Once you have your Google Analytics account set up you’ll see a handful of menu options on the left-hand side of the platform. While Google Analytics has tremendous capabilities in custom reports or “Customization,” they also offer 5 basic reports off the shelf. Within these 5 reports, there are also lots of subreports that allow you to dig deeper into your data. You can also change date ranges and segments within those reports to answer some important questions about your marketing and your site.
Realtime
The first report in Google Analytics is the Realtime report which gives you a live look into your site analytics at the given moment. This can be especially useful when you launch something new on your site or have a big campaign live to monitor users on the site. Within this report, you can look at the overview and see how many users are on the site and some additional info. Another important piece of this view is the “Top Active Pages” section where you can see which pages are currently being viewed. You can also click on the sub-reports there to see locations, traffic sources, and more.
Audience
The audience report gives you insight into the users on your site. The overview subreport lets you see how many users have visited your site over whatever timeframe you set as well as pageviews, sessions, and duration. The Active Users subreport shows you different breakdowns of active users over various time horizons. The User Explorer subreport contains more detailed information about your site visitors including demographics, interests, geography, device type, and more which can be especially useful to understand your customer segments.
Acquisition
The Acquisition report, a crucial report for any digital marketer, gives you insight into how you are driving traffic to your site from various digital channels. Within these reports, you can see users and behavior across different channel groupings like Email, Organic, Social, and more to see how users interact with your site based on where they came from. You can also link some of your digital tools like Google Ads and Search Console to give Google Analytics additional information and link it with your web analytics. Make sure to spend time in this powerhouse marketing report to get important insights to drive your marketing efforts forward.
Behavior
The behavior report gives you a deeper dive into the behavior of your users on the site. Once we have driven users to the site, we want to know what they are actually doing on our site. The behavior reports can tell us what our users are doing on the site and where there may be opportunities to improve the experience. We can see behavior flow through multiple pages, site speed reports, and more here.
Conversions
This is where the money is made. This report allows you to see how your site is fulfilling your target objectives. You can set up goals like a purchase, email signup, or some other action you’d like users to take. There is a report to see how your conversion funnel is working across multiple steps, eCommerce reporting, as well as multi-channel funnels for a version of multi-touch attribution.