Top 10 Google Analytics Reports for Small Business
                     Top 10 Google Analytics Reports for Small 
Business
ACQUISITION OVERVIEW
This report tells you how people found your website – whether they came via organic search 
(using a search engine like Google), referral (they clicked a link from another website), direct 
(essentially, a pool of “unknowns” – it can be when a customer inputs your URL into the 
address bar, or when a link isn’t properly tagged, or someone goes from a private, secured 
website to an unsecured site), social (from Facebook or Twitter, for example), or paid search 
(which is advertising, like using Google’s Search Network).
MOBILE OVERVIEW
One of the most definite insights into internet use over the last decade is the rise of mobile 
devices to access the internet. In 2017, 73% of the entire population accessed the internet 
through their mobile phone, and roughly 60% of all traffic to the top 10,000 sites is mobile 
traffic. By 2021, mobile internet usage will reach penetration of 86.5% in the US.
DEMOGRAPHICS OVERVIEW
The introduction of demographics reports has been cause for huge excitement in the 
analytics community. Through this, you can see the gender split and age ranges of 
customers on your site (usually a subset of the data). Google gathers this data 
through the third-party DoubleClick cookie, and looks at things like Google Account 
details, social media profiles, and browsing activity to determine demographic 
information.
You do have to enable the collection of the demographic data within your Google 
Analytics account, but once you do, it can be invaluable in informing your marketing 
activities, and giving you the scoop on exactly who your online customer is – and this 
may differ from your instore or face-to-face customer. By learning more about the 
people who visit your site, you can adjust it to better suit them.
SEARCH CONSOLE – QUERIES
One of the most commonly-asked questions about analytics is “what do people search for to 
get to my site?” Unfortunately for many site owners, about six years ago, Google encrypted 
the search data so that search terms are replaced with “(not provided)”. They did this to 
protect the privacy of a site’s users, but it also encourages people to sign up for Google’s 
AdWords product – search terms are easy to find in Google AdWords.
CONTENT DRILLDOWN
This report really starts to get into what customers are actually doing on your site – 
you can see your most popular pages (or products), how long people are staying on 
each page, whether it’s the last page they visited on your site, and how many unique 
pageviews of each page occurred. And within this particular report, it also shows you 
the information from a “category” level – so if you have various sections on your 
site, you can see which of those are resonating with your customers.
TOP EVENTS
One of the limitations of Google Analytics is that it doesn’t automatically set up 
tracking of important data like PDF downloads, newsletter sign-ups, or banner clicks. 
This needs to be set up separately from the basic GA install, and can either be added 
to each link or click, or (more easily) via Google Tag Manager. Once it’s done, 
however, you can access the Event reports and get information on how many 
downloads of product manuals you got in a particular week; how many people 
clicked the first banner on your home page versus the second banner; or how many 
people clicked on your referral links.
The Top Events report divides the events into Category, Action, and Label, which are 
all determined during set up. You might have a category called PDF, one called 
Videos, and one called Links. The Action may be Download, or Play (Pause/Stop, 
etc); or Click. The Label is generally the File Name or some variation that makes the 
event easily identifiable. Most important is the total events, but unique events also 
tells you how many unique events occurred within each session.
GOAL OVERVIEW
One of the most important (and often overlooked) aspect of Google Analytics is goal 
set up. Even if you don’t have ecommerce facilities on your site (in fact, especially if 
you don’t have ecommerce), you will still have specific actions that you want your 
users to take when they visit, like creating an account, making an enquiry, registering 
for a free trial, or even something based off an event, like downloading a particular 
paper. You can (and should) still set up goals for purchases as well.
Adding a goal value to each of your goals will also “unlock” some great insights in 
other reports too, like giving each of your pages a value, showing how important (in 
a monetary sense) they are to your business. It can also show which of the 
acquisition channels (e.g. organic traffic, social networks) are having the greatest 
effect on your goal. For each goal, you can also set up a funnel, with its various 
required steps, to give you insight into where users are dropping off. Again, this isn’t 
just for ecommerce conversions – it can be for sign ups (is the process too 
complicated?), quizzes, free ebooks – anything where there are a number of pages 
as steps to follow.
DAY OF WEEK/TIME OF DAY
This is a custom report, but you can easily download a template so that the hard 
work is already done for you.
With this report, you can get an understanding of the most important days and time 
of day for your online customers. Knowing when they visit the site can help you with 
advertising (target your advertising to the times when people are already logging on 
to your site), pop-up sales, and timing of maintenance, as well as the effect of other 
marketing, like any TV or radio advertising, email newsletters, or referral site 
campaigns.
ALL CAMPAIGNS
This is a custom report, but you can easily download a template so that the hard 
work is already done for you. With this report, you can get an understanding of the 
most important days and time of day for your online customers. Knowing when they 
visit the site can help you with advertising (target your advertising to the times when 
people are already logging on to your site), pop-up sales, and timing of maintenance, 
as well as the effect of other marketing, like any TV or radio advertising, email 
newsletters, or referral site campaigns.
ALL CAMPAIGNS
When customers click on a link to come to your website, you should add parameters 
on to it that tell Google Analytics what the link is about. For example, if you set up 
Facebook advertising, it will ask you at some point to include your destination URL – 
the page link that customers will end up on. Best practice for doing this specifies 
adding some information to the end of that URL that passes information along to 
your website that includes the source (Facebook), the medium (ads), and the 
campaign name (Spring_sale). Some services, like MailChimp, do this for you 
automatically.
BEHAVIOR FLOW
The Behavior Flow chart shows how customers move through your site, which works 
as a fantastic snapshot of the user journey. Beginning with the landing page (the first 
page a customer visits on your site), you follow the most popular user paths, with 
less popular journeys available as an minimized group of pages. This chart also 
shows the number of sessions that ended on each page as a percentage, to give an 
“at a glance” view on where you’re losing your customers.
Is Google Analytics Helping Your Business?
If you aren’t currently using Google Analytics to optimize your marketing efforts, 
your missing out on free analytic data that is extremely valuable to your business. 
You can start tracking things like where your traffic is coming from, which marketing 
efforts are working, what pages were viewed, when your website is busiest, and 
more. Get in touch for a free consultation:
               
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