How to interpret your analytics reports

Fine Tune Your Website Strategy For Maximum Impact

Your business website is the hub of your online presence, the one pure and authentic source of information about your business that you control completely, and that is not subject to someone else’s rules. For that reason, it’s important to build your site on a sound foundation that includes branding, keyword analysis, and competitor research. If you’ve done your homework there, you’re off to the next step of honing what you’ve built to get the best results possible.

A successful website strategy isn’t static; it’s a living, evolving plan that needs regular refinement based on new insights and data. This is where analytics become crucial. By reviewing and interpreting your analytics reports regularly, you can uncover opportunities for improvement and adjust your approach to better meet your business goals.

Why Are Analytics Important?

Analytic reports provide insights that are the basis of any marketing strategy by showing you what is working and what is not working, so you can make adjustments to get better results. Analytics can help you make decisions, solve problems, and find new business opportunities by measuring how people are finding and using your website. Without an understanding of your analytics, you won’t have the information you need to make good decisions, to decide where to spend your marketing budget. Without a solid basis for decision-making, business owners are often tempted to spend on tactics that end up disappointing when they don’t deliver, just delaying their success.

In addition to helping you make better marketing decisions, analytics can also provide clarity about your audience. You can understand what pages they visit most, where they are located, and what devices they use. This kind of detailed information helps you optimize your website for user experience, ensuring visitors are finding the content they need quickly and efficiently.

Google Search Is Top Priority

Google processes more than 3.5 billion searches per day! This chart shows the market share for the highest-performing search engines in the U.S., where Google holds 88.87% market share. For this reason, we focus on Google first before optimizing for other search engines.

88.87% of all searches over the last year have taken place through Google and its subsidiary YouTube.

Worldwide, that number is even higher at 92.66%.

With Google dominating the search engine market, optimizing your site for Google can lead to the most substantial gains in visibility and traffic. Ensuring your site follows Google’s best practices for SEO can help increase your organic rankings.

Google search results.

Search Engines Market Share

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Search Engine Market Share

How to Read Your Analytics Reports

Click on a tab below to see definitions for each analytics account type.

Google Analytics is a vital tool for understanding how users interact with your website. It tracks key metrics, such as how many visitors your site receives, where they come from, how long they stay, and which pages they engage with the most. By analyzing traffic sources—like direct visits, referrals, organic search, or social media—you gain a clear picture of how people find you. With its easy-to-interpret graphical reports, Google Analytics empowers you to refine your website and marketing strategies, ensuring you meet your business goals.

User: a visitor to your site. When a person lands on any page of your site, they are counted as either a new or returning user.

New User: someone who has visited your site for the first time.

Total Users: includes new and returning users.

Session: When a user first lands on your website, they start a session. Google Analytics records the actions they take during this visit (called “hits”) as part of that session. When the user leaves your site or is inactive for 30 minutes, the session ends.

Session Duration: A good average session duration is considered to be between 2 – 4 minutes.

The average session length for Business-to-Consumer (B2C) companies — websites offering services or products to consumers rather than to other businesses — is 92.33 seconds. The average session duration for Business-to-Business (B2B) companies is 77.61 seconds.

If a user is visiting your site just to get your contact information, their session may be very short. So a short session doesn’t mean necessarily that the user isn’t interested in your services. The goal for new users would be a longer session during which they can engage on some level and learn about what you offer.

Engagement Rate: If 100 users visit your website, and half of them engage with your content in a way that gets counted by Google Analytics, your engagement rate for that month would be 50%. It’s the percentage of sessions on one page where a user was engaged.

An “engaged session” is any session where a user does any of the following things:

  • Stays on the page for 10 seconds or more
  • Views at least 2 pages
  • Triggers at least 1 conversion event

Engagement Rate: In general, an engagement rate of 60%-70% is considered good.

Engagement rates vary depending on the type of site. For instance, an e-commerce site, where users are choosing products and making purchases, may have a higher engagement count than a news site.

Engagement rates also vary widely by traffic source. If your traffic is driven mostly by paid ads, you can expect a lower average engagement rate.

Event: An event is a measurement of user interactions on your site. There is a long list of events that are collected by Google Analytics by default, and some are dependent on the type of device the user has for browsing your site. Examples are:

  • when a user loads a page
  • clicks a link
  • interacts with a form
  • makes a purchase
  • downloads a file
  • the first time a user scrolls to the bottom of a page

Custom events can be created and measured too.

Conversion Event: To be measured and shown on Analytics reports, “conversion events” have to be manually created in a company’s analytics account, according to the custom actions they want to see users taking. Each time a user triggers the desired event or takes an action that goes beyond the default events that Analytics already counts, it’s counted as a “conversion event.” If you have a 0% conversion rate, it’s only because you haven’t identified any custom events in Analytics to count.

Unassigned Session: Google’s set channel rules group similar traffic sources into one group. Unassigned sessions appear when your traffic cannot be assigned to other channel groups like organic search, paid search, social, email, direct, referral, etc.

Direct Session or Traffic: When someone already knows about your business, they may not need to do a keyword search to find it. If they type or paste your URL to their search bar, click a bookmark, follow a link from an email, click on a link in social media, or some other source that Google can’t see, their visit gets counted as a direct session.

Direct user traffic results from a direct session and is a good thing! It means the user is probably a repeat visitor who already knows how to find you.

Referral Session or Traffic: Referral sessions are counted when a user clicks on a link from another site that links to yours. apart from search engines, paid advertising campaigns, and direct visits.

Referral traffic results from a referral session. Links to your website and users finding you from other sites are a good thing, helping to build your SEO.

