How to Read Your Google Analytics Website Traffic Report

If you're like 99% of business owners out there, your Google Analytics traffic reports may be a little hard to understand. Fortunately, there's 4 simple questions you can use to begin understanding your Google Analytics website traffic reports and gathering insights from them.

Here are the questions to ask after you receive your traffic report:

1. How many visitors are coming to your website?

a. Do you have a problem attracting traffic to your website? (feel free to ask us for help!)

b. Also, look for long term trends (is traffic going up?) and seasonality (is there a time of year when traffic is highest? lowest? Why?)

2. Where are your visitors are coming from?

a. What referring websites are sending you traffic? (e.g., is all the time you're investing in Facebook paying off with traffic to your website?)

b. What keywords are (and are not) sending you traffic from search engines? (getting traffic to your website from industry-related keywords is ideal - not just your business name)

3. What do you want your visitors to do on your website?

a. What is the goal of your website? It's raison-de-existent. Do you want people to fill out your contact form, sign-up for your newsletter, make a purchase, etc? Deciding your website's goal is critical as you can't "improve" your website until you know what exactly it should be doing for you.

4. What are your visitors actually doing on your website?

a. Look at your top content and entry pages. If you want people to complete your contact form, are visitors even getting to your contact form page? If not, what can you do to change that? If they get to the contact form page, are they staying on the page or are they "bouncing"? Are they being encouraged enough to complete the contact form?

Have questions? Need some help looking at your analytics report or need more detailed information from your analytics report? Feel free to email me at cnorton@alcaris.com.