How do you make decisions that will affect your website? Do you base them on a hunch or on conversations with your customers?

If you’re not analyzing your website’s statistics, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities to grow your business.

Are you using Google Analytics?

We’re going to go over the basics and some specific tools, but before we get there, here’s a quick summary:

Google Analytics is a freemium (free and premium) website analytics tool that tells you how well your website is performing. With Google Analytics, you can track:

  • The number of users visiting your website.
  • How they find you.
  • What device they’re using.
  • Where visitors drop off as they browse your site.

In short, Google Analytics provides incredibly valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t when it comes to your website. When you recognize your strengths and weaknesses, you can optimize your site to convert users more effectively—that is, get more customers to buy your products.

Getting Started with Google Analytics

Before diving into some of the reports provided by Google Analytics, first answer this critical question: Do you have a Google Analytics account?

If the answer is no, then the first step is to set up an account and install your unique tracking code on your website and in your TuriTop dashboard.

The process for adding the tracking code to your site varies depending on the type of content management system (CMS) you’re using. The following list includes the most common CMS platforms and a link to instructions on how to add the Google Analytics tag for each one:

Essential Google Analytics Reports for Evaluating Your Website’s Performance

After adding your Google Analytics tag to your website, it can take between 24 and 72 hours to start collecting data from your users. Even after you start seeing data in your account, you’ll likely need to wait until you have at least 1–3 months of data before drawing any conclusions.

Once you’ve collected a few months’ worth of data, you can start digging into the reports to identify trends. These five reports provide a basic overview of what your website is doing well and what needs optimization.

1- Audience Overview

This report gives you a broad view of your website’s overall performance. Here you can see things like:

  • how many people visit your website per day
  • the number of new users versus returning users
  • and your website’s average bounce rate over a given period of time

Let’s break down two key points here:

Website Traffic

Before we dive into the numbers, there are two key terms you need to understand: users and sessions.

A user is a unique person who visited your website. A user is considered “new” when they visit your website for the first time. Returning users have visited your website before.

When a user visits your website, they start a session, which is the amount of time they spend clicking and browsing the site. By default, sessions expire after 30 minutes of inactivity. If a user clicks on your website after being inactive for 30 minutes, a new session begins. Therefore, a user can have multiple sessions on your website.

Bounce Rate

A “bounce” is when a user visits your website and takes no further action before leaving your site. For example, a user lands on your homepage and leaves without clicking on any other page or button.

Bounce Rate of 0–15%: Generally a sign of incorrect data.

Very low bounce rates often mean that your Google Analytics tag is incorrectly implemented on your website and is not collecting accurate user data. Make sure the tag has been correctly added to your website.

Bounce rate of 16–40%: Excellent bounce rate.

Users who visit your website are high-quality leads and are interested in your tours and activities.

Bounce rate of 41–60%: Average bounce rate.

Your website is performing well, but bounce rates close to 60% indicate there is room for improvement.

Bounce rate of 61–90%: Poor bounce rate.

Your website could use some serious optimization. Is your site mobile-friendly? Is it easy for users to navigate? How many clicks does it take to make a booking? Does your website have too much or too little content?

Now that we have a basic understanding of a website’s bounce rate, let’s dig a little deeper by looking at bounce rates across all devices. Now that we have a basic understanding of a website’s bounce rate, let’s dig a little deeper by looking at bounce rates across all devices.

2- Mobile Overview

The Mobile Overview report breaks down how your website performs on different devices, specifically on computers, mobile phones, and tablets.

Why is this valuable? Because your website may perform well on computers but not on mobile devices (or vice versa). In a world that’s increasingly dependent on mobile devices, it’s essential to have a website optimized for them.

3. Acquisition Overview

Do you know where most of your website’s traffic comes from? Do most of your users find your site through search engines, or are they discovering it through social media?

The Acquisition Overview report answers all these questions. When you look at this report, you’ll see that there are four main channels driving traffic: organic search, direct, referral, and social. If you run a search campaign or display ads, you’ll see those listed as channels here as well.

What are each of these channels?

  • Organic Search: when users find your website by typing keywords into Google (or a different search engine).
  • Direct: the user enters your domain directly into the browser’s URL field.
    • Keep in mind that if Google Analytics cannot identify the source of a visit’s traffic, it will categorize it as direct traffic. Therefore, up to 60% of direct traffic is usually organic search or referral traffic. This is known as “Dark Traffic” because its true source is hidden.
  • Referral: when users find your website by clicking on a link on a different website.
  • Social: when users find your website from a social media page, such as Facebook.

Your main traffic channels are also influenced by your domain and page authority, overall SEO, and your social media engagement or digital marketing strategy. When your website has strong authority and good SEO, your primary channel will likely be organic search.

4. Behavior Flow

Want to know how your users navigate through your website? The Behavior Flow report shows where users land on your site and which pages they visit during their session. Landing pages are the pages where users first arrive, and each subsequent interaction represents the next page in their journey.

Ideally, we’d like our customers to enter the booking funnel in 1–3 clicks. Ideally, we’d like our customers to enter the booking funnel in 1–3 clicks.

5. E-commerce Overview

The E-commerce Overview report is where you can view and track your website’s performance from a conversion perspective. First, let’s talk about your conversion rate in e-commerce.

Your e-commerce conversion rate is the percentage of your website’s total traffic that completes a purchase. So, if 100 people visit your website today and 5 people make a booking, your conversion rate for that day is 5%.

A tribute that evokes the scent of volcanic soil, high-altitude wine, and the work of the people who make it all possible…