The Behavior section is about how your users interact with your website or your app.
This section includes everything from what content people look at to how users flow between
pages or screens.
This section also includes the Site Search reports.
These reports provide valuable data about how users interact with your on-site search
engine.
This data can help you better understand the intent of your users and can help you discover
new opportunities for marketing campaigns.
In this lesson we'll cover: how to identify the most popular content on
your site, analyzing how visitors move from page to page
during their visit and how to analyze site search data.
Let's get started in the Behavior section by looking at the All Pages report.
The "Pageviews" metric in this report, allows you to easily see how frequently each page
on your site was visited.
By default, this report will show data by the page URI.
However, you may find it easier to read the All Pages report by switching the primary
dimension of the report to "Page Title."
Other metrics in the All Pages report, like "Avg.
Visit Duration," and "Bounce Rate," give an indication of how engaging users find each
page of your site.
You can sort the report by these metrics to quickly find low performing pages that need
improvement, or high performing content that you can use to guide future design.
The Content Drilldown report, groups pages according to directory.
You can click on a directory to see the pages of your site within that category.
This is especially useful if you're trying to understand how content in a certain section
of your site is performing.
Using the pie chart view, you can also quickly view which sections of your site are being
used the most by your visitors.
The Landing Pages report lists all of the pages through which people entered your site.
You can use this report to monitor the number of bounces and bounce rate for each landing
page.
Looking for high bounce rates in this report can help you identify which pages need to
be redesigned to be more effective.
The Exit Pages report shows you which pages of your site were the last pages of a user's
visit.
If you see pages in this report with a high exit rate that also function as landing pages,
you'll want to be sure to revisit those pages of your site to make sure they're optimized
and aren't driving people away from your site experience.
If you incorporate Flash, Ajax, or other kinds of interactive elements on your site, you
may wish to know how your visitors use them.
The Events reports provide a non-pageview based approach to tracking interactivity.
Events are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a page
or a screen.
Downloads, widgets, gadgets, Flash elements, AJAX elements, and video plays are all examples
of actions you might want to track with events.
Event Tracking is available for both web and app properties but requires additional coding
setup that should be completed by a qualified developer.
Let's take a look at the Top Events report.
"Categories" are the primary divisions of the types of events you have on your site.
Categories are at the root of Event Tracking, and should function as a first way to sort
the events in your reports.
"Videos" and "Downloads" are good examples of categories, though you can be as specific
or broad as your content requires.
The event "action" is a descriptor for a particular event category.
For example, you could define an action named "Play," "Stop" or "Pause" for a "Video" interaction.
You could also be more specific, and create an action called "Video almost finished" to
trigger when the playback slider on a video reaches the 90% mark.
The "label" attribute is an optional piece of information that provides more context
to the event action.
For example, if the action for your video player is "Play," then the label might be
the name of the video that is playing.
Finally, you have the option of setting a "value" with your event.
For example, if you want to be able to track how long it takes a video to load in your
user's browsers, you could set a value that indicates the video load time.
If you provide a search box on your site, use the Site Search reports to find out how
successful your visitors are when they search your site.
Why analyze how people search your site?
On both large and small sites visitors frequently use search boxes as a form of navigation.
By looking at what people search for, you can identify missing or hidden content on
your site, improve search results for key phrases, and even get ideas for new keywords
to use in marketing campaigns.
In order to set up Site Search tracking for your website, you'll need to have an administrator
configure your view settings.
The Search Terms report only includes visits during which a search was performed.
Each search term is listed in the table.
Looking at the search terms that people use to search once they are on your site can give
you ideas for keywords that might also help drive traffic to your site.
This report is also useful for investigating whether your site navigation could use some
improvement.
By adding in the secondary dimension "Refined Keyword" you can see when users are conducting
multiple consecutive searches on your site, presumably because they can't find what they're
looking for the first time.
Let's take a look at a few key metrics in this report:
The metric "Total Unique Searches" counts the number of times your site search was used.
This excludes multiple searches on the same keyword during the same visit.
The metric "Results Pageviews per Search" shows you how many pages of search results
your users visit after conducting a search.
The "Search Exits" metric shows the number of searches a visitor made immediately before
leaving the site.
The "Search Refinements" metric gives you the number of times a visitor searched again
immediately after performing a search.
The "Time after Search" metric shows you the average amount of time visitors spend on your
site after performing a search.
The "Search Depth" metric gives the average number of pages visitors viewed after performing
a search.
Finally, let's take a look at the Behavior Flow report.
This report visualizes the paths visitors travel from one page or event to the next,
and can help you discover what content keeps visitors engaged with your site.
When you open the report, you'll see green and blue boxes, or nodes, which represent
the pages or events through which traffic flows.
A connection between the nodes represents the path from one node to another and the
volume of traffic along that path.
By clicking a connection you can highlight just that segment of traffic through the entire
Behavior Flow.
The red drop-off after each node indicates where visitors left the flow completely.
Clicking on a specific node allows you to see which pages are grouped in a node and
highlight or explore traffic through that node.
By selecting the option to explore traffic through the node, you can see all the connections
to and from one particular page or group of pages on your site.
By honing in on one page specifically, you can analyze how effective the page is as a
landing page, indicated by the entrances in green, and where users navigate after landing
on the page.
You can also see how users arrived at a particular page before exiting the site to help you understand
your users' experience before they chose to leave.
To change which page or set of pages you view in the report, you can use the edit button
above the central node.
For example, if we only wanted to view the behavior flow of any users who navigate through
our online store search page, we could enter the request URI for that page here.
Once you apply the settings your report will show the navigation flow through the specific
page you selected.
Finally, you have the option to adjust the Behavior Flow report to show just page interactions,
just event interactions, or both types of interactions together using the menu at the
top of the report.
By choosing to view both page and event interactions together, you can get an even more granular
picture of how users engage with and progress through your site.
The blue boxes in this version of the report represent event interactions, whereas the
green boxes represent page interactions.
For more information on using the Behavior reports in Google Analytics, check out the
resources in this lesson and visit the Google Analytics Help Center.