Google Analytics is the go-to for many SMBs website analytics. However, lots of small business owners don’t look at their Google Analytics. Google Analytics reports look complicated, especially after the new Google Analytics 4 that came out a few years ago. If you used the old reporting tools, you feel lost.
If your Google Analytics report is collecting dust, you are missing out real insights about the traffic on your website. The goal is not to turn you into a Google Analytics expert. The goal is for you to spend as little as thirty minutes every few weeks and pose little questions to yourself as you look over your reports.
Start by looking where your users came from. The Google Analytics 4 report that captures this is the traffic acquisition report. Traffic sources will typically be placed in categories such as, organic search, email, social, paid search, and referral. Here, the goal is to find where your traffic is coming from and if it is coming from one of the categories listed, where the majority of your traffic falls. If traffic is coming from a single source, your business is at a risk to a decline in traffic.
Next, we’ll take a look at the pages where users are actually landing. Many smaller businesses believe users are arriving at their homepage. However, data shows that users typically land on a page that has answered their question. Therefore, if a certain page or post is receiving traffic, that page should be prioritized and should serve as a model for additional content.
Next, see how long users are spending on a page. See what they are doing while spending time on the page. GA4 refers to this as engagement. Positive engagement means users are spending the desired time on a page. If high volumes of users are landing on a page, but the majority of those users are leaving within a few seconds, then that page is not offering what users are looking for. This indicates that there is a quick, simple solution worth fixing.
GA4 has also updated analytics surrounding privacy. Ad blockers, cookie tracking, and email tracking have lowered the accuracy of some numbers, though the trends remain. These numbers are not as important as they once were, so avoid assigning too much weight to them. Primarily, the two versions of Google Analytics are measuring things in slightly different ways, and the new GA4 will take some getting used to, especially while doing year-on-year reporting in comparison to Universal Analytics.
If all of this is overwhelming, custom reports let you select the data. For the majority of small companies, there are about three or four important metrics. You want the total number of website visitors, the traffic sources, the pages they visit, and the useful actions they take (e.g. completing the contact form or making a purchase). Once you set that up, checking the reports every two weeks is all you need, and…
