Make the most of your Google Analytics: three lesser known reports to improve your insights

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, but do you know how to get the most value out of it? A lot can be done on the platform, and there are multiple features to explore that allow you to draw better analysis and make more informed decisions about your digital marketing strategy. 

However, next to the most common reports, there are lesser known ones that can offer new and valuable insights on your marketing activities. Here we explore three of them, which are all part of the ‘Explorations’ section of Google Analytics, or GA4. Explorations are more complex than standard reports, as they help you gain very precise insights into your customers’ behaviour on a website or app.

Path Exploration

This tool allows you to see what decisions people make after visiting a webpage. This could be the home page of your website, or a specific page that you want to draw analysis from. 

Let’s take your home page as an example. The path exploration tool will allow you to see:

1. The top pages people viewed after your home page

2. The behavioural patterns of people who leave for a different page, but return to your home page later

3. How many users scroll to 25%, 50% and 75% of your home page

This tool can therefore be used to determine the sequence of a chain of events. For example, you can examine your visitors’ next steps after a specific starting point (e.g. your home page), or retrace your visitors’ backwards path by looking at the steps they took before reaching a certain page, also known as the ending point.

Google offers more in depth guidance on how to set up path explorations and what else you can do with them.

Cohort exploration

Cohort explorations allow you to draw insights from the behaviour of groups of users with similar characteristics. A cohort is a batch of users who share a common attribute in terms of how they have interacted with your website. For example, users who visited the same page in a certain month belong to the same cohort. 

Cohort explorations can be a powerful tool to understand your customer’s repeat actions. For instance, you can see how long after an initial purchase a customer returns to buy again. This could be an important consideration when analysing customers’ loyalty – a key element for the long term health of your business.

The example above illustrates a typical cohort exploration chart. It shows that there were 969 users between September 1st and September 3rd. Of these, 877 showed some form of user engagement on the website after they started a session in the same timeframe (week 0). Out of the same 969 users, 139 people also started a session and had some form of engagement with the website in week 1 – in this case, September 4th to 10th. 

Google offers more in depth guidance on cohort explorations here.

Segment overlap

A segment overlap allows you to compare users of up to three different groups to see how their characteristics overlap with each other. This tool presents data in a visual format, ensuring quick analysis and decision making.

The segment overlap report could look something like this:

The conclusions we can draw from this example are:

• All mobile traffic that also comes from Google is from users within the UK

• About half of the users from Google access the website through a mobile device (49%)

• The majority of mobile users accessed the site through Google (64%)

You can further analyse your visitors’ demographics, with insights on their country, age, gender and interests. You can also include users who have previously purchased a product, along with implementing custom filters such as people who have clicked a specific button on your website.

This analysis could be used to prioritise user experience improvements on different device types, or optimising your customer journeys. 

Google offers further advice on how to optimise your segment overlap analysis here. 

Compared to traditional statistics, Google Analytics explorations allow you to delve deeper into your customers’ behaviour. Explorations include some important and unique tools, which can drill down on data that you wouldn’t be able to see in any other way. Gathering and understanding this data is the first step to analyse your digital marketing strategy and fully optimise it to achieve better results.

If you want to learn more about the power of data to reveal how your customers think and act, get in touch! Our marketing data experts will be happy to help you.