Google Analytics is an essential tool for business owners to see detailed data about their website visitors – such as their age, location and how they came across the site. It’s a free tracking tool that can help you to grow traffic and boost revenue if used correctly.

The data is easy to interpret so you don’t have to be an analytics expert to understand what content your visitors are engaging with and how you can tailor your marketing strategy to grow your traffic.

When you base your website strategy on the insights you learn from Google Analytics, you can effectively improve traffic and conversions.

When you log into Google Analytics, you’ll find an overview of your statistics on the homepage. You can select a specific timeframe, such as a day, week, month or year, to drill down into the data during that period.

These are just a few of the reports accessible through Google Analytics either via the homepage or the drop-down menu on the left-hand side.

1. Real-time report

On the real-time report, you can monitor activity on your website as and when it happens. It updates continuously to show the number of people who are on your site right now, their location, which pages they’re viewing and the keywords or sites that led them to your website.

This information is useful for a number of reasons. For example, it allows you to see which content is popular at that exact moment so that you can optimise it across other channels. Or if you launch a new campaign or hold an event, you are able to see immediate results as to how the audience is interacting with your website during that time.

2. Audience overview

The audience overview allows you to see who visited your website during the selected date range. Some of the metrics available through this report include the following:

• Users – A user is counted as a visitor who arrived at your site during a selected date range.
• New users – This is the number of first-time users who visited the site during the selected date range.
• Sessions – A session is a group of interactions each visitor takes within a given time frame. For example, the pages browsed, purchases made and anything downloaded.
• Pageviews – This is the total number of pages viewed on the website.
• Bounce rate – The bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing a single page for less than 0 seconds.

The information found in this report is useful to understand whether you are attracting new or returning visitors and whether they are engaging with the content viewed.

3. Acquisition overview

The acquisition overview provides information on the channels used to drive traffic to your site. It can give useful insights as to whether you are gaining visitors through social media, a paid campaign or organically.

This report makes it easy to look at the top-level performance of all a website’s traffic sources so you can see whether your campaigns, SEO and social channels are bringing in the volume of traffic you’d expect them to.

4. Behaviour overview

And finally, the behaviour report reveals what your visitors do on your website – such as the pages they visit and any actions they take during that time. It lets you see which page they landed on when they entered your site and the path they took once there.

It also shows the last page people have viewed before leaving your website. This can be valuable to see if there is anything more you can do to keep visitors on your website longer, such as links to other pages or a call to action to follow your business on social media.

If you’ve not yet got Google Analytics set up on your WordPress site, you’re missing out on vital information to grow your traffic and boost revenue.

If you need a professional to install it for you and help fix any WordPress issues you are facing, get in touch with WP Tech Support. We provide a regular maintenance service to those who use WordPress for their business and want to maximise its performance.