Understanding User Behaviour with Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides a wealth of data to website owners. Utilising this information, you can not only recognise where your traffic is developing from, but you can also analyse how those users engage with your website and its contents.
Once you understand how visitors engage with your site and content, you can find the most trending pages, build more content that receives the most engagement, enhance important metrics, and even boost website conversions!
But how do you gather all this information?
The key is Google Analytics Behaviour Reports.
In short, the Google Analytics Behaviour reports let you assess the performance of your website’s content, and these reports also explain in detail how visitors engage with your site and the actions that they take while they move through your website.
The Google Analytics Behaviour reports can be a bit daunting and devastating, just like the other Google Analytics reports.
Here we are going to delve into the Google Analytics Behaviour data and reports. We will explain the best way to employ the Behaviour reports to improve your site performance and conversions.
Behaviour Overview
The Behaviour Overview report concentrates on particular pages of your site, as compared to the entire website. It delivers an overview of page views, unique page views, average time contributed on each page, bounce rate and exit rate. You can also assess how the content is performing by page URLs, captions, search words or events.
Behaviour Flow
The Behaviour Flow report helps you to visualise the path visitors navigate from one page to the next. This will help you notice which content is most engaging as it reveals how people enter the website (landing page) and where they move from there (interactions) as well as exit (drop-off) points. See that the Behaviour Flow report can also be handled to visualise pages and events.
Website Content
The Behaviour Analysis Website Content reports aim to analyse just that – your website content. They determine what content is more engaging and competent. Based on this data, you can figure out how well your content addresses your site's objectives:
- All Pages – This report reveals the efficiency of individual pages with a detailed list by pageviews (how many times that a page was loaded), unique pageviews (from new visitors), average time expended per page, number of entries per that page, the bounce rate and exit percentage (how regularly users exit the site from that page), as well as page value (transaction revenue + total target value) or unique page views.
- Content Drilldown – Content Drilldown report is almost identical to All Pages, but rather than giving a list of all pages on the whole website, it categorises them by parent sections. In other words, you can identify structurally which top sections of the site are more engaging (i.e., Services, Products, About Us) and then drill down to respective pages within these sections.
- Landing Pages – Landing Pages are the pages that visitors access initially when they enter your site. In addition to unveiling the same metrics as the other Website Content reports, this report points to the Acquisition-Behaviour-Conversion model and consists of conversion data that reveals the efficacy of these entry points concerning conversion.
- In many situations, your most diligent landing page is not your site homepage. Users generally get in your website through search engine results, and at times specific pages can top the homepage (for example, if you are using content marketing and have an impressive article or a trending promotion, visitors are likely to enter your website through those landing pages).
If your landing pages have a huge bounce rate, or users spend only a few moments on these pages, it’s probably a signal that these pages do not satisfy visitors’ expectations, or that they are not competent in engaging and maintaining your visitors' attention. - Exit Pages – Exit pages are the closing pages that users see when quitting your site. This report will inform you which pages are the preeminent drop-off points for your site. If they also arise to be your most decisive landing pages, perhaps they are incompetent in engaging visitors. On the other hand, if many users leave your site from pages that make transactions (like a "thank you" page following a shopping or an information request), that is a sign your site is performing as intended.
Site Speed
The website loading speed is an exceptionally crucial aspect — which not only affects your search engine ranking but also kicks conversion rates.
You can see a few essential metrics, like average page load time, average redirection time, etc. Also, the Site Speed Overview page explains to you how long each browser takes to load your site.
Other aspects in the Site Speed segment are:
- Page Timings — You can identify how long your most visited pages take to entirely load.
- Speed Suggestions — You can get comprehensive advice from Google on how to enhance the loading speed of your site.
- User Timings — Test how fast distinct elements on a web page load.
Site Search
If you wish to identify information on how users connect with your website’s search box, Site Search is the ideal option for it.
You can look at the overall metrics for users who work with the search box on your website. As well, by diving into its subsections, you can have even more compatible information, e.g: the probable impact of bounce rate and average time on web pages with or without a search box, the keywords employed in the search box, and the web pages from where the search is coming from.
You should have a comprehensive overview of each area of the Google Analytics Behaviour reports. Consider a few diverse ideas that you can apply to your business using this data to enhance traffic, engagement, and conversions on your website.
