Google Analytics: How to Analyze the Behavior of Your Site Visitors

Do you want to learn more about how people use your website?

Wondering how the Behavior reports in Google Analytics can help?

To explore how to navigate the Behavior section of Google Analytics, I interview Andy Crestodina.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Andy Crestodina, author of Content Chemistry and co-founder of Orbit Media. Andy specializes in content marketing and Google Analytics.

Andy explains how to analyze the behavior of your website visitors.

You'll discover a few Google Analytics tricks to employ immediately.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Google Analytics
Why Marketers Should Care About the Behavior Category

In Google Analytics, the Behavior category is one of five main categories that you find on the left-hand sidebar. Andy says the categories are organized from the top of the funnel down to the bottom. The first category is Real-Time, or people on your website at the moment. Real-Time is followed by Audience (who those people are), Acquisition (where they came from), Behavior (what they did), and Conversions (who took which successful profitable action).

People dedicate a lot of time to the Behavior category because the reports show what's happening on each URL and how people flow through your website. Andy says you can see where people go, how much time they spend on pages, bounce rate, percentage of people who leave after seeing just one page, number of pages per visit, and so on. The Behavior category is the core of Google Analytics reporting.

What you find through Behavior reports is often surprising, Andy continues. Although a website is designed to encourage visitors to navigate through it in certain ways, the Behavior reports show how visitors actually move through your site.

Listen to the show to hear an explanation of the value of behavior analytics with a restaurant analogy.

Behavior Flow Report

Andy believes Behavior Flow is an interesting and sometimes confusing report because it mashes up data from other reports. The Behavior Flow report looks almost like an infographic. It shows how many people are on your website, where they move as they navigate from page to page, and the page where they leave your site. After the starting page, the next column is first interaction, the column after that is second interaction, and so on.

Behavior Flow shows the most popular path through your website, which is important. Knowing the most common path helps you prioritize changes to your website. For example, if you have only 10 minutes to work on your website this week, you need to spend that time on the pages people visit most often. Even if your website has thousands of pages, a small percentage of those pages receive the most traction and traffic.

Therefore, when you have a great piece of content such as a beautiful testimonial or a compelling visual, you want to put it where people are more likely to see it. If your website was a city with a highway flowing through it, you'd put your billboards on the highways, not on little backstreets.

In the Behavior Flow report, the first column is the Landing Page option, which reflects where your website traffic comes from. You can change the default Landing Page option to see the website traffic from a specific source. For example, you can select social options to see how people coming from different social networks move through your site.

Next, you see the Starting Pages column. Andy says this column lists only the top pages. (For analysis of a specific page,