Are you curious to know how customers are finding your website? Then you should familiarize yourself with Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a service offered by Google that allows you to see statistics about your traffic, including traffic sources, pageviews and conversions (completions of an activity that you care about, like registrations, sales and requests for quotes).

Knowing this type of information is obviously beneficial to your company – you’ll be able to see what’s working and what isn’t, at a glace. This information will show you how and where to focus your time and money. You can find it in the Acquisition section of Google Analytics.

Overview

The Acquisition Overview lists a summary of the top channels that send visitors to your website. It also lists quick details of each channel. Google Analytics Goals (which will need to be configured) will show you how well each channel affects conversions.

The channels used to monitor your traffic sources are: Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct Search, Referral Search, Social Search and Other.

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Organic Search: This channel will track what visitors came to your website straight from Google.com or another search engine. Since Yahoo is now the default search engine for Firefox (and rumors are that Apple is considering a similar move for Safari (including iOS), Yahoo may become a big player again).

Paid Search: This channel will track what visitors came to your website from a paid search ad, like Google Adwords/Double Click, Bing, Yahoo’s Right Media, etc.

Direct Search: This channel will track what visitors came to your website directly without using another source to locate your website. These users have typed in your web address to find you. You’ll also see some visitors whose entry point can’t be determined will end up in this group.

Referral Search: This channel will track what visitors came to your website from another website by clicking on a provided link. When another site links to you, and a person clicks that link to come to your site, that is a referral from the linking site.

Social Search: This channel will track what visitors came to your website from a social media site, like Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn.

Other: This will be where any other source will be listed.

Channels

The Channels section goes more in-depth than the Acquisition Overview, giving you a little more granularity. Clicking on the channel links will list more detail in each channel section. If Social Media generated 1500 visits in March, how much of that was from Facebook? This is a question that Channels can answer.

All Traffic Report

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An All Traffic Report lists your top traffic sources from all channels based on the number of visitors each channel sends to your website.

All Referrals Report

The Referrals Report will only list the website domains that have referred traffic to your site.

Campaigns

This will track the visitors who come from campaigns you or a third party source have set up. Take the time to play around with these – super helpful!

Keyword Reports

This report will give a detailed breakdown of what keywords were used to locate your site. Of course, that won’t include logged-in users from Google. To protect the anonymity of their users, Google no longer provides that data to website owners.

Social Reports

This section specifically lists which social sites were used to link to your company’s website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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If you’ve connected your Webmaster Tools to Google Analytics, this section will become useful. It lists reports that come from Google Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Tools is a free Google service that will allow you to monitor your website in Google Search – penalizations, 404 errors, anything iffy that the Google Bot encounters when crawling your site will come up here. Within the SEO panel there are three sub-sections.These sub-sections are: Queries, Landing Pages, and Geographical Summary.

Queries: This pulls the keywords used to locate your website in Google Search and puts it into Google Analytics for you. It will also list the number of impressions, clicks, and click-through rates for each keyword.

Landing Pages: This will show you the pages that receive the most impressions and clicks from Google Search. It also lists the click-through rate and position.

Geographical Summary: This will give you a summary of where search engine users are located and may give you an idea of who is most likely to click on certain links.

Cost Analysis

This section will allow you to measure costs and revenue performance for paid advertising campaigns.

AdWords

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This section will also show you data about visitors who click through your AdWords campaigns. You will need to connect Google Analytics to AdWords for this data to populate.

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Google Analytics is a free service that I highly recommend you take advantage of. There are some great Google Analytics learning offerings at their site.