Exploring Google Analytics for Website Visitor Insights

But let us proceed to section eight, Google Analytics Reporting. This is really the crux of Google Analytics, right? We're tracking all this, all these events. You know, we are, but now we want to understand and gain insight into how our visitors are engaging on our website, where they are going, where they are coming from, what campaigns are driving them there, so many questions.

Who are they, their demographics, and we're going to look at that because the reports that cover all of these different sections. All right, so we'll go to the dashboard, of course, but just as a preview, the Google Analytics dashboard serves as a central hub to access key metrics, reports, and insights about website performance and its features. It includes a report snapshot and overview, real-time data, audience overview, acquisition overview, engagement overview, conversion overview, and search overview, even tracks search activity.

We'll look at that in a moment. Google Analytics provides a variety of reports that offer insights into website performance and the behavior of site visitors. Reports are categorized into sections focused on different aspects of site data, and we'll see how they divide it up.

Regularly analyzing reports provides insight to make informed decisions to optimize user experience and achieve marketing goals, right? You want to review these reports, discuss these reports, and see how you can impact behavior, what you can glean from this that's going to allow you to improve your campaigns, where are the problems, and what's working well.

So, what I want to do at this point is point everyone to the Google Demo Analytics account. If you Google Analytics Demo account, you'll come to this in your search results. GA4 actually says GA4 Demo account, so it's just the Google Analytics 4 version. Once you get to this, you will see you can click on Google Analytics Property, Google Merchandise Store. Now, what is this? This is real data you're seeing from the Google Analytics Store, what is happening in real time. And what we're talking about is this: shop.merch.Google will take you to the store.

So what do they have in the store? Various branded merchandise. You see everything from backpacks to Android plushies because Android is owned by Google pencils, duffel bags, and pens. You can see the various categories: apparel, hats, socks, drinkware, stationery, and collection. I had no idea that this amount of merchandise was being offered by Google. And what we're looking at now is actual engagement on the site as I speak. Right now, there are 14,000 active users. The first screen you see here is the snapshot I was just referring to, it's an overview of all the activity.

These are considered tiles; each of these different squares is considered a tile. You can customize this, add tiles, swap out tiles, but let's not focus on that just yet. Let's just understand what it is. Google will pick the information it feels is most relevant for your website, but generally, you're going to get a listing of tracked users and key events. Remember, we discussed key events. What it's saying is that in the last seven days, here's the time period, everything from yesterday up to the last 12 months, 14,000 people came on the website, and they clicked on 18,000 key events.

We can also look at other things: total event counts. That means there's a total of 293,000 events, but only 18,000 were designated as key events by Google. This is a real-time snapshot; it shows the active users in the last 30 minutes and shows you what country they come from.

Now, for any of these reports, you can click once again and get more detailed information on that section. Again, this is a snapshot; it's covering different areas of information. It's giving you engagement in terms of users and key events, but it will also tell us things such as sources.

So what are the sources? It's where the traffic is coming from. You can see here, let me click on this to get the full picture. These are the sources of Google traffic. It's looking at this from September 16th to October 13th, the last 28 days. Again, I can vary this simply by changing the dates. But what it's saying is direct. What is direct? Direct is you typing in the URL into your browser or bookmarking the site. That's considered direct. They're getting 37,000 sessions and visits to the website from direct. That's clearly the number one source of traffic: 40% of the traffic is coming from there.

Then it shows us that 35,000 is coming from Google people going onto a Google search browser and typing that in. Then they have an app that's apparently driving traffic, or whatever that URL is. Bing, another search engine. Some is coming from their newsletter. You're seeing the various sources of their traffic.

You can also see, in addition to sessions, engaged sessions. An engaged session is essentially a session where someone stayed on the website for at least nine seconds and/or did at least one action. That action could be clicking to another page, clicking a button, or any event. If they don't do any of that, that's considered a bounce. If they stay on for less than nine seconds and don't do any of that, that's a bounce.

If you want to know the bounce rate, an important metric to the effectiveness of your website, it's simply subtracting the engagement rate from 100. If 58% of your visitors were engaged, that means 42% bounced. That's a relatively high bounce rate, which makes sense because a number of this traffic could be from people doing the demo. I don't know if that's filtered out. So there could be reasons why they get more casual traffic. They have a fairly high bounce rate.

It also shows you, from each of these different traffic sources, the average online session engagement and how long they stayed online. People coming from direct were on for 1 minute 34 seconds, whereas those from Google were on for 1 minute 16 seconds. You would examine that and see if there's any rationale as to why that might be the case. Is that good or bad? That's where your understanding of your brand and the marketing process comes in. Usually, you expect more engagement from those doing organic search like Google because they came with intent, whereas other channels might have less intent.

I just wanted to point out that it says 11 of 20 of 97, so there are a lot more sources you can check out. You can keep going and going.

Okay, so all that was the traffic source. Now, we can also look at it on a different basis as well. This might sound a little confusing, but it's fairly straightforward. Again, we're looking at where the traffic is coming from, traffic acquisition, and there are different ways it's tracked.

The source is where it started from. It started from this particular website. The medium is how it got there. That's where terms like organic come in: it got there from organic search. It got there through CPC cost per click as a Google ad. It got there from a referral, meaning it came from another website such as a blog or a price comparison site. It came from an email campaign you ran. You can see the sources.

Why are some checked? The ones that are checked are the ones showing up in the graph at the top. You can see organic, CPC, referral, and email. Where it says none, it means that for one reason or another, it wasn't able to determine it. It's not a perfect system. Some data cannot be distinguished. Unfortunately, for the Google Merch store in this period, most of the traffic was not set similarly and was not identified. But usually, you would get some sense of where the traffic is coming from. So that's a session medium.