The most frequently asked questions about customer behavior on Google Analytics get answered.

How do I track customer behavior on Google Analytics?

Google Analytics can collect a lot of different kinds of data about your customer behavior. If you have only basic Google Analytics tracking implemented (to track only pageviews), it already records the number of users that visited your site, sessions, duration of those sessions and the average number of pageviews per session. This data can be reported for each of your traffic sources separately to get insights about the quality of traffic different channels bring to your site and how engaged the audience is.

Among Google Analytics’ standard behavior reports, you can find the Behavior Flow report, which is very useful for understanding how users navigate your site and typical post-visit sequences in this flow. Here is what this report looks like:

If you also have event tracking implemented, you can observe events with pages in the same sequences:

You can configure view type and level of detail in this report’s dropdown menu:

Google Analytics’ event tracking features are very useful if you want more information about user behavior than just data about navigation. Events can be configured for any action that happens on the page. The most popular types of event to track are clicks on different buttons and links, page scrolling, viewing video, form submissions, adds to cart, site search events and so on. For each type of event in the custom category, the action and a label can be assigned. Moreover, it is possible to assign some value to each event. All these settings make it possible to create complex tracking systems that are able to evaluate each user and session.

With events, it is also possible to track JavaScript errors and 404 errors so you can evaluate how these errors affect user behavior and conversion rates.

Google Analytics allows you to track internal site searches, which is an important type of user behavior. If you have this feature properly configured, you can see in the standard reports the percentage of users who use site search, popular search terms, search categories, percentage of search refinements and other useful information.

If you are interested in user on-page behavior, the Chrome plugin Page Analytics (by Google) (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/page-analytics-by-google/fnbdnhhicmebfgdgglcdacdapkcihcoh) is a good option. With this plugin, you will be able to see which links and buttons users click directly on your page. Here is what this looks like:

For better visualization, you can change the mode in the same plugin to view with colors:

In the standard audience reports, you can also find useful information about user behavior.

For example, Cohort Analysis reports provide information on user retention. If you are a publisher who is focused on audience loyalty, this report will come in handy. If you do not have any experience with this type of report, this article will help you to understand how to use it best.

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