How to Use Google Analytics Behavior Reports to Optimize Your Content16 min read

Nothing can beat Google Analytics Behavior Reports when it comes to boosting the user experience of your website.

Various reports in Google Analytics will tell you how the visitors engage with your web content regularly.

It is one excellent platform that provides in-depth information about different user journeys, helping website owners to target potential leads.

The provided data will let you know what the users want from your site, so you can adapt to making better content marketing strategies.

According to BuiltWith, over 28 million sites are actively using this great tool, as per the current worldwide scenario.

Behavior report in Google Analytics plays a strong role in ensuring better website performance.

In this blog, we will discuss more in detail how Google Analytics behavior flow can help improve your website’s reach online.

Let’s begin by knowing some important terms related to Google Analytics Behavior Reports.

Acquisition Report In Google Analytics

The acquisition report lets you find out how people are discovering your website and where the most valuable traffic rates are coming from.

From the data, you can extract information on users who are returning and those who are most engaged in particular areas of your website.

Also, this makes you realize what type of marketing channels are providing the most profits to you.

The analysis of ‘Acquisition Behavior Conversion Google Analytics’ will also inform you of the total number of users converted to leads.

Audience Report In Google Analytics

The ‘Audience Overview’ report will provide a quick overview of the number of visitors actively engaging with your website.

Also, it allows you to find out where the most traffic is coming from.

Digital marketers use audience reports of Google Analytics to better understand their audience’s preferences.

This works tremendously well in guiding you to formulate better and more effective marketing plans to meet the popular demands of users.

The metrics in this report include:

• Sessions
• Users
• Pageviews
• Pages Per Session
• Average Session Duration
• Bounce Rates
• Percentage of New Sessions

Conversion Report in Google Analytics

This report shows an analysis of the number of conversions that have taken place and what areas of your website are performing well.

Identifying the most hyped content on your website will let you make similar and better content to attract more leads in the future.

Importantly, this report helps to optimize your website performance and boost conversion rates.

There are so many essential metrics you can find under Google Analytics that work exceptionally well in helping you make an overall improvement to your website.

Let’s get into the details on how you can use Google Analytics Behavior Reports to optimize the content on your website.

How to Use Google Analytics Behavior Reports to Optimize Your Content

The Behavior section in Google Analytics reveals how and with what purpose visitors usually visit your website.

Importantly, this report has got several informative metrics included to inform you of all the various routes most visitors take while visiting your web content.

Just click on the left sidebar menu of the Google Analytics dashboard to easily access Behavior reports.

There are eight different reporting features you can find under the Behavior report of your website’s Google Analytics.

Let’s dive into each one of them and learn about their functions.

1. Overview

The ‘Behavior’ section of Google Analytics has an ‘Overview’ sub-section which includes different metrics.

Each provides a specific technical solution to let you measure marketing progress online.

The analysis of these metrics will reveal how much traffic is coming for your site and from what sources.

The functions of different metrics on the ‘Overview’ page include —

• Pageviews —

Pageviews let you know the total number of visitors who viewed your web pages and the frequency of their visits within a specific time.

• Unique pageviews —

The unique pageviews metric will show measurements of how many users have visited a specific page of your website.

• Average time on page —

It is the average amount of time users took to view a particular page on your site.

• Bounce Rates —

This metric shows the percentage of visitors leaving your website soon after visiting it, without converting.

• Exit Percentage (% Exit) —

The exit percentage metric shows you results on how often users exit from a specific webpage after viewing it.

2. Behavior Flow Chart Google Analytics Report

The second part down the line of the Google Analytics category is the Behavior flow report.

This report will show you the history of users who visited your pages or events and their time of engagement.

You can also do an individual analysis through Google Analytics Behavior flow for specific page.

From this report, you can identify what types of content visitors mostly like to view and what keeps them engaged with your site.

Behavior flow chart Google analytics report will let you sort out what kind of content you need to improve and what types should be presented to your audiences.

You will find more clarity from this report about targeting your audiences better.

You can view how many visitors are staying on your website and how many have left soon.

This report gives you better insights into the interactions of your audiences with your website.

Later, you can use it to modify and customize your content according to your audience preferences.

3. Site Content

The ‘Site Content’ section is more useful mostly for bloggers, marketers, and business owners and it is categorized into four sub-sections —

• All Pages
• Content Drilldown
• Landing Pages
• Exit Pages

The sub-sections here will each show an analysis of how, why, and where the users are mostly interacting with your website.

Importantly, you can get better insights into your audiences’ interactions with specific pages of your website.

Each of these provides informative reporting about the performances of all your web pages.

The Site Content section contains the following reports which tell you how visitors get engaged with your website.

• All Pages

The ‘All Pages’ report will provide a quick overview of how well your website has been performing.

This shows which of your web pages are popular and which are rated as top content among users.

