Audience reports overview

Audience reports are located under “Audience” in the left-hand navigation. These reports can help you better
understand the characteristics of your users. This can include what countries they’re in, what languages they
speak, and the technology they use to access your site. But it can also include data like age and gender, their
engagement and loyalty, and even some of their interests.

Active Users report

Let’s begin with the “Active Users” report. This can show you how many users had at least one session on
your site in the last day, seven days, 14 days, and 30 days. We call this “site reach” or “stickiness.” If your
marketing activities and site content encourage users to visit and return to your site, the active users in each
time frame should grow.

Demographics and Interests reports

Next, let’s look at the “Demographics” and “Interests” reports. The “Demographics” reports provide
information about the age and gender of your users. The “Interests” reports show your users’ preferences for
certain types of web content like technology, music, travel, or TV. This information is useful in two ways.
First, if you know your target audience, it can help verify that you’re reaching the right people. Second, it can
help guide decisions about your marketing and content strategy.

 Note that to see data in these reports, you must first enable advertising features in the “Demographics
and Interests” reports for each property. Go into the “Admin” tab under “Property“ and select
“Property Settings.” Under “Advertising Features,” set “Enable Demographics and Interest Reports”
to on.
Once activated, you will see data in your Demographics and Interests reports about the age, gender, and
interests of your users. Note that if you’ve just enabled this feature, it may take a day or two for data to appear
in these reports. Also, the Demographic reports may not contain any data if your site traffic is very low or your
segment is too small.

Geographic reports

The “Location” report under “Geo” is one of the most useful Audience reports. Google Analytics can
anonymously determine a user’s continent, sub-continent, country, and city through the IP address used by
their browser. Notice the geographic heat map at the top of the report, which you can adjust to display different
metrics. For example, switching the map to show “percent of New Visits” lets you identify potential new
markets based on new user traffic to your website. This can help you decide whether to build awareness or
invest in customer loyalty in particular locations.

You could also use the table below the visualization to identify areas that have a high number of conversions
(or transactions), but low traffic rates. That could indicate untapped markets to target with advertising.

Another analysis technique is to identify the regions where you already have a large audience, but lower than
average performance. For example, if certain regions have a higher than average bounce rate (or users that
leave after viewing a single page), you might need to optimize your advertising or website. Perhaps you need
to translate your ad or site into the local language or add geographically-specific content.

Behavior reports

Below “Geo,” are a set of behavior reports that help you understand how often users visited and returned to
your website. The “New vs Returning” report breaks out acquisition, behavior, and conversion goal metrics for
new and returning users. You can look at this comparison over time to see how audience loyalty may be
shifting. Consider your website objectives, as well as your marketing activities, when evaluating the mix of
new and returning users to your site.

Technology and Mobile reports

Underneath Behavior reports, the “Technology” and “Mobile” reports can help you understand what
technologies your audience uses to consume your site content. These reports can help you fine-tune your site to
make sure it’s fully functional on different devices and browsers.

For example, you can use the “Browser and Operating systems” report to quickly identify issues with certain
browsers on your site. If your site has a comparatively high bounce rate on a mobile browser, you may need to
create a mobile-optimized version of your website with streamlined content and simpler navigation.

It’s also a good idea to understand if users are migrating from desktop to mobile and plan your development
accordingly. You can use the “Overview” report under “Mobile” to see a breakdown of your traffic based on
smartphones, tablets, and desktop devices. Check this report to see how quickly mobile usage of your site has
grown over time.
The “Devices” report lets you see additional details about the devices used to browse your site. This includes
the mobile device name, brand, input selector, operating system, and other dimensions like screen resolution.
These reports can give your developers and designers direction on how to create a mobile-optimized
experience to best suit your users.

Acquisition reports overview

“Acquisition” reports are located under the “Acquisition” section in the left-hand navigation. You can use the
Acquisition reports to compare the performance of different marketing channels and discover which sources
send you the highest quality traffic and conversions. This can help you make better decisions about where to
focus your marketing efforts.

Before we discuss Acquisition reports, it can be helpful to know how Google Analytics identifies traffic
sources for your website. When a user lands on your site, the Google Analytics tracking code automatically
captures several attributes (or dimensions) about where the user came from. This includes the traffic medium,
source, and marketing campaign name.
You can think of the medium as the mechanism that delivered users to your site. Some common examples of
mediums are “organic,” “cpc,” “referral,” “email,” and “none.” Let’s look at these different types of mediums:

 “Organic” is used to identify traffic that arrived on your site through unpaid search like a non-paid
Google Search result.
 “CPC” indicates traffic that arrived through a paid search campaign like Google Ads text ads.
 “Referral” is used for traffic that arrived on your site after the user clicked on a website other than a
search engine.
 “Email” represents traffic that came from an email marketing campaign.
 “(none)” is applied for users that come directly to your site by typing your URL directly into a
browser. In your reports, you will see these users have a source of “direct” with a medium of “(none)”.

