The 3 best Google Analytics reports to analyse your website traffic: 1. Acquisition Overview
For many business owners, getting their website up and running is a key goal in marketing their business. But, while this is certainly important, in reality, it’s what you do from here and how you track it that’s going to push your digital marketing forward. The last thing you want to be left with is a website that doesn’t receive visits. If this is the case, the tricky question is why? And the answer is not always straight forward.
What a tool like Google Analytics can do is provide informative data about where your website is doing well and where it needs improvement. This allows you to focus your efforts in the right direction to improve your SEO. Here, we will look at the first of 3 great Google Analytics reports you can use to analyse your website’s search traffic.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free website tracking platform that collects data on how users interact with your website. Once its collected, Google Analytics sorts the data into easy-to-read interactive reports.
Acquisition Overview report
The Acquisition Overview report shows the route of traffic to a website over a defined time period. Google Analytics splits this traffic into categories:
- Organic Search – people who have found your site through searching an key phrase on a search engine and clicking through to your site
- Direct – both direct and ‘other’ are usually the same categorisation. That is, traffic results that Google Analytics is unsure about. It could be that either the user typed the URL directing into the browser, but it also covers traffic that couldn’t be categorised
- Referral – traffic from a link on another site
- Social – traffic from a social media platform
- Paid Search – traffic from digital advertising (Paid Per Click, Cost Per Click and paidsearch)
Here, we can see the traffic going to Company X’s website for February 2021 and February 2022. This comparative view is helpful in seeing how efforts in SEO have made improvements over time and where future resources need to go.
However, before analysing these results, it’s important to understand your buyer personas. For example, if your ideal client/customer likes to read a blog or listen to a podcast when interacting with your business, but doesn’t engage with social media, there would be little point in putting your efforts into social media content. You would be better to focus on creating a dedicated landing page for a campaign, or improving your website content in its style, quality and SEO, to drive organic searches and improved engagement. This, in turn, could be coupled with digital advertising to target this content towards your ideal client.
Company X have concentrated on improving their website content in the last year through creating interesting articles, engaging landing pages, both of which have been optimised for SEO. These efforts have increased the number of visits from organic searches as well as improving the time visitors spend on their site. However, their ideal client does use social media, in particular Instagram. Yet this avenue for engagement isn’t currently being harnessed. As company X’s products are very visual and most of their sales are through commissions, running an Instagram campaign to promote their products could prove an excellent way in which to drive customer engagement and more traffic to their site in the future.
This report shows a broad overview of a website’s traffic and engagement, and therefore cannot tell the whole story. Before embarking on any new digital marketing strategy, it is worth investing in more detail to really target where and how improvements can be made .
Check back in for our next blog which will look at further Google Analytics reports that get into the detail of these broad results and allow you to make compelling, data-driven decisions about your digital marketing.
