Why Google Analytics Behavior is Underrated Data

Google Analytics behavior gives you great insight on user interaction. We often get stuck on the standard analytics data within our Google Analytics account such as, traffic source, acquisition method, number of users, session duration, or bounce rate to name a few. This data is all incredibly valuable, but you can better understand your users by studying the sequential actions that they take while they’re on your website. 

Rather than just looking at pieces of the data, it’s important to look at the datasets as a whole. This post will discuss why Google Analytics Behavior is underrated data, and how it can help you better understand user interaction within your website. 

Understanding Google Analytics Behavior 

Within your analytics account on the left-hand side of the screen, you’ll see the behavior tab that has the following sections:

• Overview
• Behavior Flow
• Site Content
• Site Speed
• Site Search
• Events
• Publisher
• Experiments

Each section provides a different value-set, the ultimate goal is to tie all of this data together and make better sense of audience behavior on your website. To do that, let’s go through each section to better understand how the data correlates in order to provide a better end-user experience. 

Google Analytics Behavior Overview

As expected, this section provides an overview of the behavior as a whole; To dive further into the behavior, we’ll use the next sections. The overview tab will show you top performing pages, number of users over a specified time period, avg. duration, bounce rates, & exit %. 

The overview section also allows you to dive into other sections of behavior by clicking on the page that you want to gain a further understanding on. For example, you can click on your top performing page and then be taken to the site content tab (we’ll talk about this section later on in the post) where you’ll be able to study previous page paths, next page paths, & exits.

If you’re new to this, here’s a quick breakdown of pages paths and exits. 

• Previous page path: page a user was on prior to the page that you’re viewing
• Next page path: page a user navigated to after the page that you’re viewing
• Exits/Drop-offs: users that leave the site after visiting the page that you’re viewing

Behavior Flow

Behavior flow enables you to visualize the flow of how users interact while on your website. The landing page column highlights the top first pages that users ultimately land on when they first get to your site, followed by the next pages that they interact with. 

When you see a red color, it’s showing you where the user leaves your website, or drops-off. 

The drop-offs enable you to compare vs. other pages in terms of where users tend to leave your page the most frequently. With higher drop-off percentages, it’s more than likely telling you that the page may need to be optimized to provide further value to the end user. The only exception in this scenario would be a higher drop-off on a contact page, but only after the users have converted on your contact forms; check out this article to learn more about how to track goals, events, and conversions. 

One of the most significant aspects of this report is that you can filter by the medium to compare how your site acquired those users and identify correlations.

For example, you may notice that a highly optimized SEO page drives the majority of organic traffic, while promoted ads drive the majority of users to a completely separate page. Regardless, you’ll want to study the following sessions and drop-offs to better understand how your target audience views your landing pages. 

Site Content

To  dive a bit deeper into the behavior, site content allows you to view a list of your top pages, where you can then click and see where your users go after that specified page. 

The example above shows that the second most visited page after the home page is the page that highlights the leadership team. Two takeaways from this data tell the website developer that they should:

1. Ensure the leadership team page is optimized (speed, design, content, etc.)
2. Easily accessible within the homepage menu so users aren’t stuck searching for it 
3. And finally, that your audience cares about who leads your organization and what value they provide

Additionally, within the navigation summary of the site content tab, Google Analytics shows data on previous page paths and next page paths depending on the page you’re trying to drill down on. For example, what brought the user to the leadership team page, and what page did that user navigate to after the leadership team page?

Site content allows you to visually look at a flow-chart, or dive into pages in columns within Google Analytics to help you make better sense of audience performance. 

Site Speed

As we continue to compete for user attention, a significant portion of enhancing the user experience on a website consists of ensuring that the site speed is optimized. Landing pages should load within 3 second or less; Once pages begin to take longer than 3 seconds to load, you’ll see a drop in user attention.

This is important because we can attempt to identify correlations between drop-offs and site speed. For example, if total load-time for a page is 5 seconds and we’re seeing increased drop-offs, it may be telling you that the speed needs to be enhanced. 

This portion of Google Analytics will tell you what the average load time is for all pages, in addition to linking you to the Google PageSpeed Insight tool to test out individual pages. Here’s what that looks like:

By clicking on the page speed suggestion, Google PageSpeed Insights will run an analyzer on that page and give you a score with steps for improvement. 

Google tends to be a tough grader (rightfully so) as they place an extreme emphasis on enhancing speed for your users (as they should).

For comparison purposes, we also recommend running your domain url through GTmetrix for speed insight and improvement analysis. 

Site Search

It’s easy to confuse this with Search Console, but this site search section actually refers to what users search for when they’re already on your website, rather than what they’ve searched for to ultimately find your website. 

This is hugely valuable for an e-commerce site as users are continually searching for items within the search bar. Here’s Amazon’s website search bar as an example.

Keep in mind that this is a feature that needs to be turned on, but luckily is very easy to do. This video gives a quick overview of what the process looks like. 

Once this feature is turned on, you’ll have a working report of the keywords and terms that are being searched for while users are already on your site.

After viewing your top keywords, you’ll want to ensure that the pages that highlight those keywords are fully optimized. Be sure to also compare drop-offs and user navigation on those pages to ensure that the actions a user takes aligns with your company goals. 

Sticking with the theme of better understanding user behavior, we’ve found it valuable to compare site search with search console terms to identify correlations between how users find your website, and what users search for when they’re on your website. Consistent keywords between the two reveals that you may want to focus your SEO and ad bidding around those words, as that is what your audience is looking for. 

Events

The events portion tracks, you guessed it, events that occur on your website. Google Analytics will either automatically create the events for you after learning about repetitive events that occur, or you can create them by leveraging Google Tag Manager to predict and track actions that a user takes. 

For example, you may want to track button clicks or contact form submissions. The button clicks may tell you whether or not users are actually engaging with your website, while the contact form submissions will track conversions and the number of users that submitted a form.

To fully optimize SEO in the coming years you’ll have to ensure that your website is engaging, and event tracking is a great way to do that. 

After tracking the events, you can again track the flow that led to the event prior to a dropoff. 

The common theme that you’re seeing by this point is that we’re aggressively trying to understand user behavior on our site, and optimize in order to provide the best experience possible. 

If you’re someone that focuses on SEO, it’s so easy to get caught up with how users get to your website that we often forget to focus on what your audience actually does on your website. Those that provide the best user-experience on their website will win in the long term, and by understanding user behavior, you’re put in a better position to provide optimal value. 

We’ll leave you with a quote from the best selling Author of ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey. 

First seek to understand, then seek to be understood.

Let us know how you’re studying Google Analytics behavior to enhance your user-experience.