Google Analytics (GA) is a free tool that anyone can use to find out more about their website traffic statistics. You can use your existing Google account to sign up for it at https://analytics.google.com/.
Once you get it set up, this tool will track the number of visits to your web pages. It can tell you things like:
- How many people visited your web page in a certain time period
- How long they stayed on a page
- How many pages they visited per session
- Whether they’ve visited your site before or are new
- If they visited a previous website before yours and which one it was
- What country the visitor is located in
The tool cannot tell you the individual name, phone, email or any other private information about the person who visited your site. However, you can get aggregate data, such as gender and age if you have demographics turned on.
Here are a couple of very simple exercises in GA that you can do to learn more about your traffic.
What is your most visited page?
In Analytics, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Adjust the date range near the top right side of the screen to display whatever range of time you want to view. Scroll past the chart to the bottom of the page to see the list of pages.
Your home page will be represented as a forward slash (/). If it is listed first, it is your most popular page. If you are running ads or lead magnets, your landing pages may get the top traffic. Your “About Us” page will likely be right up there too.
The first column shows the pageviews – this is how many times your page was displayed. The third column, time on page, is interesting too.
Where is the traffic coming from?
Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. This tells you where the traffic is coming from.
- Organic search is where people click on your site from a search they did in Google.
- Direct is where they typed in your domain name because they knew it or clicked from a source that Google couldn’t determine (such as an email you sent out).
- Referral is where they clicked on a link to your site from another site, for example, a membership site or a directory listing.
- Social is when the traffic comes from social media.
- Paid Search is when traffic comes from you running Google Ads.
Clicking into any of these gives the relevant detail. Organic provides the search terms people used to find you, although most of these are missing. Direct provides the pages. Referral tells you what site they came from before landing on yours.
What percentage of people are visiting my site using mobile?
Go to Audience > Mobile > Overview. The report lists desktop, mobile, and tablet and gives a percentage of each.
You can also discover the average age and gender of your visitors by going to Audience > Demographics > Overview.
Take action on the information you learn by adjusting your content to the audience you want to reach, improving the pages you want to get more visitors to, and working with your webmaster on new ideas for your site.