Lots of people want an easy way to use Google Analytics.
But how do you take your website to the next level with Google Analytics.
What follows, is your answer.
Pure gold.
Next time you’re looking at all the data in Google Analytics…
…instead of struggling through all the reports…
…simply ask a question.
Google has a great feature. Simply type a question into the top search box in your Google Analytics report, or just speak if you’re using the smartphone app.
Google will cleverly grab the relevant numbers and present them to you in a nice, friendly and easy-to-read format.
But what questions should you ask Google Analytics?
Here’s a list of Google Analytics question ideas from Google themselves:
Basic Performance
- How many users did I have last week?
Ask a follow-up question:- Compare Users this week vs last week
- Show me a breakdown of the top 10 Traffic Channels by Users
- What Traffic Channels had the most growth Users
- Over the last 6 months, on what week days did I have the most users?
Ask a follow-up question:- Percent of Users by Day of the Week
- Trends for Day of the Week
- Trend of Users over the last 28 days
- How many total new users did I have in the last 12 months?
Ask a follow-up question:- Show me a trend of New Users over the last 90 days
- What Countries had the most growth in New Users
- Show me a breakdown of the top 10 Countries by New Users
- Show me a breakdown of my users by device type
Ask a follow-up question:- Trends for Device Category
- Trend of Users over the last 28 days
- Percent of Users by Device Category
Where You Get Your Users From
- What are my top default channel groupings by user?
- What campaigns have the most sessions?
- What campaigns have the most revenue?
- Top campaigns by sessions excluding (not set) campaign over the last month
- Top campaigns by sessions excluding (not set) campaign over the last 30 days
- What percentage of my users came from organic search in the last 30 days?
- Compare users on medium of organic vs medium of referral in the last 30 days
Understanding Trends
- Show me a trend of my bounce rate over the last 3 months
- Trend of monthly users over the last six months
- Trend of weekly revenue over the last 12 weeks
- Trend of daily sessions over the last 30 days
- Trend of daily sessions over the last 30 days compared to last year
- What’s the month-over-month growth rate of my users?
- Show me a trend of my week-over-week growth rate of users for the last 10 weeks
- Why did my users change last week?
- Any anomalies in number of users last week?
Content Analysis
- What are my top pages in terms of pageviews?
- What are my top landing pages in terms of sessions?
- What pages do people spend the most time on?
- What are my top landing pages by revenue?
- What are my top landing pages by users?
- Entrances and Exits for my top pages
- Which landing pages with over 10 sessions have the worst bounce rates?
Understanding User Behavior
- How long do users spend on my site?
- Average session duration on mobile vs desktop
- New vs. Returning users last month
- Session duration for new vs. returning users last month
- Distribution of count of sessions
- What browsers do my users use the most? What browsers have the most revenue?
- What devices do my users use?
- Revenue by device
- What are my top event categories by user?
- What are my top event actions by user?
Geographic Analysis
- What countries do my users come from?
- What are my top countries by revenue? 25 What states in the United States have the most users?
- What pages do people from California go to the most?
- Breakdown of New vs Returning users from Europe
- Revenue from North America
- Users from South America
- What languages do people use in the United States?
- What are my top cities in the US in terms of users?
Analyse Product Performance
- What’s my total product revenue for the last 30 days?
- Show me a trend of product revenue over the last 3 months
- Year-over-year growth in average order value last month
- What are my top products in terms of revenue?
- What are my top products in terms of transactions?
- What default channel groupings have the most revenue?
- How many transactions used order coupon codes?
- Average quantity by product
- What products have more than 5 unique purchases last month?
Measure Your Goals
- What’s my goal conversion rate?
- Show me a trend of my goal completions over the last 3 months
- What was my Goal 1 conversion rate last week?
- How does goal 1 conversion rate break down for devices?
- How many goal 1 completions did I have in the United States last month?
Technical Performance
- What’s my average page load time?
- Show me a trend of my average page load time over the last 3 months
- Worst country by page load time for countries with at least 10 users last month
- Highest landing page average load times
Start with a few questions
There’s no need to ask all these questions.
But you’d be mad not to ask Google Analytics at least some of these questions today.
The questions above are a great starting point.
Google will also start to suggest questions to you, and even point you to the full report to give you a more thorough answer.
- Get started now.
- Click here to sign into your reports.
- Just copy a question from above and paste it into your Google Analytics search box.
- You’ll get great actionable insights which you can put into action today.
Good luck and happy asking!