A lot of small business owners are not sure if Google Analytics is important for their business and are reluctant to learn how to deal with it. The truth is that Google Analytics is a really powerful tool that can immensely help your business grow. Here are some questions to ask yourself if you are still not sure whether you need Google Analytics or not:

• Do you have a website?
• Do you want to know how many people visit your website?
• Do you want to find out who your visitors are? Where they come from? What age they are?
• Do you want to know which pages of your website are the most popular?
• Do you want to find out how many website visitors have turned to leads (or even customers)?

If you answer any of the questions above with “yes”, then you need Google Analytics! Once you register, however, it is really easy (and tempting) to get lost in all the detailed data and, as is often the case, figure out that you’ve spent hours clicking without any idea what to do next to improve your online presence!

Don’t let this happen to you. Here are our Google Analytics reports basics for small businesses that will guide you out of the analytics maze and get you right back on track:

Google Analytics Reports Basics:

Audience
The Audience Report will give you everything you need to know about your visitors. This is where you can see your visitors’ age, gender, interests, where they come from, what language(s) they speak, etc. Except for this, you can also make conclusions about their behavior, for example how often they visit your website.

One of the most interesting reports you can get in the Audience section is the type of technology they use to visit your website. If you see that the majority of your visitors are coming from mobile devices, for example, you should consider getting your website mobile-responsive. This will both rank your site better in search engines and will provide your visitors with a better user experience!

Acquisition
The Acquisition Report will provide you with invaluable insights about what drove your visitors to your website. This is the place to look at if you want to see your traffic broken down to categories, sources, etc.

Use the Acquisition Report to improve your social networking efforts, PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Behavior
The Behavior Report will reveal to you all those details you want to find out about your content. This includes your site content, landing pages, exit pages, etc.

This is the place to check if you want to find out the speed of your website (how fast it loads). Here you’ll also get suggestions from Google on how to improve your website’s speed – just go to Site Speed  Speed Suggestions.

Conversions
Everybody knows the importance of conversions. The Conversions Report in Google can be of great help in this reference. It only needs a few adjustments at first, though! To get the best out of this report, you need to first set some goals inside Google Analytics. This is how you tell the tool to keep track of what’s important to you and your business.

There are different types of goals you can set, depending on what you want to track. No matter what (or how many) your goals are, once you set them, you will also notice specific data tied to your conversions on most of the other standard Google Analytics reports.