Is your website working?

This is more than is it working from an operational standpoint. The question is: Does your website achieve the goals you're trying to accomplish?

Those goals could include:

• Are users finding the information they're looking for?
• Where do they click?
• What pages do they visit?
• Are they clicking on the calls to action?

There are ways to answer those questions and others pertaining to your website's functionality and its ease of use by the user.

To find those answers, make sure you have a Google Analytics account attached to your website. You can set that up here.

Once you have that set up, there is a world of knowledge for you that'll help you get answers to the aforementioned questions above.

In this tutorial, I'm going to focus on the Universal Analytics, or UA or GA-3, dashboard.

Understanding the Google Analytics dashboard

This is the "home page" for your Google Analytics. It's the hub to where you'll find your information. You can view various reports in the left-hand column (see image below).

• Realtime is just that. What is the user activity on your website at that particular moment, in real time.
• Audience is a breakdown of demographics and psychographics. Data available here includes interest, geography, technology used.
• Acquisition shows how did users get to your site, such as social media.
• Behavior shows the activity of a user on your site, such as what web pages did they go to.
• Conversions shows a breakdown of goals you can set to measure your key performance indicators, such as signing up for a newsletter. (More on this is a separate blog)

What is a Behavior Flow chart?

Just like the name says, it's a flow chart of user activity on a website. It looks at the pages visited through a website journey. There are several data points you can measure such as landing page, source/medium, campaign, social network and many more.

You can find the behavior flow chart under "Behavior" on the left-hand column of your dashboard as seen below.

Diving deeper in the analytics

Now you know where to find data. How do you use it? What data can help you evaluate your website?

If you're looking to understand your website data, ask yourself: What am I trying to find out? If it's how people are getting to your site, you'll want to focus on acquisition. If you want to know a user's journey on your site, you'll want to focus on behavior.

Let's take a look at how to learn more about a user's journey on your website.

Understanding site content data

Under site content data, you'll find the following options: all pages, content drilldown,

landing pages and exit pages.

All pages will give you a full list of all URLs on the site. You can toggle this to by page title for easier organization.

Content drilldown is similar, but it's big difference is you can set it to start with a directory or page.

Landing pages is just that, the landing page. Same thing for exit page.

What you'll notice amongst this data are statistics called bounce rate and exit rate.

The bounce rate is the rate of which users leave the site without navigating to any other page. The exit rate is the rate of which users leave a the site after navigating at least one other previous page. Here you'll learn what pages users start on your website and where you're losing them.

Something to keep in mind. If you're bounce rate is within 35-60%, that's OK. It's outside of those numbers that attention should be paid. Same goes with exit rate. These numbers only offer a scratch of the surface insight. A review of other goals, such as the call-to-action, could be necessary.

What is the Navigation summary?

The navigation summary report in Google Analytics shows not only how often users entered or left the site on a given page, but also what pages they came from and where they went next.

The navigation summary isn’t easily accessible from the main menu. See below.

Now once on Navigation summary, you can learn a lot more in depth about your website's navigation.

Under "current selection" that is where you can set any page on your site as the middle part of the chain. It starts with the home page or "/" by default.

For this example, the middle page will be set to a jobs/volunteer page. See below.

You'll notice that there were 40 or 62.5% of page views of the home page or "/" (the character after your URL), then those users go to the jobs/volunteer page. The next page those users went to are broken down in the right-hand column. So 9 users or 60% of them went back to the home page after viewing the jobs/volunteer page. You'll notice the page views don't add up to the previous page path. That's because the users not in that next page path left the website at that point.

Learn more

If you'd like to learn more about the information available, here is a link to a webinar I hosted in 2020: WEBINAR: Understanding Google Analytics, website design