Google Analytics can tell you almost anything about your site, user behaviors included. To make things simple, I want to explore the use of Google Analytics in examining user behaviour across three different, broad areas:
Before I dig any deeper, I want to clarify the intentions of this guide, some assumptions I’m making, and how to best use this guide for your own site or site search.
I’m assuming a few things about your brand, which should be true regardless of any online marketing strategies you currently use:
I’ll be referring to these three principles throughout the article, and will be exploring them solely in the context of user behaviour. Finding the right target audience, optimizing your traffic, maximizing your visitors, and selecting the right offers for users are all important topics for these principles, but they’ll be the subject of a future guide. For now, I’ll be focusing on the insights behavior can bring us.
Feel free to read straight through or skip to a section you want specific information about.
First, let’s take a look at how and why users are coming to your site.
The place we’re going to start is where we’ll spend most of our time for this article, so get comfy.
Head to “Behavior” in your dashboard and click on “Behavior Flow.” This should bring you to a massive, confusing looking chart that looks something like this:
It’s about to get a lot less confusing.
For now, we’re only examining how people are entering the site—we’ll get to the rest later—so take a look at the columns “landing pages” and “starting page” here. Those terms may sound synonymous, but there’s a critical semantic distinction here. A landing pages is the first URL a user clicks or enters, while a starting page is the first page a user arrives at. To illustrate the difference, consider a 301 redirect that takes a user from the URL they clicked on (a landing pages) to a final destination URL (a starting page). You may want to examine both to see how and why your users are being redirected, but remember, our focus is on behavior, so we want to ask ourselves two questions:
*these questions are phrased as singular, referring to only one page, but feel free to look at several of your top-entrance pages for more thorough results.
Let’s examine these individually.
For many of you, this will be a home page or a landing pages you’ve specifically created to accept new users. Either way, it’s the first page people are seeing, and this information should be enlightening to you.
This is the page where the majority of your users get their first impressions of your brand. In a moment, we’ll look at how those first impressions manifest into traceable user actions, but for now ask yourself the following questions:
This question is less relevant to the behavior of your users and more relevant to your acquisition of users; this page is popular because it’s a popular page link on social media, or on a referral source, or in Google site search results. This can tell you something about the intent of your users—especially if your most popular landing pages is a specific blog page—but it speaks more to your audience targeting methods and effectiveness at online marketing in general.
If you’re interested in gaining more insight into why and how your users are entering in these specific ways, consider adding a modifier to your behavior flow report chart. Click on the dropdown menu in the upper-left hand corner of the chart, and select a new variable to add to the left-hand side:
For illustrative purposes, select “Acquisition” and “Default Channel Grouping.” Here, you’ll see a breakdown of your major sources of traffic (Direct, Organic, Referral, and Social) and where those sources ultimately land on your site.
This may help you understand why certain entrance pages are more popular than others, but if you’re more interested in optimizing your initial audience, gaining more visitors, or otherwise modifying your incoming traffic, you’ll want to look at audience Acquisition rather than Behavior.
For now, you should have two potential action items:
Now, let’s move on to the guts of user behavior on your site.
This will be an easy transition since I already have you looking at the Behavior Flow chart in Analytics. Now, instead of looking exclusively at the entrance page, we’re going to be examining how and why your users engage with other parts of your site.
First, let’s break the chart down.
There are two things to look for here:
It’s also worth noting that you can modify or add different traffic segments to evaluate certain demographics with a closer inspection. To do this, click on “Choose segment from list” above your chart, and select from any one of the dozens of choices Google offers you.
For example, you could compare the behavior of “new users” against the behavior of “returning users” and gain key insights about the differences between those familiar with your brand and those new to it.
The Flow chart is handy and concise, but it isn’t the only place to find information about the behavior of your users. In fact, it pays to look elsewhere—check out the “Overview” section of the Behavior tab, and I’ll show you what I mean.
Here, you’ll find some key information about the general behavior on your site, including the average time a user spends on a page, the collective bounce rate of all your web pages, and the most popular pages of your site search overall. Click on “view full report” in the bottom right-hand corner of this chart, and you’ll be able to view metrics like these for each of your pages individually—for example, you’ll be able to calculate the average time a user spends reading a specific article on your blog or discover the bounce rate of your individual product pages.
As usual with Google Analytics, there are many ways to modify this information. For starters, you can use the audience segmentation trick mentioned in the preceding section to closely examine one portion of your overall audience.
This is the most important piece of this section of the guide. Now that you know how to read the chart and peripheral information, it’s time to draw the key revelations that will allow you to improve your site’s design, site content, and functions.
With the core user behavior out of the way, let’s take a look at one final element of user behavior.
Any engagement with your brand is valuable, with some types being more valuable than others depending on your brand and your core strategy. “Engagement” here can mean just about anything—a download, a form submission, a purchase—and there are ways to track any of these engagements meaningfully in Analytics.
To start, there are two ways to track and understand engagements: Events and Goals. Events are the most flexible creation, applicable for almost any user action on your site. Goals are better for tracing specific user paths, such as measuring visitors who most visited pages on a specific page and then convert a designated way.
To start tracking Events, you need to go through a short set-up process. To avoid detracting too far from my main points, I won’t detail these steps here; they do require a bit of technical expertise, but you can find more information straight from Google on the process here.
Once created, you can find reporting for all your Events under the Behavior tab in Analytics. Here, you’ll be able to filter by specific Events, groups of Events, or by different segments of your audience (detailed in my section on “Segmenting Your Traffic” above).
Goals are a bit easier to create if you’re unfamiliar with the technical side of things. First, head to the Admin section (found in the upper-right), and you’ll see three columns. Click on Goals on the furthest right-hand column.
Here, Google will walk you through one of several different pre-made templates for Goal completion. Once created, you’ll be able to measure and monitor your Goals in the same location.
There are tons of insights to gain from Goals and Events regarding your conversion optimization—but that’s a topic for an entirely separate post. Here, let’s examine some of the behavioral insights we can gain by looking at actions leading up to Events and Goals:
Your biggest insights here should be the motivating factors for conversion—where are users when they convert? What are they doing? What are they seeing? Where have they been? Replicate these conditions elsewhere on your site, and you’ll double your potential converting traffic. Similarly, you’ll know what to stay away from in conversion opportunities that are rarely taken by your audience.