The team at Google Analytics has recently rolled out a brand new report to their Audience suite that will help you understand your site visitors with clarity.
The new User Explorer report provides step-by-step action data that can help you understand what users are doing while on your website. In so doing, you'll be able to get a clearer picture of what pages and content, inventory, or services resonate with your audience.
Having this information at a much more granular level will help you optimize your website experience to account for real human behavior rather than relying on guesswork or assumptions. In so doing, you'll have a greater opportunity to win business by supplying the demand of your market.
Along with the marketing implications, this also will give us more validation about what users find most valuable, and how long their purchase process takes.
To learn more about the new User Explorer report, watch this brief video below:
The User Explorer report breaks apart into just a few simple segments. Let's take a look at each of the main parts so that you can see how the information is useful and what you can learn about your site visitors.
You'll find the user explorer report in the Audience suite of metrics within Google analytics. Simply click on Audience and User Explorer to access the data.
Once you've clicked on the User Explorer report you will see a table of high-level data. Each column in the table reflects data that is familiar to other metric suites within Google Analytics such as Sessions, Avg. Session Duration and Bounce Rate.
The Client Id column lists a series of IDs that get assigned to a user to help track the movement and actions they take while on your site. The id is also linked to a specific device which is helpful in understanding how mobile-friendly your website is.
From the table above you can see that there are site visitors who are spending an average time of over 5 minutes per session, and in some cases have logged over 30 sessions. Cross-referencing that data to their average bounce rate, and you can see that these individuals are making quite a bit of movement throughout your website.
By clicking on any of the user ids, you'll be directed to an in-depth view of that user's visits to your website.
In the right column, you'll see when the date that they first visited your website along with the acquisition source and the device they were using to access your site.
This information is helpful because it adds a layer of context to the data that we're going to look at in the next section.
Along the top of the page, you'll see some baseline metrics about the user as well. These include the total number of sessions (45) and the total amount of time this user has spent on the site over those 45 sessions (about 2 1/2 hours).
The rest of the information on the user's page gives a breakdown of what their activities were while on your website.
According to the information above, this visitor spent some time browsing the inventory, filtering search results, and looking at two different vehicles.
As the data accumulates over time, you'll begin to see patterns in search behavior that will ultimately help you optimize your website in a way that speaks to the demand of your market.