Measuring How Users Interact with Your Website
So you have a beautiful, sparkly, expensive website. Is it effective?
In marketing, there are many ways to measure a website’s effectiveness. You can look into basic user traffic trends month over month or year over year, or even track conversion trends. But what if your 6-7 figure website isn’t performing how you want it to?
A website’s overall performance comes down to one thing: was it built with the end-user in mind?
If you don’t know the answer, it’s time to do some digging. Google Analytics has countless tools to show how users are using your website— tools that marketers should review and analyze frequently.
In this article, I will explore how marketers can use the basic set-up of Google Analytics to better understand their website’s users. Specifically, I want to highlight some of my favorite tools to use when extracting user behavior data.
Audience Overview Report
Path: Audience/ Overview
The audience overview is a great dashboard to unlock basic audience metrics. To use this report, set the timeframe you want to analyze, and Google Analytics will show you the following:
Sessions: a record of a single visitor browsing a website during a given time period. This can include multiple screen or pageviews, events, or ecommerce transactions. Sessions end at midnight on the day a session was initiated or after 30 minutes of inactivity.
Users: an individual visiting a website during a period of time.
Pageviews: Every instance that a particular page on a website has been loaded or reloaded.
Pages Per Session: The average number of pages that a user views in a session.
Average Session Duration: The average duration of sessions in a given time period.
Bounce Rate: The percentage of users who leave a website after only viewing one page.
% New Sessions: The percentage of sessions of users who have not previously visited a website.
In terms of how people interact with a website, focusing on Pages Per Session, Average Session Duration, Bounce Rate, and % New Visitors can shine a significant amount of the overall performance of your users’ retention.
Of course, the Audience Overview shows all website data. Depending on a brand, conversion goals, etc., it may be smart to go even deeper by analyzing the same metrics for individual webpages or by source acquisition.
Engagement Report
Path: Audience/ Behavior/ Engagement
This report is broken down into two parts: Session Duration Bucket and Page depths. Both sub-reports provide an overview on how a website’s users are engaging with the site.
Session Duration Bucket: Remember the Average Session Duration metric mentioned earlier? This report gives further insight on how that metric is calculated. With this report, you can view how many sessions lasted x amount of time.
The longer the session, the better. So, having a majority of sessions in the lower time buckets should be concerning to a marketer. With a well user-optimized site, users should want to engage with the site for a longer amount of time.
Page Depth: This report gives further insight into the Pages Per Session metric. Do you want users to only view one page and bounce? Probably not. So, if a large percentage of user sessions are reported in the lesser Page Depth buckets, a marketer should take that as a red flag and strategize how to encourage users to engage with a site further.
Acquisition Source/ Medium Report
Path: Acquisition/ All Traffic/ Source/ Medium
I’m going to be honest: This is my ALL-TIME favorite report. I look at this report religiously— probably more than I should. This report provides a deep insight of where your website users are coming from and how they are interacting with your website. This report is similar when compared to the Acquisition: Channel report. But, instead of seeing just “Social” channel reported, you can see specific social media platform traffic such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. The same goes for the other channels.
Behavior Flow Report
Path: Behavior/ Behavior Flow
This report can be a tad overwhelming at first glance. But it reports extremely valuable information and should not be ignored when analyzing user behavior and interaction. It shows the path of how users traveled while on your website. You can also see how users entered your site by using the drop-down menu at the top of the report. Lastly, you can view common exit points.
Conclusion: Understanding Your Brand’s User Interaction Metrics Is Vital for Success
A website is a brand’s main selling tool. If users aren’t engaging with a website well, perhaps it’s time to step back and ask “why?” I could go down a giant rabbit hole answering the “why” question, but there are many ways to optimize a website without changing it all together: revamping landing page copy, rearranging menu items, and adding engaging content to the site such as videos, blogs, visuals, etc.
Hello, content marketing.