How to Understand User Behavior With Google Analytics

If you want to understand user behavior with Google analytics for improving your business, look no further as you are in the right place. For the past 15 years, Google Analytics helps to track and report web traffic. Launched by Google in 2005, it is still the widely used web analytics service with an SDK to collect information from both Android and iOS apps. But it is also best for increasing conversions and ROIs of advertising campaigns by understanding the site user behavior.  

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Check out nine tips to use Google Analytics for understanding user behavior for transforming marketing efforts to business goals.

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Google Analytics is a powerful web tool that does not need additional configuration to uncover user behavior stats. It includes how the users viewed the site, the interesting content, and which page they exited from it. These valuable user insights will help you understand what motivated your users to buy the products or services. It is one of the significant needs for today's digital market success, and you can grow your business with it to new heights. Hence, find the following nine tips for using Google Analytics reports and a few custom configurations to increase conversions and ROI. 

Behavior Flow

The place to find: Behavior > Behavior Flow

The users' navigation through the site gets visualized in Behavior. It will help the users install SEO Pro Extension, journey to the home page and other pages after landing on the 'Thank You page. With such a flow, it is easy to get an idea of how to place the interlink pages and CTA. Furthermore, it will help the consecutive users to follow the same navigation route specifically created for them.

Additionally, it is easy to change the flow settings for traffic sources, landing pages, users, and events. Also, from the Behavior Flow report, it is easy to find a few that include

• Navigation of uses coming from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter & others
• Visitors' Behavior getting influenced by using the various operating systems
• To check if the user journey was as per expectation for a specific campaign

User Explorer

The place to find: Audience > User Explorer

The first tip of Behavior Flow will show the aggregate user journeys, but this user will also show the full story of every user's journey. Using no personal identification, the users get identified by a Client Id here. 

It is easy to check every user's number of sessions, and digging deep into these sessions will help to view the pages they visited, goals or events triggered, and the traffic sources. With eCommerce tracking, it is even possible to see the Customer Lifetime Value. The information in the report is so much that it is essential only to check for the need and not get overwhelmed with all of it.

Audiences

The place to find: Audience > Audiences to create Admin > Audience Definitions 

This Google Analytics report helps to better understand specific audiences of people who visited the site or left it after adding the product to the cart but without buying it. It is easy to use the audience in Google Ads also by connecting to Google Analytics. After populating the audience, it is easy to view detailed stats like the used devices, browser, traffic sources, and demographics.

Site Search

The place to find Behavior> Site Search

For eCommerce websites, Site Search analysis and strategies need to improve conversion rates. Site Search enables users to view what all the users search from the site to create the right content. But Site Search requires some configuration which will take less than a minute.

Traffic Sources

Place to find: Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels

Traffic Sources is a popular Google Analytics report, showing users sources to know where they come from to check organic traffic or traffic from social media or referrals. A pro tip is to confirm to set the right medium in campaigns tracked with UTM parameters to avoid attributing the traffic to others. 

Average session Duration, Pages/Session & Bounce Rate

The place to find: In metrics of specific reports like Traffic Sources, Landing Pages & others

Average session duration shows the time of the last access session, which is easy to calculate by dividing the total session duration in seconds by the number of sessions.

Pages/Session shows the number of pages visited by the user in a single session.

Bounce rate is fundamental when only one hit occurs for a session

All the above metrics are best when used only in the proper context. Since it is easy to manipulate these metrics, it is important to use them only as additional KPIs and not as significant ones. 

Landing & Exit Pages

The place to find: Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages/Exit Pages

These Google Analytics reports help analyze and understand if the user journeys were expected by knowing which page they landed and exited.

Uncover more insights with additional Google Analytical tools

The official In-Page Google Analytics add-on will help add more insights into user behavior by clicking tracking and heat maps.  

The additional tracking to configure in Google Analytics

Apart from the rich features of the default Google Analytics, many things help track and understand the audience better. 

Goals help measure when the users complete a specific action or reach a particular destination on the site. 

Events like the number of clicks, filling forms, scroll depth, and others turn into goals. 

Ecommerce tracking is vital for selling products on the sides for adding the transaction code to the Order Success page.

Conclusion:

The above nine tips of using Google Analytics reports out of the box will surely help you understand the user behavior and use those valuable insights for your marketing campaigns for maximizing the ROI and making it successful.