It is quite a useful report for informing you about your revenues generated and overall users engaging with your website.

You can easily keep track of your website visitors and how they interact via the following terms – traffic rates, page’s pageviews, unique pageviews, average time on page, conversion rate, bounce rate, % exit, page value, etc.

This report helps you to improve and optimize your website for a better user experience.

• Content Drilldown

The ‘Content Drilldown’ report looks quite similar to the ‘All Pages’ report, yet it has some differences.

This report lets you find the top content sections of your website.

When you want to know how each of your web pages is performing then the ‘Content Drilldown’ report guides you with the right analysis.

You can only find this section useful when you need to handle multiple directories of your website.

• Landing Pages

The ‘Landing Pages’ report of Google Analytics will show you the performances of your web pages through various metrics.

Metrics involved with your landing pages include – % new sessions, bounce rate, pages per session, average session duration, conversions, etc. many others.

This report informs you about the number of visitors who have converted and become your leads.

It is also one of the useful metrics that allow you to understand your audiences better.

• Exit Pages

The Exit Pages report shows the number of visitors who visited the last web pages from your website before leaving your site.

This report is an excellent way of letting you know what causes users to leave your website.

The data it provides will let you improve user experience and let you identify strategies for keeping your visitors engaged long enough.

Once you can reduce the exit rates you can then ask the visitors to convert.

4. Site Speed

Your website must have a fast loading speed as it significantly impacts the search engine ranking of your website.

This is vitally important as well for improving your conversion rates and expanding your reach online.

Improving your page load time has many other benefits and one of them is to increase your online visibility.

Check out the vital metrics under the ‘Site Speed’ segment:

1. Page Timings

This metric shows the total time each web page takes to load fully. It also involves server response time and other factors influencing your overall page speed.

2. Speed Suggestions

It is another effective metric that provides suggestions on better improving your website’s overall speed.

The suggestions may include things like image optimization or reducing server response time.

3. User Timings

This metric shows time measurements of overall users interacting with specific elements of your web pages.

It can be survey forms or CTA buttons or any other aspects of your website users are engaging for a specific amount of time.

Analyzing the user timings will allow site owners to identify which elements are affecting their site negatively.

This lets them fix the problems where it is necessary for improving their website’s reach.

4. Avg. Page Load Time –

This is the average amount of time (in seconds) web pages take to fully load after a visitor clicks on a specific page.

5. Avg. Redirection Time –

After clicking on a link, the server will redirect any user to another web page.

The average redirection time measures how long it takes for the user to reach another page after being redirected.

This measurement shows the average amount of time (in seconds) taken for a redirect to properly load.

The faster the redirection time means the better will be the user experience with your website.

6. Avg. Domain Lookup Time –

This shows the average time (in seconds) spent in DNS lookup for a particular web page.

It is the representation of the time a server IP takes for connecting with a user’s device address.

The optimal time should be up to 0.25 seconds.

A speedier domain lookup ensures that consumers are obtaining information faster and more effectively.

7. Avg. Server Connection Time —

This is the average amount of time (in seconds) taken for establishing a TCP connection for a specific page.

It represents the total time a server IP takes for connecting with a user’s device address.

8. Avg. Server Response Time—

This metric measures the total time taken by the server for responding to a specific browser’s request for web content.

The Avg. Server Response Time measures the total time spent by the server to respond to this request.

This also includes the networking time from that of the user’s location to your server.

The shorter the response time is taken, the faster users can access the content they are seeking for.

9. Avg. Page Download Time —

This metric measures the average time (in seconds) taken by any browser to download any specific web content.

If a page downloads faster then it significantly reduces the bounce rates. Quick loading time makes any website user-friendly.

5. Site Search

‘Site Search’ is a great segment in Google Analytics where you can find more details on the number of users interacting with your website.

Moreover, all its sub-sections are effective for extracting more valuable information about the users’ interactions.

You need to set up ‘Site Search’ metrics on your website to be able to use analysis reports.

Following are the reports you can use to find how your audiences are interacting with your website—

• Site Search Overview

This report shows an analysis of how well your visitors are engaging with your website.

You can find results on searched terms and other web pages visited by your users.

This metric shows an analysis of how well site visitors are engaging with your site.

It helps you realize what type of visitors are looking for specific content within your website.

• Usage

You can use this metric to find out which sections of your website need to be optimized and which need to be eliminated.

This analysis will tell you the number of times multiple visitors have interacted with your website.

• Search Terms Report

The Search Terms report shows the type of keywords searched by the users through your website’s search box.

You will find many other metrics related to visitors and various searched terms that will help you keep track of your audiences’ patterns.

The metrics in this report include—

• Total Unique Searches
• Results Pageviews/Search
• % Search Exits
• % Search Refinements
• Time After Search
• Avg. Page Depth

6. Events

The ‘Events’ section in Google Analytics is used to track only certain interactions within your website.

