The Behavior Reports section in Google Analytics helps you understand what exactly your users are doing in your website. All the data under this section allows you to gain answers to big questions like:
- What content pieces are my visitors most interested in?
- How much time are they spending on specific pages on the site?
- How are they moving through the website?
- What landing page/exit page are they entering and leaving the site?
Such questions need answers because they’re crucial in providing the best user experience possible for prospects. And obviously, the more your website is optimized to provide the smoothest UX possible – the more likely you’ll attract and convert more leads.
Thankfully, you no longer have to guess or ask your customers. Google Analytics Behavior Reports has all the answers you need to improve user experience. In this blog post we will be diving deep into some of the vital subsections that you can use to see exactly what your users are doing once they are on your site.
If you need to learn the basics of Google Analytics before we jump into this particular section, be sure to check out our post on Google Analtytics Basics.
Here are some of the best insights you can extract from your data – and where exactly you can find them.
1. The Report for Boosting Content and Engagement
If you want to 10x your content strategy, here’s the one simple thing you need to do:
Craft more relevant content for your prospects and existing customers. The type of content that informs and excites them. The type that’s in tune with their interests and values.
How do you do that?
It’s pretty simple. Just head over to your Google Analytics Dashboard and follow this path:
Behavior section< Site content< All Pages.
Once you get to the All Pages report, you’ll see a ranked list of the most visited pages in your site. You’ll also see the average session time and bounce rates for each page.
So… you’ve got all of this data now. But what about it?
There’s actually a few strategic things you can do to make the most out of your data…
For starters, use the ranked list of your pages to determine what your audience is interested in. The top 3 pages of your site is a good place to start to identify the topics and types of content your prospects love to engage with. You can then craft and tailor your content around your audience’s actual interest.
Extremely high bounce rates are also quite indicative that something is wrong with the page.This mostly means you need to optimize the page so you can reduce the number of people who ‘bounce’ in your page.
2. The Report for Tracking User Behavior
You’d also want to know what your users are doing on your website – what they click, what they watch, and what they buy.
If you set up custom events in Google analytics, you’ll be able to track every single move of every visitor coming in your site. Now what exactly is a custom event? It’s a specific action that your user needs to perform on your site.
For instance, you may want to track the number of newsletter sign-ups on your website. An ‘event’ therefore happens whenever a user clicks the sign-up button on your website.
You can also use ‘events’ to track things such as how frequent a user:
- Clicks on a product description page
- Adds a product on their cart
- Sign-up for a freebie
- Proceeds to check-out
Google Analytics Behavior Report Key Takeaways
Using this guide, you now have a clear idea how to better measure specific metrics like email sign-ups, sales, content consumption and among others.
Also, by knowing what pages your users are reading, you’ll have a great deal of information on what makes your audience tick. It’s now easier to craft content and offers that your prospects actually want and relate to.
There are a few more advanced sections under Behavior Reports that are not discussed in this blog post. However, these two vital sections are already more than enough to help you improve and optimize your marketing efforts.
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