Are you wondering how to view how visitors find your website? You can try different methods and techniques but website analytics are the most reliable source to learn how your users find your website. Google Analytics is the most popular website analytics tool out there, but it’s a bit tricky for beginners.
So, in this article, we’ll show you how to see how visitors find your website using Google Analytics the simple way.
Why Is It Important to Know How Visitors Find Your Website?
You may try a lot of different strategies willy-nilly to optimize your website and grow your business. But all your efforts will go in vain if you don’t actually know how your visitors find and use your website.
The issue happens because you’re relying on guesses, not on facts. In fact, guessing can actually harm your website.
So, to avoid guesswork and make informed business decisions, it’s important to know how users find your website in online.
That’s where website analytics tools come in handy. Using a website analytics tool, you can view the exact metrics of how your visitors find and use your site, so you can analyze them, and then optimize your site for more conversions. There are multiple benefits of using website analytics for your business growth.
How to See How Visitors Find Your Website (Step by Step)
As we stated above, Google Analytics is the most popular and probably the best website analytics tool for viewing how users find your website, but it’s a bit complex for newbies.
If you’re an absolute beginner, you’ll either need to learn the entire process or hire a developer to do the job for you.
Or, you could do it the EASY way, by using MonsterInsights.
It’s the most beginner-friendly tool for adding Google Analytics to your WordPress site, and viewing your website metrics.
Now, let’s go ahead and learn how to use this plugin to view how visitors find and use your website.
Step 1: Install MonsterInsights On Your WordPress Site
First of all, you’ll need to download the MonsterInsights plugin from its official website.
Then, open your WordPress dashboard and install the plugin by going to Plugins » Add New » Upload Plugin.
After the installation is complete, it’ll ask you to authenticate your site with your Google Analytics account. That’s how you’ll connect your website with your Google Analytics account.
It takes just a few clicks to complete the authentication process and then, the plugin will start gathering your website analytics metrics.
That’s it!
It’s quick and simple to set up Google Analytics in WordPress using MonsterInsights plugin. If you were to follow the traditional method, you’d need to add the Google Analytics tracking code in WordPress. And, that’d cost you extra time and effort, as well as money
However, if you absolutely insist on doing it the hard way, here’s our step-by-step guide on how to properly set up Google Analytics in WordPress.
Step 2: View Your Website Analytics Metrics
After successfully installing Google Analytics in WordPress, you can now view your website analytics metrics, and see how visitors actually find your website.
But you may need to wait a while to view your first reports because Google Analytics takes a few hours to gather your website data.
MonsterInsights makes it easy to view your website reports as it shows all your important site metrics in an easy-to-understand format, right on your WordPress dashboard. It features a highly comprehensive Google Analytics dashboard right inside your admin panel, so you don’t need to navigate away or open other sites to view your website analytics.
To view your Google Analytics reports, you’ll need to visit Insights » Reports on your WordPress dashboard. Then, you can see the Overview report of your WordPress site there.
The Overview Report itself has some of the key metrics that are useful to know how your users find and interact with your site.
The first part of the Overview Report gives you a visual look of the number of sessions and page views your site has seen. That’ll look just like the above screenshot.
And right below that section, you can see quick data related to your users’ behavior, including the number of sessions, the number of page views, the average session duration, and your site’s overall bounce rate.
You can also view the percentage change in these metrics in a defined range of time.
Note: You can define the time range to show data from the left side of the Reports page in the top. You can set it to show past 7 days or 30 days or any custom date range you want.
As you scroll down, you’ll see a pie-chart of New vs. Returning Visitors and Device Breakdown.
The New vs. Returning Visitors graph helps you to learn what percentage of visitors are returning to your website after leaving it. In general, your returning visitors are your prospect customers as you can assume that they have come back to your site because they found something useful in your site.
Similarly, the Device Breakdown shows you which devices your visitors are mostly using to visit your website.
As you keep scrolling down the Overview Report, you’ll see the Top 10 Countries where your visitors are located.
Then, finally, the last section of the Overview Report shows you to most popular content on your site. It’s an important piece of data to know how your users see and engage with your content.
You can click on the View Full Post/Page Report to get a more detailed statistics of your top posts and pages. When you do this, it’ll redirect you to your Google Analytics account.
Then, you can see a report like the one in the image below:
From there, you can check out the number of pageviews, unique pageviews, average time on the page, entrances, bounce rate, and exit percentage. You can get a clear idea of how users actually find your site content from this report.
Step 3: Explore More Reports in Your WordPress Google Analytics Dashboard
We just discussed the Overview Report in the previous step, but that’s not all MonsterInsights offers.
So, let’s explore more of the WordPress Google Analytics dashboard to find reports on how users see your website.
Now, ‘exploring’ doesn’t mean you have to actually go anywhere. Simply visit the tabs in the horizontal row on the reports page.
1. Publishers Report
The next tab after Overview Report is Publishers Report. It has a lot of information useful for viewing how people find your website.
As you click on the Publishers tab, you’ll see the following data:
- Top landing pages
- Top exit pages
- Top outbound links
- Top affiliate links
- Top download links
- Demographics and Interest categories
The reports here will provide your more insightful views of how users find and use your website. For example, the Top Landing Pages report shows the exact number of visits, average duration, and bounce rate for your top landing pages.
If you want to see more than top 10 pages and detailed reports, you can simply click the View Full Top Landing Pages Report at the bottom of the report.
2. eCommerce Report
If you are selling things from your website, eCommerce report includes very important data you’ll want to see.
Click on the eCommerce tab in MonsterInsights to get a quick glance at how your online shop is doing.
Then, you’ll see data such as your shop’s conversion rate, the number of transactions, how much revenue you’ve generated, and the average order value.
You can also see a list of your eCommerce shop’s top products. That way you’ll know which products to continue promoting.
This report is actually very useful to see how users find your online store. By analyzing this report, you can identify which products, shop pages, offers are doing well (and which are not).
3. Search Console
The Search Console report shows you the top 50 Google search terms your site’s ranking for.
This isn’t directly related to how users see or use your website but it’s insightful for learning how users come to your site.
If you want to learn how to configure and use Google Search Console, here’s our step-by-step tutorial.
4. Custom Dimensions Report
Google Analytics treats certain factors/ dimensions as primary dimensions and shows their metrics by default. But, if you want to know more than the primary dimensions, you’ll need to track secondary dimensions or custom dimensions.
Using MonsterInsights, you can track the following custom data:
- Most popular authors
- Most popular post types
- Most categories
- Most popular tags
- Best SEO score etc.
Using these metrics, you can have an idea of what users find most interesting on your site. Then, you can analyze the information, and make informed business strategies.
For a detailed look at how to use custom dimensions, you can check out this helpful guide on using custom dimensions.
5. Forms Report
Another important report helpful to see how visitors find your website is the Forms report. As contact forms are the main point of user interaction on your website, tracking these forms can give you an idea of how users actually find your site.
MonsterInsights supports all the major contact form plugins and provides you with a comprehensive report for your form conversions.
We hope this guide helped you to learn how to see how users find your website.
If you liked this article, you might want to check out our guide on creating Google Analytics Advanced segments. And, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook for more Google Analytics tutorials.