What basics should we be looking at in Google Analytics?

[IcarusSEO]

We have GA set up on our site for a while now. However, we do not look at the data.

We did today and it's quite overwhelming.

Is there anything in specific we should start with? A top 3 items we should start to monitor each week and try to improve?

Bonus Question: Is there a way to use analytics to find out who are competitors are?

[brooksmanley]

Touching your bonus question:

GA will not tell you who your competitors are, however they did roll out a feature somewhat recently that allows you to see how you're doing in comparison to businesses in the same industry as you. You can find this:

Audience > Benchmarking > Channels

Select your industry vertical, region, and average number of daily sessions to find out how you stack up to what probably amounts to your competition.

Hope that's helpful!

[ThompsonPaul]

You're right, GA data can be overwhelming if you've never looked at it before, Icarus. I almost always find the most useful place to start is the Channels report **Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. **It will show you your current traffic divided out by the primary sources, and will also show you the comparable bounce rate, time on page etc for each.

The other report that's pretty well always essential is the Content report Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages. This will show you which individual pages are getting the most visits on the site.

Use the date selector in the top right corner to review the last month's data, and then to compare it to the previous month, or the same period of the previous year. The latter is important for sites that have seasonally-variable traffic, as it might not be sensible to compare Christmas traffic to November, for example.

Beyond that, it's going to depend on why type of site (e-commerce, lead gen, publishing) and what elements of your site you're working on to improve, to determine what might be most useful to look at.

And for the bonus, no, nothing in Analytics will tell you about your competitors. GA is for showing you what's happening on your own site.

Hope that gets you started?

Paul

P.S. Once you get going with your data, you're going to want to set up some shortcuts (quick ways to navigate to reports that usually take a number of clicks,) and Dashboards (collections of information you've decided you want to check frequently in one place instead of having to navigate through the interface each time.)