Some examples include – video play, a CTA button, downloading content, ads clicked, getting into backlinks, etc.

You need to install an event tracking code on your website to use this reporting feature and more advanced reports.

Following are the sub-sections included in the ‘Events’ section:

• Overview
• Top Events
• Pages
• Events Flow

• Overview

The ‘Events Overview’ metric of Google Analytics provides a quick overview of the overall visitors’ engagement with your website.

You can achieve this analysis by setting up an event tracking code on your website.

This metric provides news on overall revenues generated, user behavior analysis with your website, and many more functions.

Also, a certain number of events are measured by this feature.

• Top Events

The ‘Top Events’ reporting is also valuable for businesses with online portfolios, such as web designers or freelance writers.

Seeing what example links people click on most would show you the work your potential clients like best.

When you notice a particular portfolio item never gets clicked on, you’ll know to remove it from your site.

The ‘Top Events’ metric allows you to find the top-performing events on your website.

This data can be represented in many forms based on event categories and event labels.

Also, this report is an excellent way to track visitors entering specific links.

• Pages

This metric reports on the events of your website informing you about the most engaged parts of your website.

With this metric, you can easily identify which sections of your website need to be optimized.

• Events Flow

The ‘Event Flow’ metric is a great way to examine user behavior throughout the user journey, starting from the first page to the last one they visit.

You can simply identify how different users are interacting with your events and improve accordingly.

A successful user journey can be determined using this metric.

7. AdSense

Google AdSense is one popular advertising platform that lets marketers earn money by utilizing website ads.

Google shows results of how your AdSense ads are performing through certain metrics.

To analyze these metrics you first need to link the Google Analytics account to your Google AdSense account.

Here are the details about the AdSense metrics:

• AdSense Overview

The AdSense Overview report shows you the total revenues generated from Google Ads on your website along with other data.

Metrics like click-through rates, impressions, top-performing ads, estimated earnings, traffic sources, etc. also provide an overview of your overall ad performance.

• AdSense Pages

The ‘AdSense Pages’ report on the top-performing pages of your website which have been generating the most revenues for your business.

Publishers can utilize this report analysis and optimize their ads to improve their performance on websites.

• AdSense Referrers

The ‘AdSense Referrers’ report shows you the number of visitors who discovered your website via certain referring links.

This allows you to identify the traffic sources most visitors are coming from and start focusing on them to increase ROI.

It is an excellent thing to help you optimize your web content for better reach.

AdSense metrics like the ones mentioned and many more like them provide valuable insights about the performance of their ads.

By evaluating these metrics, publishers can maximize their earnings and adapt better with time.

Note: You must interlink both your Google AdSense and Google Analytics accounts for analyzing data reports.

8. Experiments

The ‘Experiments’ section in Google Analytics allows you to run A/B tests for identifying factors scaling up the conversion goals.

This analysis helps improve your landing page performance and boost conversion rates.

The ‘Experiments’ section lets you examine different variations of their website and help you identify which version brings the best results.

Using the data from this metric you can make significant improvements to your overall
website’s performance.

Wrapping Up- How to Use Google Analytics Behavior Reports to Optimize Your Content

The importance of Google Analytics in content marketing goes deeper than what we think it is.

So far, we have discussed how Google Analytics behavior reports include many versatile functions that can be used to improve website performance.

It significantly adds value to increase your site’s visibility online while boosting ROI for your business.

Each sub-section of Google Analytics provides different informative analyses to help you understand your audiences better and act accordingly.

Also, the Google Analytics User Behavior report is effective enough to let you thoroughly observe the overall user journeys’.

Indeed, it is a great platform for getting better insights into user behavior.

Using this great feature will help you better adapt to new trends and branding strategies, all for enhancing your website performance.

Every website owner must try Google Analytics as it can help them stay strong in the market competition.

FAQs –

1. What Is Behavioral Data?

Behavioral data provides information about visitors’ interactions with your website and the business as a whole.

It helps you understand your target audiences better.

2. What Is Behavioral Analytics?

Behavioral analytics is the process of monitoring and analyzing user behaviors interacting with your website or brand.
This guides you to improve your marketing strategies and user experience.

3. How To Read Behavior Flow In Google Analytics?

Select the “Behavior Flow” report from the “Behavior” section in the left-hand menu of Google Analytics.

This report will show the number of users who interacted with your website and tell you about the overall user journey each visitor took.

4. How To Understand Behavior Flow In Google Analytics?

Analyze each segment of Google Analytics to learn about user interactions and how they engage with your business.

Once you know their preferences you can then optimize your content accordingly.

5. What Is Behavior In Google Analytics?

The Behavior report is one dynamic feature found within the Google Analytics dashboard that also includes other vital metrics, all used for analyzing visitors’ interactions.

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