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4 Google Analytics Reports Every Small Business Owner Needs to Know

For many business owners I speak to, their #1 challenge with Google Analytics (other than never logging in) is that they don’t know where to begin.

Below I’ve put together 4 of my favorite ‘reports’ in Google analytics that are not only pretty powerful – but only take a couple of clicks to get to!

Check ’em out below:

Report #1 – Source Medium

spurce medium

For my money, this report gives the best overall breakdown of website traffic & performance and is  great place to start a performance review.

By default, it shows us traffic from our top 10 sources AND mediums along with user engagement and conversion data.

In the example above, we can see that:

  • Google organic drives most of our traffic
  • Our paid traffic converts twice as high as organic
  • Bing organic converts 3x as high as Google organic

For a small business, this is a great report to get a handle on your marketing effectiveness, and a great starting point to drill deeper into how each channel plays a role in your growth.

How to find it:

From your left sidebar, hit Acquisition > All Traffic > Source Medium

find source medium

Report #2 – GEO

Depending on your business,  carving up your data by region can be an incredibly insightful way to better understand how your traffic performs.

In our example above, we saw that organic traffic drives nearly 3 times that of paid search, but converts half as well.

Or does it?

Let’s apply the geographical dimension of ‘region’ onto this report:


Whoa!

We can now see that for our Alberta based client, organic traffic from Alberta actually converts slightly better than our geo-targeted paid traffic, and it is traffic outside of our service area that is pulling conversion rates down.

How to find it:

Starting from your Acquisition > All Traffic > Source Medium report (as above), add a secondary dimension of region:

region secondary dimension

Report #3 – Landing page

All too often, business owners I speak to believe that the vast majority of prospects enter their website via the home page, then navigate to their desired product/service from there.

While this can often be the case, it’s critical to understand that your home page is just one of many pages through which your customers find you.

Similar to our GEO filtering, reviewing website performance based on where users enter can be another powerful way to understand your marketing.

top landing pages

In the image above, we can see that in the month of December Adster’s traffic arrived via very different types of pages:

  • Our Home page
  • A blog post about Google maps
  • Our marketing service page
  • Our SEO page
  • A job that we had posted

These entrance pages give us great insights into user intent!

How to find it:

From your left sidebar, hit Behaviour > Site Content > Landing pages

find landing pages

Report #4 – Device

A while back, I wrote a blog about part of our struggles as an agency working on desktop computers while the rest of the internet consumes content on mobile.

As a business owner, you too likely spend your day working on a desktop or laptop computer, rarely using your phone to view your own website.

device landing pages

In the image above, we can see that approx 65% of our website traffic is mobile, and perhaps more significantly – this mobile traffic converts at less than half the rate of desktop traffic – ouch!

But let’s dig a little deeper.

In the above, we have added our ‘GEO’ as secondary dimension (region)  onto our device report, and filtered this to only show traffic from Alberta (crazy, right?)

Now, we see conversion rates much closer between the 3 devices (though desktop is still king!)

This report could be a great way to dive deeper into our mobile traffic to understand why it does not convert as well as desktop.

How to find it:

From your left sidebar, hit Audience > Mobile > Overview

mobile overview

Wrap up!

As you can see, these basic ways to slice data can be an easy AND impactful way to understand your website performance leading to measurable optimization opportunities!

What are your favorite ways to carve up data?

Share in the comments!