights into which channels, campaigns, or site interactions lead to successful outcomes.

Use this information to optimise your marketing strategies, refine the UX, and increase conversions by focusing on what best converts site visitors into customers.

Summary

Contact ID Studio anytime if you need help installing, using, or understanding Google Analytics. We are highly experienced in this area and have assisted many clients with their GA needs.