Google Analytics is incredibly important for managing an online business. The data provided by the program can give you valuable insights about how well your site is doing, but for beginners, it can be hard to interpret all of the information or even know how to get started. But don’t panic, this step by step guide will make the process easy.

Step 1: Check Out Acquisitions, All Traffic, Source/Medium.

This is the one part of Google Analytics that I check every day. You can use the calendar at the top to display data from a certain period of time or to do a year-to-year comparison. This will give you an idea about how well your site is performing in terms of important key metrics.

The page tells you the top sources of revenue that your site has. You may have hundreds of different entries on the page, but the top five on the page will be the most important for you. It’s these areas that you’ll want to concentrate your marketing efforts on.

With the filters, you can eliminate certain traffic, such as visitors that are coming from outside the geographic area that you sell to. By selecting different metrics, you can evaluate things like how well advertising methods are working. This will help you to refine your marketing efforts and spend money on the things that are most profitable and beneficial for you. You can also dive into your pay per click traffic to find out how much you spent on specific ads versus how much you actually made.

The other segment that I use most often is mobile traffic versus non-mobile traffic to see how well my site is performing with shoppers using mobile devices. This will also let you know what percentage of your sales come from mobile device users and how those users are finding your site.

Step 2: Check Out Your Conversions/E Commerce /Sales Conversion

This is another valuable page for gaining insight about your overall sales. You can see sales for specific days. With the secondary dimensions, you can see a lot of information about where traffic came from. For example, you can go in and see how you got your biggest sales. You can do this with Source/Medium and then dive in deeper to see which ads or keywords led the user to your site.

Step 3: Look at Your Goals.

There are a few parts to the Goals area that are beneficial. The first is funnels visualization, which is very helpful for seeing how people flow through your site. I have my funnel set up so I can see how many people clicked on the shopping cart on my site. Then, I can see how many made it to the check out page and then from there how many actually completed a sale. If I see that there is a large number of abandoned orders at either point in the funnel, I know that I need to take a look at what might be wrong. You can also compare the funnel from one period of time to another if you make changes or update your site to see if the adjustments that you made helped or hurt people’s ability to easily make purchases from your site.

Step 4: Check out the Site Content and Landing Page Area.

This part of Google Analytics can give you some surprising insights into your website. For example, I discovered some time ago that my colors page was one of the most popular pages on my store. I never would have guessed that so many people were checking out what colors my products were available in, but once I knew, I was able to add links to some of my other pages to encourage customers to buy.

To learn the rest of the steps needed to master Google Analytics, watch my full video Learn Google Analytics Step By Step.