Identify high performing channels in GA

Step-by-step Playbooks
, , , , ,
1

Contributors

@jamaicawinshipgmail-com @andreea-macoveiciuc-content-expert @danielisler1gmail-com

Business Benefits

Improve your ROI.

Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

Channels are the categories that indicate how users found your website. The default channels available in GA are:

  • Direct: visitors who come to your site without going through another channel.
  • Organic search: traffic arriving at your site from search engines.
  • Social: visitors who come to your site by clicking a link from social media.
  • Email: traffic that comes to your site from email campaigns.
  • Affiliates: traffic that comes to your site from affiliate marketing campaigns.
  • Referral: non-paid traffic that comes to your site from another website.
  • Paid search: traffic from PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns.
  • Other advertising: traffic that comes to your site from paid advertising that doesn’t include PPC or display ads, such as CPV (cost-per-view) video advertising.
  • Display: traffic from display ads.
  • (unavailable) or (other): traffic that GA isn’t able to identify.

Change the date range to track specific time periods.

You can set a custom date range or select one of:

  • Today.
  • Yesterday.
  • Last week.
  • Last month.
  • Last 7 days.
  • Last 30 days.

Review at least 3 months’ worth of data to spot trends. Look at a shorter time frame such as yesterday or the last 7 days to identify urgent issues that need to be addressed. For example, by looking at yesterday’s data, you may be able to tell if your GA tracking code suddenly stopped working properly. Tick the Compare to checkbox to compare a channel’s performance to a previous time period. This allows you to check whether its performance has improved or declined over a period of time.

Look at the number of users, new users, and sessions from each channel to get an idea of what percentage of traffic it’s responsible for.

  • Users are all visitors who have initiated a session on your website during the specified date range.
  • New users are the number of visitors who have visited your website for the first time.
  • Sessions are groups of user interactions that take place on your website within the specified date range.

Look at bounce rate, pages/session, and average session duration for each channel to determine which channels drive engaged viewers to your website.

  • Bounce rates indicate the percentage of users that leave your website after only visiting one page.
  • Pages/session is the average number of pages that a user views during each session.
  • Average session duration is the average length of time users spend on your website during each session.

You should be looking for low bounce rates, high numbers of pages/session, and high average session durations. These metrics indicate that visitors from these channels are highly engaged with your site’s content.

Analyze the conversions for each channel by looking at the Conversions columns.

You’ll need to set goals or ecommerce tracking in GA to track conversions. Once they are set up, you’ll be able to see the following metrics for each channel:

  • Goal Conversion Rate: The percentage of sessions that have led to conversions, such as newsletter sign-ups or form completions.
  • Goal Completions: The number of site visitors who have completed a goal.
  • Goal Value: A dollar amount associated with each conversion.

Gather more insights about each channel’s performance by looking at secondary dimensions.

Secondary dimensions allow you to see more information about your website traffic. By looking at secondary dimensions, you can gather more information, such as:

  • The age groups of website visitors that come from social media.
  • How many website visitors from each channel are located within a certain country, region, or city.
  • Whether users who visit your website from each channel are using mobile or desktop devices.
  • The time of day or day of week that visitors from each channel came to your website.

Click the Secondary dimension dropdown menu and select which dimension you’d like to apply.

Review your GA reports at least once per month to ensure your marketing efforts are on track.

Use the data to review your paid and organic marketing campaigns, analyze trends, and identify new opportunities for future projects.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:45:39Z