6 Google Analytics Reports I love, and so should you

If you’re a new blogger (or a seasoned blogger even), and you don’t have Google Analytics implemented on your site, there’s a hella lot of data you’re missing out on! Insights that could really help you with the direction the blog should be heading, things you should be doing more/less of, and generally just knowing what’s going on with your blog and your readership. And so with that, here are 6 reports I absolutely love and use in Google Analytics, and so should you.

1. Audience Overview Report

The audience overview report, one of the most commonly used report, gives you a really great view of your visitors over time. This includes the total number of users over that time period, the percentage of users that are new versus returning visitors, number of sessions, bounce rates, page views and pages per session. All that good stuff. All in all, a great bird’s eye view of your site’s health.

2. User Location Report

The user location report lets you know which parts of the world your users are coming from. This then informs how you actually think about content and phrasing and other nuances in language to cater to your most ravenous readers. For example, American users constitute 64% of my overall readers, and that’s a big chunk of it! That might change over time, but I guess for now i’m gonna have to talk miles and Fahrenheit as opposed to kilometers and celcius! (I kid. I just can’t.)

3. Traffic Channels and Sources Report

A lot of blog owners would be super interested in the channels that are driving traffic, and how they stack up against each other. Traffic Channels report gives you a good insight into which channels are bringing in the traffic, and more importantly, quality traffic.

Within Social, you can also drill down further into exactly which social media platforms are bringing you traffic. As you can see from this, Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter are pretty close in terms of driving traffic, and it seems like Twitter traffic has more staying power, with the lowest bounce rates and highest pages per session of the three.

4. Search Console & Queries Report

If you haven’t set up Search Console in Google Analytics, I suggest doing that immediately. This report gives you access to users’ search queries on google, and how your blog and articles appear in the search results in relation to the queries, as well as any clicks from those search terms to your site.

This is an amazing insight into the keywords that are working in driving organic traffic to your site, and should be used regularly to research and work those keywords in your blog posts to show up higher in the search results page.

5. Behaviour: All Pages Report

Lastly, we breakdown the individual articles that are receiving traffic, and you can filter this report by bounce rate, pageviews or time on page. This report is extremely helpful in identifying the actual articles that are popular and helps you plan more of such articles in future.

6. Goals Report

Finally, we all should have conversion points, or goals, in Google Analytics. As my site is still new, looking at engagement and how interesting my articles are, would be a proxy to a conversion or a goal for me.

How do I quantify that? Well, I set one of my goals to simply be that if a user were to come to my site and read 3 or more pages, I would rate that a super successful visit, in that my content is useful enough that people would actually go a further 2 additional pages, excluding the one they landed on.

As I do work on some affiliate products, I’m also tracking outbound clicks to external sites. That goal, however, needs more work, and I will tweak it in future to know exactly which site they clicked off to. But it will work for now as a general proxy to my visitor behaviour.

What about you? I hope this was helpful, and what are some of your favourite Google Analytics Reports?