Organic Social Session or Traffic: An organic social session is one that results from organic social media links, like from your social media profiles or posts as opposed to paid social media ads.

Organic Search Session or Traffic: An organic session is one that results from an organic search through Google. This means that the session began from a search engine result page, and not through paid advertisements.

Organic traffic is a count of the visitors who reach your website through organic search results, as opposed to paid advertising traffic, social media links, direct traffic, or other referral links.

Report date is the 1st of each month: This is disturbing to see! It looks like your traffic dropped to zero, but it didn’t necessarily. The report is generated on the first of each month early in the morning before data for that day is captured, so it shows zero traffic. The meangingful numbers are all the preceding days for the prior month.

Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is your gateway to better local search visibility. It allows you to showcase essential business details like your address, phone number, hours, and website, ensuring potential customers can easily find you. Beyond basic information, it provides insights into customer behavior—such as how they discovered your business and what actions they took, like requesting directions or visiting your site. With the ability to manage reviews and post updates, your profile becomes a dynamic tool for engaging with customers and boosting your local SEO presence.

Impressions: The number of times users view your Google Business Profile listing.

Actions: This is a count of what users did to take action after seeing your Google Business Profile.

google business profile actcions

They might click on the Website link to go to your website, click on Directions to see your business on the map, click on the Call button to call you, or click on Share to save your profile to a location of their choice. Keep in mind that an action is only recorded when a user clicks on an option on your Google Business Profile page. If they simply read your phone number and call, that action can’t be counted.

Website clicks: This is a count of the number of times users clicked on the Website button or your website address on your Google Business Profile.

google business profile actcions

Call clicks: This is a count of the number of times users clicked on the Call button or clicked on your phone number on your Google Business Profile.

google business profile actcions

Direction requests: This is a count of the number of times users clicked on the Directions button on your Google Business Profile or on your address to see your location on the Google map.

google business profile actcions

Conversations received: This is a count of the number of messages or chat conversations received on the Google Business Profile. Google Chat is a premium service that requires payment. There is setup required to enable chat on both the business and user end of a conversation.

Search keyword: Google tracks the keywords that searchers enter in their browser that lead them to your Google Business Profile. Keyword ranking is developed primarily on your website but also on your Google Business Profile, business directories, social media accounts, and other sources on the internet where you have established profiles.

Search keyword table: Unfortunately, Google doesn’t let anyone know when they change their procedures for pushing out data. Analytics tools everywhere are affected by their whims, whether the tools are free or premium analytics tools marketing companies and businesses everywhere pay for. Our setup has been triple-checked, so the best we can do is wait for the data to appear. If you don’t see this table populated with the search keywords people entered to get your Google Business Profile to appear, all anyone can do is wait and come back to it later. The Google Search Console section shows keywords people entered that resulted in the appearance of your links in organic search results.

Google Search Console is a powerful platform for monitoring and improving your site’s presence in Google Search. It provides performance reports, showing which keywords drive traffic, how often your site appears in search results, and your average ranking positions. It also highlights technical issues, like indexing errors or mobile usability problems, helping you fix barriers that hinder visibility. By submitting sitemaps and reviewing analytics, you can fine-tune your SEO strategy to ensure your site meets Google’s standards and performs well in search rankings.

URL Clicks: This is a count of the number of times a user clicked on your listing in organic Google search results. This count does not include clicks on paid Google ads.

Impressions: This is a count of the number of links to your site that appeared in a user’s browser in organic Google search results. Impressions are counted even if they appear below the viewed area of a search results page.

Query: The queries table shows you the keywords or phrases that people are using to find your website on Google over a period of time. Queries give us insight about what people are looking for and the terms they are using to search for a topic.

Landing Page: This is the first page that a user lands on when looking for information. It can be any page that appears in search results or that’s kept in a bookmark or that’s shared in an email — whether that is a home page, a help page, a blog post, or a contact page.

CTR: Click-through rate is the number of clicks that your page receives divided by the number of impressions, to let us know how regularly search result impressions are motivating people to click on them.

Clicks ÷ impressions = CTR. For example, if you had 5 clicks and 100 impressions, then your CTR would be 5%.

A high CTR is a good indication that users find your listings helpful and relevant.

Note on Rank Tracking

Keywords are mentioned on your Clarity Marketing Studio monthly reports only if you are subscribing for keyword tracking services. If you are watching your rank for certain keywords, keep in mind that Google’s daily updates routinely reshuffle ranking order so that little rank changes from day to day are inevitable. Google doesn’t explain what’s behind these changes, so we have to follow internationally known search engine optimization companies who do nothing but interpret the tea leaves to keep us informed.

Here’s an example of the daily Google rank changes we monitor. These numbers represent the average number of ranks, either up or down, that your keyword ranking might have changed. Anything under 3 ranks is considered “OK” even though it may be alarming to us who are constantly working to get you ranking higher! These rank changes that happen as a result of Google’s daily updates usually even out, so if your rank goes down, be patient and check over the next few days. When there are major changes, we know about them and know when to adjust your keyword strategy.

Google keyword rank daily changes
keyword research square

Certified Marketing Consultants

We use a proven marketing system to get the best results for our clients.

Do you need a marketing upgrade? Need to revisit your goals and priorities to see what’s possible for your next step? Our team of experts is here to help you navigate the complex landscape of digital marketing and provide tailored solutions that align with your business objectives. Whether you’re looking to improve your website’s performance, enhance your SEO strategy, or develop a more robust online presence, we’ve got you covered.

Reach out today for a complimentary consultation and discover how we can elevate your marketing efforts to the next level!

Get in touch and book a free 20-minute consultation call today!