Google Analytics (GA) is the most popular web analytics tool in the world and for good reason. It’s completely free and insanely powerful. However, it can be a little daunting to look at. There are hundreds of reports and a range of graphs within each of those reports.
The good news is, you don’t need to understand all of the reports in GA. Understanding the basics is an essential step toward making calculated adjustments to your website and ensuring that you are investing in the right areas.
To make it a little easier, we have put together our top 3 reports to start monitoring:
1. Audience Overview
Simple definition: A high-level view of the characteristics and behaviour of your visitors
Where to find this report in Google Analytics: Audience -> Overview
If you start actively monitoring only one report after reading this, make sure it is this one. It highlights some of the most individually important stats in your GA account in a very simple view.
Use this report to quickly monitor the overall performance and marry up highs and lows with changes you are making off and on your website.
It will look something like this:
2. Traffic Channels
Simple definition: How your website visitors are getting to your website
Where to find this report in Google Analytics: Acquisition -> All traffic -> Channels
The traffic channels report gives you a simple breakdown of where your traffic is coming from. Are you investing in paid and organic search? Are you ramping up social media activity? Use this report to compare how much traffic each of these channels is generating for your website.
It will look something like this:
Pro tip: Switch to the “Source” tab within the Traffic channels report to get a more detailed breakdown of your referral websites.
3. Landing Pages
Simple definition: What pages visitors are first landing on
Where to find this report in Google Analytics: Behaviour -> Site content -> Landing pages
Too often, somebody will only put effort into optimising their home page. It’s easy to forget that a number of visitors’ first view of our website will actually be one of the internal pages. This can be a property page, team member profile, etc. This report will show you where visitors are landing first on your website.
Pay particular attention to the “Bounce rate” column in this report. This will help you find pages that have a higher rate of users bouncing, so that you can focus on improving the experience on that particular page.
It will look something like this:
Summary
Google Analytics is an essential tool for any website owner/administrator, but understanding it can be difficult. Use these reports to start understanding where your visitors are coming from and how they are interacting with your website. This will drive a more calculated approach to the way you manage your website content and spend advertising money.
If you don’t have “GA” installed on your real estate website yet, make sure to get it done as soon as possible. There are thousands of tutorials on setting this up – here’s one to get you started.
If you need assistance with setting up Google Analytics and other must-have digital tools, make sure to check out our Digital Basics package.
