The beauty of Google Analytics (GA) for a business in any industry is the ability to learn about your users (aka your customers and prospective customers). Data and metrics within GA provide insight into how people discover your website, what they look at and for how long, and you can track conversions. Depending on the purpose of your business you may just be interested in building an audience (like I am with this blog) or you may have an e-commerce site to sell your product(s). Depending on the purpose of your site, you will weigh the importance of various GA reports like Real Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions differently.
The Google Demo account also can get value out of exploring its Behavior report. In the snapshot below we see that for the same time frame they had 141,373 Page Views. But, because they are an e-commerce store, the pages where people are spending the most time can be particularly important for understanding where customers are exploring. We see from the chart below the second most popular page is the store, but ultimately for e-commerce, the main concern will be the basket and how many people check out.
Here is a look at how my blog data and reports of interest compare to Google Demo e-commerce account:
Behavior Report
The Behavior Report is helpful for deducing your most to least frequented pages. The Page Views metric in particular “can give an indication of how popular a post or page is” but it is best to compare it with another metric as repeated views of the same page are counted. For my blog, between the dates of October 25 - November 7, 2019, I had 108 Page Views, which isn’t too shabby for a brand new blog. What this tells me though is that there is room for improvement in terms of increasing traffic through user experience design and blog promotion. The next report, Acquisition, will help me decide where I promote my blog to achieve the goal of increased page views.
Source: Bridget Kunz Creative Blog in Google Analytics, 2019
The Google Demo account also can get value out of exploring its Behavior report. In the snapshot below we see that for the same time frame they had 141,373 Page Views. But, because they are an e-commerce store, the pages where people are spending the most time can be particularly important for understanding where customers are exploring. We see from the chart below the second most popular page is the store, but ultimately for e-commerce, the main concern will be the basket and how many people check out.
Source: Google Merchandise Store Demo Account, 2019
Conversions Report
An interesting report that I have not explored for my own blog is Conversions. Since I have not established any Goals within my GA account, this report doesn’t hold much value for me at the moment. However, conversions are helpful for an e-commerce store like Google’s Merchandise store because specific goal completions can be tracked. A tool called the Reverse Goal Path can show the last three pages a user took as a path to reach a completed goal. If there are three pages that seem to be the most popular path to get people to check out, the store would then want to make sure to promote them further, potentially through a paid ad. Since I don’t have a store for my blog, I might want to consider setting up a Contact page and having a form fill be a Goal within my GA account.
Source: Google Merchandise Store Demo Account, 2019
I agree there is a big difference between a content site and an e-commerce site, but ideally they both want conversions...nor matter how they define that concept.
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