Admit it. Google Analytics has you excited about data and nerdy stuff. It's ok! You're in good company. Today we are wrapping up our Geeking Out series on Google Analytics to walk through a few more ninja moves you can do and glean from with advanced reports, goals and conversions.

But first... Analytics vs Reporting. What's the difference? Our brains glaze over when we start thinking about data because we consider it from a reporting perspective. Reporting spits out facts. Analytics tell us what happened and how much so we can use our brains to figure out what happens next. Our brains must explain why it happened so we can decide what we’ve learned and make a plan for how to get more of that activity. So let's look at some advanced reports to help that analytical side of you.

SEO Reports

These use to be the go-to reports on Google Analytics back in the day because you could find out the keywords you were being found by on Google. And then they took them away and crushed every SEO consultant’s job and made it way harder. So, these reports are honestly a lot less useful, but you can still get some good insights if you set up Search Console on your website. Without search console set up, if you click google/organic and drill down to keyword reports, you’ll see 90% of the keywords are hidden behind 'not provided'. So how do you get something useful? One of the most useful reports for keywords right now is found by looking at the landing pages on your site to see where your traffic is going from organic search on your site. You can get there by going to > Acquisition > Channels > Google/Organic > Keyword > Landing Page I can see people are finding my home page, podcast and specific podcast episodes through organic search -- which tells me what to make sure my SEO is set up well on. The other report that will help are Search Console Reports can give you some insights by looking at the Queries Report (which is a fancy term for the keywords people are finding you through). Step one is to make sure you have Search Console turned on for your site. If you haven’t set it up before, it will prompt you to set it up on your site in the Admin section.

One thing you'll want to be aware of is that Google only keeps the data for 90 days in the Search Console so you'll want to download it every quarter for historical purposes if that kind of information is important to you.

Social Reports

This report answers the questions: Is our social media strategy working? How does social impact people coming to my website and how does it impact my marketing goals? 

This is the second caveat on this topic but, these reports aren't as useful as they used to be because they haven't been updated by Google in a long time. Looking at the overview for social reports will tell you how many conversions were happening on your page (if you set up goals) and how many were from social media. The section for Social Network will show you all the social channels in one place, and you'll also be able to see what landing pages are driving social media activity back to your site.

Content Engagement

One way to measure content engagement on your site is to look at how your visitors are interacting with the content on your page, the flow of content throughout your site and what your content is asking them to do.

Site Search If you have a lot of content, make sure you set up the site search function so that visitors can search your content to find exactly what they are looking for. If you have this turned on, this report will tell you the exact phrase your visitors were searching for, how long they searched, what pages they were searching on, etc. -- which is helpful for you to know what's working on your page, where people may be getting stuck or what they're coming for. Site ContentThe second report for...