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Quick guide to using Google Analytics Statistics

Google Analytics is a fantastic little free tool that allows you to study how people find your website, what they do when they’re there and lots of other useful little stats that help you make your website more user-friendly and more searchable. The trick, however, is not spending hours pouring over statistics and getting caught in the minutiae. So here’s some tips.


One. The main stat to focus on is in your overview

If you only have five minutes a month, then look at your overall traffic once a month in Audience > Overview. You can nail down more detail in other stats, but essentially each month your traffic should be going up.

Got ten minutes? Then change the format so that you can see what days are most popular. This can give you ideas as to when to post your latest blog, when to be active on social media etc.

Two. Your most popular pages.

Confusingly, there are two ‘Behaviour’ links in Google (sort it out G!) You want the main one in orange, not the Audience > Behaviour link. This will tell you what your most popular pages are and give you some idea of how to capture more traffic. You may be surprised by what is your most popular page. Think about what marketing you’ve done that might have caused the clicks. If you can’t think of anything, find out what that page is being found for in searches.

Three. Find out where your traffic is coming from

In Acquisitions, you’ll find a tab called referrals. This tells you where people are clicking from in order to arrive at your website. You’ll find all sorts of useful quick info about which websites are driving traffic for you.

And that’s it. A really short way to get the best out of Google Analytics in the shortest possible time. Be careful – a little like social media, you can end up spending hours tracking every single click and every referral when the overview is the most important thing. Remember to take action on what you learn each month and give it a little time for results to improve.

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