We love a periodic play around on Google Analytics here at zero2one. It helps us know how you guys found us, and how you spend your time our site. For online retailers, understanding where their customers came from is absolutely crucial to forming a successful marketing plan. And that’s where Google Analytics comes in.

Google Analytics is a whole lot simpler to use than it may look at first. Once you’ve got your head around the graphs and figures, there are a few basics that will stand you in good stead.

Referral Paths

If you’re looking at your traffic sources but not really digging in to them, you could be missing out on some insightful data about where your traffic is coming from. Referral paths can be messy, but they hold the key to the most popular tweets, influencers, and content for your business. Here are a couple of referral paths you should check out to learn more about specific traffic sources.

What Are Referral Paths?

In Google Analytics, when you view your Referrals under Traffic Sources, you see the main domains that traffic to your website originated from.

When you click on any of these source domains, you see the specific pages where people found your links and clicked on them.

Google Search keywords.

Finding out what people searched before landing on your page can be the key to putting together a successful SEO, or Google AdWords strategy. It is easily accessed by clicking on: Standard Reports > Acquisition > Keywords > Organic once logged in to Google Analytics.

Referrals from other websites.

Wouldn’t it be good to know what websites directly refer traffic to your site? Follow this route to find out your most popular website referrals:  Standard Reports > Acquisition > All Traffic > Most Popular Websites.

Your most popular pages.

‘Popular Pages’ is a good indicator as to which pages should be most accessible to your visitors, as this is the content they are seeking.  You can view your most popular pages by logging on to Google Analytics and following the Knowing Behaviour > Site Content > New Pages.

So now you’re au fait with the basics, it’s time to start thinking about your business’ specific goals.