Understanding User Behavior With Google Analytics & Trends

Transcript

Understanding who your audience is and what they’re interested in is crucial for a successful SEO strategy.

Let’s start with some key user insights in Google Analytics 4.

First, we’ll look at a Demographic report.

Log in to Google Analytics 4, navigate to the left-hand menu, and click “Reports.”

Under the user tab, click “Demographics,” then “Overview.”

Here you’ll get an idea of where your visitors live, along with age, interest, and gender.

For a more in-depth view, click “Demographic details” located below “Overview.”

Scroll down to see a table view of various metrics. You can sort this information using the metric that matters most to you, whether it’s new users, engagement rate, or conversions.

Simply click on the metric you’re interested in — engagement rate, for instance —and the table will repopulate to show where the highest engagement rates are coming from.

Now let’s move into Acquisition reports.

Click “Reports” in the left-hand navigation menu.

Under the “Lifecycle” tab, click “Acquisition,” then “User acquisition.”

Here you’ll see how many new users visited your site, as well as which channel they came through, like organic search, paid ads, or social media.

If you click “Traffic acquisition,” located just below user acquisition, you can see similar information describing which channel drives the most traffic to your site, including new and returning users.

Moving on, let’s dive into engagement.

Click “Reports” in the left-hand menu under the Lifecycle tab, click “Engagement.”

There are a few reports here.

By clicking “Overview,” you’ll see a composite of your site’s engagement, including views, events, average engagement time, and more.

To see specifics about events, you can go into the Events report in the menu.

Scroll down to see more information about a particular event.

In the Conversions report, you’ll see conversion data for different events, which you can customize to compare, say, all sessions versus organic sessions.

Lastly, in the Pages and screens report, you can see which pages on your site or screens on your app people engage with the most. You’ll see how many views a page has, how many users, views per user, engagement time, and more.

And since we define the comparison between all sessions versus organic sessions, you’ll be able to view data for both here.

Now that you know how to measure user engagement on your site, let’s talk about how to prospect topics for new pages with Google Trends.

Start by going to trends.google.com.

Type in the topic or keyword you’re interested in, and click “Explore.”

You’ll see a graph outlining how interest in this topic has trended over time — whether that’s over the course of a day, a month, or a year — all the way back to 2004. You can also filter by location.

Scroll down to see a breakdown of regional interest. You can also take a look at related topics and queries to further inform your content planning.

Lastly, you can compare topics or keywords by clicking compare at the top of the page.

Let’s compare our original term with dog food recipes.

Dog food recipes appears to be a much more popular topic. Again, you can compare these over various date ranges and by location.

Understanding your audience and what matters to them helps you figure out what to say and when so curious visitors become satisfied customers.