1. Mobile Traffic

With more and more users doing their website browsing on mobile devices, you need to keep an eye on your site’s mobile traffic. You can track what types of devices are being used by your site’s visitors, which will help you in tailoring your mobile website design and advertising placement.

2. Language

Using the Audience section in your Google Analytics account, you can potentially find new markets to reach out to. Traffic from different language codes may be telling you that you have a more international audience, and that you may want to invest in heavier advertising towards those international markets, as well as look into translation options for your site.

3. Affinity Categories

This is an interesting analytics segment that allows you to understand which user profiles are visiting your site, based on their affinities.  For example, “TV Lovers”, “Business Professionals”, or “News Junkies”.  You can then use these categories to tailor your advertising towards categories that are bringing the most traffic to your site, or you can choose to remarket towards them in your Adwords account.

4. Behavior Flow

The Behavior section details exactly how users behave once they reach your site. You’ll learn each page’s bounce rate, what search terms are being used to find products or pages throughout your site, and what your most popular pages are. The insights provided by this section in Google Analytics can help show you what pages work and work well, so that you can apply these elements across your site.

5. Traffic Sources

Analyzing your traffic sources can help you decide which visitors to focus your remarketing on. For example, if the majority of your high-converting traffic comes from Facebook, or LinkedIn, you can tailor your AdWords to remarket to that traffic source and increase the number of targeted visits coming to your site.

6. Acquisition

The acquisition section of Google Analytics is there to tell you how people are finding your site: are they typing your URL directly into their browsers, clicking on it via search engine results, a social media post, or through an external link on a blog post, for example. This information will help you understand which of your marketing streams are the most effective and bringing in the most traffic. If the majority of your traffic is coming in from Twitter, then you’ll know that it’s a worthwhile investment to start curating more content on your Twitter feed.

7. Goals & Conversions

The goals section of Google Analytics allows you to set up and track when specific actions are being completed. Goals can be applied to specific pages that your users visits, how long they stay on that page, how many pages they view in a single session, and any events (conversions) that they trigger while there (submitting a “Contact Us” request, for example). This process helps you to monetize your conversions, so that you can have a well-rounded understanding of the full ROI of your marketing strategy.

If you’re not a numbers person, all of the graphs and data may be a bit overwhelming to you; but as a business owner or marketing manager, it’s all important information that you need to know and understand, to support the success and effectiveness of your website and business.

What other areas of Google Analytics do you find useful when you’re analyzing your website stats?

For a detailed review of your analytics strategy, check out our free, downloadable guide to complement your analytics setup.