Understanding your audience is a crucial part to having a successful online business. Especially since it is a online business and your audience for the most part is interacting with your business online, so you don’t get that face to face interactions that can help you get a better understanding of each potential customer. So you need to be able to understand your audience based on their actions on your website. By looking at and examining audience behavior reports on Google analytics you will be able to understand your audience more and morph your online business to fit your audience more. Below are just a few behavior reports that you can use in google analytics that can help you grow your business.
The Site Search report allows you to understand how users interact with your site search functions. With this information you are able to see what terms they searched up and how effective your results pages is. Site searches have different site search metrics that can give you a good analysis of how customers are interacting with your site search. For example, one metric that site search has is the percentage Search Exits. This allows you to see the percentage of users that left your your search site without clicking anything in the results page.
Event tracking reports allows you to track user interactions on content that can be independently tracked from a webpage. Examples of these are downloads, videos being played, gadgets, and etc. Event Tracking is split up into components. The components that make up event tracking are categories, actions, labels, and value. Category is a name that you create for a group of objects. Action is the actual clicking and interaction by the user on the object. Label is a more specific name that you would assign to maybe one or two objects. Value is when you assign a numerical number to an object. An example of how these events tracking components would look is; Category: “videos”, Action: “video playing”, Label: “How to set up event tracking?”, Value: “Play Time”. If you want to learn more about how to use event tracking to maximize success you can read this article on 10 Ways You Should Be Using Google Analytics Event Tracking by Matt W
Another behavior report that you can use is Content grouping report. Content grouping allows you to group your content in whatever group you want. It allows you to zoom into the individual page title or screen name. For example, if I had a clothing website for both men and women I would have men and women in two different groups. Then I would dive into either the men’s or women’s group and add thing like shirts, pant, and shoes. After i’ve chosen who to add the categories shirts pants and shoes too, I would then go into shirts, pants, and shoes and add items to those categories. So we see how content grouping allows you to group your content and be more organized so that when a user goes into your website he or she can click the men’s or women’s sections it’ll take them to clothes that are for men or women. This report is very useful because say you are a new online company and you set your website up and used content grouping to split up the men’s clothes and the women’s clothes. After a few sales you look at this report and see that most people are clicking on shoes and buying from there. Now you know that people like your shoes more than they may like your shirts or pants. Now you can adjust your business to make it better and more profitable.
Content Experiments allows you to create different versions of your landing page. By having the ability to do this you can change up your landing page constantly to try and make it best for your audience. When doing content experiments you should have goals set up in analytics so that you are able to test your experiment to see if it attracted the intended users. there are four tips that you can use to help make an effective content experiment. The 1st tip is to test only a few elements, you don’t want to change everything on your landing page because then it’ll be hard to tell what was the real reason that user engaged more on the landing page. The 2nd tip is to use high volume pages to get more people to see your page so you can get a lot of quick data. The 3rd tip is to make big changes to your site so users can realize that change. The 4th tip is to keep testing. When you put out your experiments after a few days see what people liked and disliked about that site, then use that to make more updated experiments to give you the most success.