What basics should we be looking at in Google Analytics?
-
We have GA set up on our site for a while now. However, we do not look at the data.
We did today and it's quite overwhelming.
Is there anything in specific we should start with? A top 3 items we should start to monitor each week and try to improve?
Bonus Question: Is there a way to use analytics to find out who are competitors are?
-
Touching your bonus question:
GA will not tell you who your competitors are, however they did roll out a feature somewhat recently that allows you to see how you're doing in comparison to businesses in the same industry as you. You can find this:
Audience > Benchmarking > Channels
Select your industry vertical, region, and average number of daily sessions to find out how you stack up to what probably amounts to your competition.
Hope that's helpful!
-
You're right, GA data can be overwhelming if you've never looked at it before, Icarus. I almost always find the most useful place to start is the Channels report **Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. **It will show you your current traffic divided out by the primary sources, and will also show you the comparable bounce rate, time on page etc for each.
The other report that's pretty well always essential is the Content report Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages. This will show you which individual pages are getting the most visits on the site.
Use the date selector in the top right corner to review the last month's data, and then to compare it to the previous month, or the same period of the previous year. The latter is important for sites that have seasonally-variable traffic, as it might not be sensible to compare Christmas traffic to November, for example.
Beyond that, it's going to depend on why type of site (e-commerce, lead gen, publishing) and what elements of your site you're working on to improve, to determine what might be most useful to look at.
And for the bonus, no, nothing in Analytics will tell you about your competitors. GA is for showing you what's happening on your own site.
Hope that gets you started?
Paul
P.S. Once you get going with your data, you're going to want to set up some shortcuts (quick ways to navigate to reports that usually take a number of clicks,) and Dashboards (collections of information you've decided you want to check frequently in one place instead of having to navigate through the interface each time.)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is there any update on Google Search Results
I am following some keywords for my website on google. About a month, on the first page of these keywords, there are a lot of changes on ranking. 3-4 website has been falling to 2.3.page and new 3-4 website are shown on 1.page. But these new sites has 0 pagerank and there are no backlinks..These are new websites. What is the reason is there any update on Google search results ?
Competitive Research | | fikhir0 -
Google Keyword Tool Alternatives
Hey All, So ever since Google shut down the Keyword Tool we have used the keyword planner and a few other tools only to find they aren't quite the same, I was wondering what everyone is using now to get there keyword research and average traffic estimates ? We previous used keyword tool for phrase match and now not much offers phrase match or provides us with what seems as accurate results. We have tried Word Tracker after a numerous amount of research to find a alternative to the keyword tool, and found that the results are very different from the Google Keyword Planner, 1 noticeable result would be of "Web Design Melbourne", in Word Tracker it showed the average search of 9,900 (per month or year I'm not sure) and we compared that to the Google Keyword Planner and it showed 3,000. I have looked over a number of tools and found they weren't quite what we are looking for (Word Tracker, SEMRush, Google Keyword Planner) so I have turned to the MOZ Community. So my first question for everyone would be: A) what do you use for Keyword research and average search estimates now (any good tools with phrase match)? B) If you have used Word Tracker have you found accurate results in your keyword research? If you have found any tools that have proved beneficial and useful please let me know 🙂 (paid or free) Thank you
Competitive Research | | KBB_Digital
Jake Crone0 -
Which analytics tools do you use?
If you are interested in web analytics, could you tell me, which tools (software) do you use? No just Google Analytics, but also some other tools (e.x: for heatmaps, facebook, internal statistics, ... etc) I´m interested also in testing (A/B, ..) - so, also these tools you can mention thanks 🙂
Competitive Research | | mysho0 -
Tools to search google for sites?
Hi, I am sure I read it on here. But is there a link to a resource whereby I can search Google for sites that accept things like guest bloggers, offer do follow links, do not no follow comments etc... It used things like "search term" blogs, eg "guest bloggers" websute Anyone help me out? Cheers Will
Competitive Research | | YNWA0 -
Looking for a recommendation for a site ranking comparison tool.
Hi, It seems that SEOMOZ provides only link ranking comparison with competators. I'm not conviced that this is valuable for my purposes as the comeption often has few links tool, probably the nature of the business.. First, is it worth trying to compare keyword ranking with competators? I think it is, but I'm not that experienced with SEO, especially with Wordpress/Buddpress sites. Second, any recommenations for a tool that will make this easier? Larry
Competitive Research | | tishimself0 -
Tool to scan contents of a page and see it through Google's eyes?
Does anyone know of a tool that can be used to input a URL and have it spit out keywords of how Google could possible see what the contents of that page is about?
Competitive Research | | shawn810 -
How to Safely Scrape Google Results?
I've built a couple of small tools that I use personally, maybe 2 or 3 times per day. Both tools scrape the top 10 results from Google and provide more details about each domain (like the SEOMoz Keyword Difficulty Tool). Google seem to have banned my IP address for automated searches... can anyone tell me a safe way of scraping the google results? Is there a suitable API for this? How do SEO Moz do this on such a huge scale?
Competitive Research | | cmaddison0 -
Google Places - Top Listing & Strange Analytics
Hello, we have been working with this customer for a few years, doing their PPC, organic marketing, and we had established one google places listing for them as well. I guess the owner got sold on having someone else work with us to do google places for an additional office location they recently set up, and for whatever reason, they bypassed having us do it. This company never gained FTP access to the website. And despite heavy competition (apparantly), they have that new location listed in the #1 - A spot, without making any changes to the website. And, to top it off, when you review the Google places performance, there is a weird result I had never before seen labeled as "* loc:". You can see what I'm talking in both screen shots. Is there any guidance you can offer, first as to what that listing label means, and second, do you have any ideas how to 'reverse engineer' how they were able to get top listing so quickly for our customer like that? local_results.jpg local_analytics.jpg
Competitive Research | | JerDoggMckoy0