As a content creator, Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools you have access to. There’s wealth of information at your fingertips, and the best bit – it’s free. A basic Google Analytics account costs nothing to get started with. And once you are set up, you have access to lots of information about what people are doing on your site, who they are and where they come from. Here’s a summary of the top 5 reports you should be using in Google Analytics.
1. Audience Overview
The ‘audience overview’ is a great place to start. From here, you can set your date range (top right hand corner) and see all the key important metrics for your site. This will tell you how many people have been on your site, how long on average they stayed, how many pages they visited on each visit and also whether they were new to your website or have visited you before. These metrics can make for a great page in your media pack.
2. Demographics
Staying with the audience view. I would suggest the next place to visit would be the demographics area. This is broken down into ‘age’ and ‘gender’. Do you know the age of your visitors, do you know what gender engages with your content most regularly? If the answer is no, this is a great place to find out.
3. All Traffic
In the ‘all traffic’ report, you can easily see where your visitors are coming from. There’s a couple of useful reports in here. The channels report will group your visitors by an overarching type. For example visitors being referred via Facebook, Twitter and IG will be grouped under social media. If you click the blue text of the channel name, it will break this out for you.
4. All Pages
This is possibly one of the most important reports in Analytics. This will show you what your most popular article is on your site. Again, set the date range you are interested in and the report will show you what’s most read in that date range.
5. Landing Pages
If you want to narrow down your most popular content by the pages that your visitors are coming to first, you’ll need the ‘landing pages’ report. This shows you the page your reader first visited when they came to your blog. This is really useful when you want to know what posts are being clicked through to via social media or Google.
This is a brief overview of some of the key reports you should be looking at in your Google Analytics account. There’s no end to how you can look at your visitors and what they are doing on your blog. If you are yet to set up Google Analytics on your blog, I would urge you to do so. Most platforms make it really easy and there are lots of useful guides on how you can connect your blog to this powerful tool. Bloggers, if you’ve got a guide on how you connected your Google Analytics account, please feel free to add a link to the comments below.
