How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Website

Looking at your Google Analytics (GA) dashboard can feel like trying to read a different language, but it contains all the answers you need to create a better website. This guide will walk you through exactly how to translate that data into practical actions, from identifying your most popular pages to pinpointing what’s causing visitors to leave.

Start with the Basics: Answer Three Key Questions

Diving into every single report in Google Analytics is a surefire way to get overwhelmed. Instead of trying to boil the ocean, start by answering three fundamental questions about your website. These answers can be found in just a handful of straightforward reports.

1. Who Are My Visitors? (The Audience Report)

You can't improve your website without first understanding who you're improving it for. The Audience reports tell you about the people visiting your site, including their location, the devices they use, and more.

Where to find it: In the left-hand navigation menu, go to Audience > Overview.

Key Metrics to Watch:

• Users: This is the number of unique individuals who visited your site during your selected date range.
• Sessions: A session is a group of user interactions in a single visit. If one user visits your site three times, GA records one user and three sessions. This helps you understand engagement frequency.
• Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without any other interaction. A high bounce rate isn't always bad (for instance, on a contact page), but on a blog post, it might mean the content didn't match their expectations.
• Avg. Session Duration: The average length of a session. A longer duration generally signals that users are engaged and finding your content valuable.

Actionable Tip: Go to Audience > Mobile > Overview. Compare the Bounce Rate and Avg. Session Duration for Desktop, Mobile, and Tablet users. If your mobile visitors bounce much faster than desktop, it’s a big red flag that your mobile experience needs a serious review.

2. How Did They Find Me? (The Acquisition Report)

The Acquisition report is your guide to understanding which of your marketing efforts are actually working. It breaks down all your incoming traffic by its source, helping you decide where to double down and what to re-evaluate.

Where to find it: Go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

What the Channels Mean:

• Organic Search: Visitors who found you by typing a query into a search engine like Google or Bing. This is a direct measure of your SEO success.
• Direct: People who typed your website URL directly into their browser or used a bookmark. These are often returning visitors or people who already know your brand.
• Referral: Traffic that came from another website by clicking a link pointing to your site. This shows you who is talking about you online.
• Social: Visitors from social media platforms like X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. Helps you measure the impact of your social media marketing.
• Paid Search: Traffic from pay-per-click (PPC) ads, such as Google Ads campaigns.
• Email: Visitors who clicked a link in one of your email marketing campaigns.

Actionable Tip: Click on "Organic Search" to see which specific keywords people are using to find you (You must have Google Search Console linked for this data). Are these the keywords you’re trying to rank for? If not, you may need to adjust your content strategy to better align with user search intent.

3. What Did They Do On My Site? (The Behavior Report)

After a visitor lands on your site, what happens next? The Behavior reports show you which pages they view, where they spend the most time, and where they ultimately leave.

Where to find it: Go to Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.

What This Report Tells You:

The Landing Pages report is one of the most useful in all of GA. It shows you the first page a user "lands" on when they enter your site. Think of these as your website’s front doors. It also shows you engagement metrics for each specific landing page.

Look for pages with a high number of sessions but also a high bounce rate. This means a page is successfully attracting visitors, but it's failing to engage them enough to explore further. This could be due to slow loading times, confusing navigation, or content that doesn't deliver what the title promised.

Actionable Tip: Sort your Landing Pages report by "Bounce Rate." Look at the top pages with the highest bounce rate (and a significant number of sessions). Visit these pages yourself. Is the on-page experience letting you down? Is there a clear next step or call-to-action for the visitor to take? Sometimes, small tweaks like adding internal links to other relevant posts can dramatically lower your bounce rate.

Take It a Step Further: Performing a Simple Content Audit

Once you’re comfortable with the basics, you can use Google Analytics to perform a quick content audit and uncover your highest-performing assets. Your goal is to find your "greatest hits" and figure out how to replicate that success.

Step 1: Identify Your Strongest Content

Head over to the Behavior > Site Content > All Pages report. This report ranks all your pages by the number of Pageviews. By default, it gives you a good sense of your most popular content. Change the date range to the last three to six months to get a solid baseline.

Your top 10-20 pages are your powerhouse content. These are the topics, formats, and articles that resonate most with your audience.

Step 2: Understand the Context Behind the Traffic

Popularity alone doesn't tell the whole story. You need to know why a page is popular. To do this, use a Secondary Dimension.

1. Stay in the All Pages report.
2. Just above the data table, click the "Secondary Dimension" dropdown menu.
3. Select Acquisition > Source / Medium.

Your report table now shows you not only the most popular pages but also the primary channel driving traffic to each one. You might discover things like:

• A specific blog post gets most of its traffic from "google / organic," telling you it's a huge SEO success.
• Your homepage gets most traffic from "google / cpc," indicating your brand ad campaign is working.
• A case study page gets its traffic nearly exclusively from "linkedin.com / referral."

This context is gold. It shows you which types of content work best on which channels. You can use these insights to tailor future content for specific channels, like creating more SEO-focused, long-form articles or more shareable, bite-sized content for social media.

Fixing Friction: Finding and Resolving User Experience Issues

Google Analytics is an incredible tool for spotting hidden user experience (UX) problems that might be frustrating visitors and hurting your performance.

Find Your Slowest Pages

Website speed is everything. Slow pages can sink your SEO rankings and cause impatient visitors to leave without a second thought.

Where to find it: Go to Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings.

This report ranks your pages by their average load time. Sort the list from slowest to fastest to identify your biggest offenders. Pay special attention to pages that are both slow and popular. Improving the load speed on these high-traffic pages - often by compressing images or optimizing code - can deliver an immediate and significant impact on user engagement.

See Where People Leave

Every website has exits, but a high number of exits from a specific page in the middle of a user journey (like a checkout process) is a problem.

Where to find it: Go to Behavior > Site Content > Exit Pages.

This report shows you the last page a user viewed before leaving your website. It’s normal for pages like "Contact Us" or a "Thank You" confirmation page to have high exit rates. However, if you see high exit rates on pages that shouldn't be dead-ends (like a product page or step one of a sign-up form), it's a clear signal that something on that page is breaking the user's flow or causing confusion.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, but its true power is unlocked when you move from simply monitoring traffic to asking what that traffic behavior means. By using reports to understand your audience, acquisition channels, and on-site behavior, you can turn raw data into a clear roadmap for improving your website.

If navigating the complexities of Google Analytics and manually building reports still feels like a drag, this is precisely the problem we built Graphed to solve. You can connect your Google Analytics account in seconds and then use simple, natural language to get answers - like asking "show me my top 10 landing pages from organic search last month" and instantly getting a live-updating report without clicking through a dozen different menus. This gives you back the time to focus on actually acting on the insights, not hunting for them.