Google Analytics for UX designers, How can GA help UX Designers?

This article is intended for Google Universal Analytics and not Google Analytics 4 but, you can still follow along and cope with the changes, and you’ll surely get the same results.

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There’s something all we can agree on, that is, conversions matter more than anything on your website. Google Analytics can help you by generating reports that tell you about user behavior, bounce rate, and where they are coming from, information that you can use to modify the user experience of your website and increase conversions. Something that can help a UX designer reshape the site and drive traffic in the right direction.

This post is divided into five parts, that include:

1. Traffic analysis
2. Behavior analysis
3. Funnel and goal creation and analysis
4. Events
5. Conversions

Traffic Analysis: It’s just as simple as it seems. You track the channels that drive traffic to your website and how they behave. The traffic driven to your website from Facebook might be more than Instagram or LinkedIn. But the conversion rate of traffic from Facebook would be much lower than IG or Linkedin. You should treat each sort of traffic differently.

To see the traffic analysis in Google Analytics,

1. Login to your Google Universal Analytics account
2. Go to Conversions > Goals > Overview
3. Look for the term Source/Medium and click on View Full Report in the lower right corner.

Analyzing the traffic and their behavior, UX designers can easily make changes that’ll drive traffic into pages where they’ll complete the conversion. Filter the report to get deeper insights into specific traffic channels.

Behavior analysis: UX designers, imagine having a report that tells you where your visitors struggle the most or tend to leave the site. Are your visitors abandoning the cart? or are they leaving from the product page?

Google Analytics generates reports that tell you exactly all the things mentioned above, allowing you to make changes to your website’s UX. GA tells you exactly:

1. Where users are landing
2. The users’ whole journey on your website
3. Steps they take after landing on your website
4. If you need to reduce steps to make conversion happen
5. Common pages where the user seems to leave your website

You can see this behavior report under behavior flow in Analytics > Behaviour > Behaviour Flow. This report shows you where your visitors land and their journey on your website. Focus on one page at a time to know where that page takes the users to and analyze your way forward.

Goals Creation and Analysis:

The process of creating a Goal is as simple as it sounds

1. Go to the Admin panel on the lower-left side
2. Select Goals from the view column and select Add Goal
3. During the goal creation process, you’ll see two options, Template and Custom. Choose one based on your requirements.
4. Enter the Goal Name and Type and specify the destination URL.

To analyze your goals, Go to Conversions > Goals > Goal Flow. This flow chart helps you see how visitors jump from one page to another and where they are leaving on their course to converting.

Funnel Creation and Analysis:

To create a funnel, press Goal Details after Goal setup and description and turn on the Funnel switch. Name each step, and in the page sections input, the page URL except the domain name such as Test.com/product/ only enter the /product/ in the Screen/Page field. You can add up to 20 steps in a funnel.

To view your funnel go to Conversions > Goals > Funnel Visualization, where you can check the funnel report. This report gives you a clear picture of the entire user journey, and a scope to analyze the exit ratio of each step of your funnel.

Events: Want to track small interactions your users make on your website? Phone number clicks, Email clicks, add-to-cart interactions, form submission, and even how much the user has scrolled down in one of your pages are tracked using the Event feature, thanks to Google analytics.

A bit of JavaScript code can track them, using primarily Four parameters.

1. Category (Group several events with a meaningful name with this parameter)
2. Action (Defines what a user does)
3. Label (Optional, can be used to track additional data)
4. Value (Optional, can be used to add numeric value)

To analyze these specific events with a flow chart, go to Events > Event Flow. It gives you a set of transparent numbers for each event, action, and drop-offs.

Conversion: Every UX designer has a roadmap created for the website visitor. But before converting, the user usually visits the website more than once, and this is where the Path Length Report comes in handy. Access this report from Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Path Length. Path Length report helps you track the actual business conversion value in the context of the number of website visits.