Active users reports display daily, weekly, bi-monthly and monthly website stats. This report is helpful when you are looking at your daily website visitors, and determining how to drive more visitors.

Whether your business is local or international business, its beneficial to know exactly where in the entire world your core audience lies, and where your services will be of most use. With this report, you can break down the overall traffic of your website country-wise and see where most of your audience is located.

Google Analytics is pretty sophisticated in differentiating between new and returning visitors. It does so by checking the visitor’s browser to determine if it will categorize him as a returning visitor. The new vs returning visitors report is helpful to see the number of new visitors you are acquiring.

The Google Analytics device category reports are useful to know the number of website visitors who are browsing through a mobile or tablet. Reports are generated for each device category, and it is also possible to further break down this report to view which mobile brand your audience uses.

Use flow reports to see the traffic flow for a specific source or country. For example, you can check where do the visitors from the United States navigate after visiting the landing page, and whether they leave your website or move around to explore  other pages in it. Additionally, track top pages, along with which pages are most often causing your visitors to leave [called an 'exit' page].

Mainly used when running paid advertising, the channels report displays the top marketing channels which drive traffic to your website. There are eight types of default channels in Google Analytics:

1. Organic Search

2. Paid Search

3. Display

4. Direct

5. Referral

6. Social

7. Email

8. [Others]

The landing pages report displays the top pages that are ranked on Google search. This shows the complete picture of how your pages are performing along with impressions, clicks CTR [clickthrough rates] and average position on search results. This report provides data about what users see in Google search results before they decide to click to your site (or some other site). You can use this data to identify opportunities and prioritize development effort to increase the number of visitors to your site.

If desired, you can set up paid campaigns to drive traffic and generate sales. It is quite important to measure the performance of each campaign because chances are, you might be spending big bucks on your ads but not getting any results. The Campaigns report in Google Analytics lets you know all about your marketing campaigns. Whether it is a newsletter, Adwords or any custom campaign tagged with UTM parameters, the all campaigns report displays them all.

Behavior Flow report displays a visual representation of how traffic flows on your website. It displays the pages on which visitors land and on what pages do they navigate to next. This report is helpful in determining your site engagement. You can determine if the visitors find your content helpful and clicking on any CTA [call to action] button.

When adding content and/or blog pages, this is an important report to keep an eye on every week.

Which post has the highest page views, the average time spent by users on page, and bounce rate. You can change the primary dimension to view pages by title and content groupings.

Event tracking in Google Analytics lets you record specific actions. The action might be a pdf download, a form submission or a video play. You can track everything by simply inserting a piece of code to your analytics tracking code. For example, you can track your “Contact us” page form and determine how many visitors actually use this form to contact you. Diving a bit deeper you can set up scroll tracking to measure for how long visitors scroll your page.

Referral reports in Google Analytics show the list of sites which are redirecting traffic to your page. This report usually doesn’t include organic search and advertising visits. You can look into this report and analyze how visitors from these referrals behave on your site. You can further evaluate this report to see how long users stay on your site and which pages they visit.

Defining goals and setting them in your Google Analytics account should be the most important step. Setting up goals can help you measure if you are achieving your business objectives. For example, end goal may be to have site visitor click through to a url, or fill out a contact us form, or even as simple as click through to a desired page [ie: about us].

The goal report in Google Analytics displays the number of each goal conversion within the specified date range.