“Source” provides more information about the medium. For example, if the medium is “referral,” then the
source will be the URL of the website that referred the user to the site. If the medium is “organic,” then the
source will be the name of the search engine such as “google.”

Under “All Traffic” let’s look at the “Source/Medium” report in The Google Store Analytics account using the
dates August 1, 2015 through August 31, 2015. This shows the sources and their respective mediums sending
referrals, search engine traffic, and direct traffic to the site. Notice that the default sort is users.
To identify effective traffic sources, we can look at the source/medium combinations with the most users, but
that doesn’t necessarily mean this was the best traffic. Ideally, traffic should be “high quality,” meaning that
users who arrive from a source engage with the website or complete a conversion. A good indicator of traffic
quality can be bounce rate.

Our top traffic source is Google organic search, which has a relatively low bounce rate compared to other
sources. Our second most popular traffic source is direct traffic. YouTube referrals were the third highest
traffic source, but had one of the highest bounce rates. Let’s do a bit more analysis to understand if this is a
problem.

We can click into the comparison view and select the metric “bounce rate” to compare bounce rate for each
source/medium combination to the site average. Sure enough, we can see that our YouTube traffic is bouncing
at a much higher rate than the site average. The Google Store may want to investigate to make sure that
YouTube traffic is landing on a page that’s valuable to those users.
If we want to see only the “organic” sources sending traffic to the site, we could type “organic” into the filter.
You can see that Google referred more traffic than any other non-paid source and had a relatively low bounce
rate compared to other sources. This means that users arriving from Google Organic search are landing on
highly relevant pages.

Now let’s compare the performance for all of our various Google marketing activities that generated traffic by
changing the filter to “google.” We can now see that organic traffic was our biggest traffic source, followed by
google/cpc, which represents paid search traffic using Google Ads. This is a great way to add context to your
analysis and understand which marketing activities are generating success for your business.

Channels Report

There are other ways to view which traffic sources bring the most engaged users to the site. Using the
“Channels” report, we could view traffic by channel, which bundles the sources together under each medium.
Traffic sources are automatically grouped into basic categories (or channels) like Organic, Social, Direct,
Referral, Display, etc.

Clicking into each channel will break out the individual sources for that channel. If you want to group your
sources differently, you can create your own channel groupings in Google Analytics. We’ll cover this more in
an advanced course.

Referrals Report

If you want to view your traffic organized by which sites have linked to yours, you can look at the “Referrals”
report.

You can even click into individual referrals to see which specific web pages link back to your site. If you want
to understand which specific pages of your site are being linked to, you can add a secondary dimension of
“landing page” to the report. This will show you which external sites are sending traffic to each of your
specific pages, and potentially offer you a source of new advertising partnerships with those referring websites.
Behavior reports overview
You can find the “Behavior” reports under “Behavior” in the left-hand navigation. It’s important
to understand how Google Analytics calculates behavior data. If you recall, Analytics uses a
small piece of Javascript code on your website to collect data. Every time a user loads a page on
your website, this tracking code creates a “pageview” that is reported in Google Analytics.
Analytics uses this to calculate many of the metrics in the Behavior reports. For example, the
“Total Pageviews” metric is simply the sum of each time a user loaded a page on your website.

Let’s begin by looking at the “All Pages” report located under “Site Content” and scroll down to
the data table.

 The “Pageviews” metric shows how frequently each page on your site was viewed. By
default, this report will show data by the page URI. The URI is the part of the URL after
the domain name in the location bar of the browser. If you switch the primary dimension
of the report to “Page Title,” you can view this report by the title listed in the web page’s
HTML.
 Other metrics in the “All Pages” report like “Average Time on Page” and “Bounce Rate”
indicate how engaged users were on each page of your site. You can sort the report by
these metrics to quickly find low-performing pages that need improvement or high-
performing content to guide future content decisions.

The “Content Drilldown” report under “Site Content” groups pages according to your website’s
directory structure. You can click on a directory to see the pages of your site within that
directory. This is especially useful if you’re trying to understand the performance of content in a
particular section of your website. If you switch to the pie chart view, you can quickly see which
sections of your site are most popular with your users.
The “Landing Pages” report under “Site Content” lists the pages of your website where users
first arrived. These are the first pages viewed in a session. You can use this report to monitor the
number of bounces and the bounce rate for each landing page. A high bounce rate usually
indicates that the landing page content is not relevant or engaging for those users.

The “Exit Pages” report under “Site Content” shows the pages where users left your site.
Because you don’t want users exiting from important pages like a shopping cart checkout, it’s a
good idea to periodically review this report to minimize unwanted exits.

The “Events” report tracks how users interact with specific elements of your website. For
example, you can use this report to track when users click on a video player or a download link.
Event tracking requires additional implementation beyond the Analytics tracking code snippet,
which we’ll discuss in more detail in an advanced Google Analytics course.