Google Analytics: How to analyze website traffic - Ep: 13

hi welcome to this week's episode of mindscape TV my name is Jeff Bell I'm director of digital marketing services here at mindscape what we're talking about today is just some traffic analysis in Google Analytics a lot of times we'll have clients or partners come to us and they'll ask you know how do I tell where people visit on my website is this page actually relevant do people even look at it how do they get there where do they go afterwards because a lot of times with the website you've got a navigation plat plan in mind for I want people to start here I want them to click on this and go here so how do you even really tell if that navigation plan is working or effective or people are finding other content on your website that is more interesting for them so one of the ways you can do that I'm just going to show you two quick ways in Google Analytics to do that the first way if you look at the screen here is we'll come right into Google Analytics and we'll come down into content and then we're just going to click on site content all pages now what we're looking at here and this is analytics will default us to a 30-day window so what we're looking at here are the top 10 pages within this time frame that people are looking at okay so you can see here homepage our web train page or seven steps to generate massive online buzz all of those pages those are kind of our top three pages so this is important for us to know so we can kind of get a handle on what content is generating traffic this is also a good way to analyze if you're sharing content on social media channels or creating content and you want to see if it's effective and generating more traffic this is another place to go to look to see if that are how effective that content strategy is so one of the things we can do here without getting too in-depth if we click on one of these pages like the web train Paige here what we can do once we drill in we can come up to the top here and click on navigation summary this will show us how people get to and get to the page and where they leave from so now we're looking at this individual page and we can actually change that page up on top but we can see most people top 49% of those people are actually coming from the homepage they then click on our web train page and then a good portion of them actually click back to end up back on the homepage but after that they actually move on to website design services so this is just a real quick way to get hyper focused on traffic into and out of a particular page so now we know what content is popular on your site and we can kind of see how people get to that content but if you want to know a larger picture of how certain types of traffic or how all traffic navigates your website one of the great visualizations that Google has added to analytics in the past I don't know 18 months or so maybe longer but if we come up under audience here and we click on visitors flow this is a great visualization that's been added to the platform by default it will segment us out to country or territory okay so we can see here how United States traffic flows through our website okay and we can kind of see the top pages in various steps so this is how the where the traffic from the United States landed on so you can see the big bulk of our traffic lands on our home page after that where does that go well it goes over to the contact page that's great that's that's how we want people to flow well on them to read about us and we want them to contact us how most web sites are set up if we want to dive into this a little bit deeper you can click on any one of these squares here and click highlight traffic through here this will do both the the upstream and downstream analysis for you so you can kind of see where all of this traffic that flows into the home page where it's coming from our countries go and then where it's going to you can see there's 140 visits there if we if you just roll over the little connectors you can kind of see how that breaks out so that's interesting we see from we see from home we go to contact which is great but then the next one with 57 visits for this particular time period is how we work so that's good to know our traffic kind of wants to know you know about our processes about our people so that's an interesting insight had to be gleaned from here and you can see here then is that web train page and so you can see that that flow from home into the web train page then we've got 81 more pages down here but when you're looking at this high level navigation path nearly always those 81 pages are completely irrelevant you really want to see you want to see trends and you want to see big groups of people traveling in those directions because that will actually help you better analyze your navigation paths then trying to get down to the minutiae of all these individual pages that are maybe one or two visits what we can do then is if you just click and drag you can scroll over to the right and you can kind of see you know how many different interactions so this is our landing page then their first click their second click the third click and you can kind of see how many people are falling off and exiting your site from those individual pages so that's really about the end of that story one of the other things I do want to show is we can actually change the segmentation level with so instead of country or territory perhaps we want to see how people from different social platforms are navigating our site we can change that here we can see how traffic sources this is a great way to see if traffic from organic or paid search is actually navigating your site differently if I choose medium here you can see it once it refreshes you can see how we can see how organic traffic has actually flowed through the site all right so here you can see how we're segmented now by medium and we can see how organic traffic has flowed to the site clicking on the connectors will help you visualize that a little bit better and then clicking actually on each individual page and going to highlight traffic through here will show you all the traffic into and out of that individual page so if we want to see how organic traffic flows through a site we can see they come in mostly through the home page the next largest page they go to is contact after that they go back to home so that's interesting and then if we keep scrolling over they they fragment out you know quite considerably after that so that's kind of how we can see how individual types of traffic here's referral traffic if we highlight this pipe we can kind of see how referral traffic flows through very similar again we've got contact maybe how we work and then web train again so we can kind of see how all of that traffic flows through one other thing that's important here is if we segment this again by country just as the default segmentation here what we can do is let's say we want to see maybe how mobile traffic flows through here well what you can do with this is you can actually select an individual at a segment it will load all your custom segments in here as well as all of the default segments from Google Analytics so you might want to see maybe maybe you've got a custom segment to see anyone who has during a visit visited a product detail page or maybe a segment about a particular product your most profitable or popular product you can set those segments up and then you can analyze how how visitors of your most to your most popular product page have navigated through your website that's really great insight right because now you can try to either capture them in multiple ways from different places that they might be navigating or make a clearer path of navigation to get them from where they started to where you want them to end up so if we take a look here at let's say I want to see how mobile traffic is navigating through my website what I can do is I can select my mobile traffic segments here that's obviously a built-in segment for analytics and we'll click in here now we can see this is just mobile traffic now segmented out first by country and then through our page and if we click on this from the US I can see now they go to our slash mobile which is our mobile home page and we can see them from there that's interesting so rather than going to contact they actually are looking at our web train environment and how we work contact is actually the third one on the list so mobile traffic does actually navigate our website differently from organic or web-based traffic it's important to note that you know the organic traffic that we were looking at before did include mobile traffic potentially if they searched and landed on our site from their mobile device so you can slice and dice this information any which way you want very valuable information for to help analyze traffic patterns and your website see where potentially people are leaking from your site through the exits here but mostly to figure out how people are navigating your site just in a very natural pattern if that is not the way you want them to navigate the site you can then put some calls to action and things like that in place to help them get from point A to point B in a clearer and more concise fashion so thanks for joining us this week and we'll see you next week we hope you found this episode valuable relevant and interesting that you'll like comment and share our videos and subscribe to our youtube channel at mindscape hm TV please join us on Facebook and Twitter and mindscape hm or read our blog posts and join us online at mindscape - HM com thanks again for tuning in we'll see you next week you

Channel: WeAreMINDSCAPE

Views: 42,704

Rating: 4.8814816 out of 5

Keywords: marketing, google, analytics, sep, reports, traffic, navigation, flow, sources, website, generating

Id: 9InoceJ2ckI

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Wed May 08 2013