Powerful Google Analytics reports that are great for your website

We live in times of huge data and digitization. Every day, hundreds and thousands of terabytes of data generated and consumed by users across the globe. And to the right person, this data is immensely valuable. For a marketer, data on their customers and products is an asset. While for a designer, information on people’s responses to their designs is essential. On the other hand for a user, data on the best performing and popular websites is key. Numerous powerful reports on Google Analytics can help your harness this data, and apply analytics to enrich value from it.

Many users and marketers use Google Analytics just to monitor the traffic and find best-performing pages on their websites. But, this dominant digital analytics tool is capable of so much more. It offers a wide range of pre-configured and highly customizable widgets and reports to help you do more. Reports that enable you to extract every bit of data and translate it into various useful metrics.

Audience Reports

For a webmaster, the most important input to drive engagements is the audience. And, these connections can be effective and meaningful only when you understand the audience well. Audience reports are a group of several components, each exposing an impactful aspect of the audience. Analysis of these can help improve performance and boost conversion rates.

• • Interests Report – It’s good that you have some website visitors, but do you know what interests them? Interest reports can help you drill down and understand the interest areas of your viewers. The visitors are divided into various categories that relate to your business. And with these insights, you can develop targeted and personalized campaigns for them.
  • Behavior Reports – Nothing’s more important than a loyal audience. Understand the composition of your audience (new, returning, and frequent visitors). The report provides details on how frequently a visitor visits your site, there interactions, and activities. This behavioural understanding enables webmasters to draft strategies more effectively.
  • Users Flow – For many website managers, it can be a struggle to understand how users interact with their websites, and which components are driving them away. With Users Flow analysis, you get a multi-dimensional roadmap of how users navigate through the website. Furthermore, it also elaborates on the sections that get the most traffic, the path taken by users to reach other sections, and much more. And as a designer, you can restructure or enhance the user experience by acting on these inputs.

Apart from these, there are demographic reports, overviews, and technical reports which offer some basic details about the users. You can read about them at Google Analytics Academy

Site Speed

A website’s rendering speed and performance are key to user experience and SEO ranking. A website with broken links, poor structure, and bulky designs is most likely to use viewers. There are various elements to a website that affects the performance, like media, content, design, code management, plugin/add-ons, etc. With Site Speed reports, webmasters can dig deeper into technical aspects and identify the components with bad latency.

1. • Page Timing Report – This report gives performance details for each webpage on the website. It evaluates the pageviews, rending speeds, and bounce rate for a page. Additionally, the tracker also monitors how long it takes for a browser to parse the website DOM (for various different browsers).
   • Speed Suggestion Reports – This section of the report is an optimization advisor that suggests improvements based on the Site Speed metric. and also use the Pagespeed score as a measure for their website’s performance.
   • User Timing Reports – The User Timing Report, analysts can evaluate the impact of each component on the website for elements like images, tabs, buttons, grids, etc. and focus on fixing the pain areas

Multi-Channel Reports

There are many traffic monitoring tools out there to track and analyze the incoming traffic and sources. But, many of these have limits when a viewer takes multiple channels to interact with a website. For example, with Google Analytics Multi-Channel Reports, website managers can manage the site effectively.

Through a Venn diagram, you can find if a user visits the website from different channels, for instance Social Media platforms, direct visits using website URLs redirect from backlinks, etc.

These are further breakdown into

1. 1. Top conversion Path – Find the popular channels and route taken by viewers
   2. Time Lag – Identifies the timespan between the first visit and conversions
   3. Path Length – Group the routes taken for each conversion and visit

The Google Analytics platform has an exhaustive list of powerful and functional reports and tools. Hence, it can be customized to meet the specific needs of a webmaster. You can also design custom dashboards and views to keep track of the important areas. But, if you are just starting with your experience, you can check out these Google Analytics for beginners resources and get hands-on with these exciting features.