Real-Time reporting is a great tool for monitoring website traffic as it happens. This real-time report will show you who is on your site at that very moment, where they came from, their geographic location and what pages they’re browsing.
Real-time is particularly useful for gauging how a social media post, email or campaign is performing, tracking the immediate impact of traffic to your site.
To see Real-Time reporting, click on Real-Time and then Overview in the left hand navigation bar. Overview will give you most of the information on one dashboard but you can drill down a little deeper by selecting one of the other reports under Real-Time, including Locations, Traffic Sources, Content, Events, and Conversions.
WHY SHOULD YOU MONITOR GOOGLE ANALYTICS?
If you have a website, more than likely you’ve wondered where do my visitors come from? How do people know I exist? You might even want to know how many visits you get each day/ month. This is the type of information you can get for free from Google Analytics Reporting. You should be monitoring this information at least monthly to know how better to market your website.
WHAT ARE THE BASICS OF THE GOOGLE ANALYTICS DASHBOARD?
While you could watch hours of video tutorials and spend days trying to navigate through the Google Analytics Dashboard, there really are some simple areas that are key to monitoring. Google breaks down your analytics reporting to what they call the ABC’s of analytics.
- A – Acquisition This means – where did your visitors come from?
- B – Behavior This means – what did your visitors do when they were on your website?
- C – Conversion This means – did the visitor convert and reach a goal that you’ve create?
There’s also an area (Audience) that gives you the demographic of your visitors. This information is what companies base their entire marketing strategies on – and you’re missing this if you’re not monitoring your Google Analytics.
HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE REPORTS & INFORMATION
Learning where your traffic comes from can help you better understand where to spend your time. Knowing what pages they visited on your website can help you better understand what content they’re looking for and how to write new content. Monitoring if a goal was reached can help you see if your Call to Action is even working or if you’re missing opportunities. Watch the video above to learn more about this understanding.
HOW TO USE & APPLY THE INFORMATION
Now what do you do with all of the information that you’ve seen inside of the Google Analytics Dashboard?
It’s time to monitor and evaluate – change and monitor more. You should take every bit of information you can gather through Google Analytics and make changes to your marketing strategy. After a short while you should be able to see your bounce rate lower, your traffic increase and your goals getting reached consistently. This is the key to understanding Google Analytics – each statistic and number is a piece of the puzzle. Put these pieces together and out rank ANYONE in your industry!!