OK, now to the meat of this article. How to find the most relevant website data for your Fishing Lodge in Google Analytics.  Note that Google Analytics does some customization of the navigation heading and choices so what we state below are the "common" text links they use. After you have logged into Google Analytics, in the left hand navigation,  click  the Reports icon then find the link in the navigation for Traffic acquisition.  In the resulting report, below the chart, there will be a drop down selector which will currently show Session primary ...  Click the down arrow and change this to Session source / medium.  This report shows you the Source / Medium of your various traffic sources, such as "google / organic", "google / ppc", "facebook.com / referral", and more. 

The columns in the report provide you with traffic quality information.  Generally speaking, a higher number will mean higher traffic quality so a measurement such as Engagement Rate will show which traffic provides user that are more interested in your website content .  If you switch to User acquisition in the left hand navigation then switch the drop down to Session source / medium again, you will be able to view the time per session which will help you understand how engaged your site visitors are, or another way of stating this, is how well are you providing meaningful content to your visitors.

In either the User Acquisition report or the Traffic Acquisition report, there is a column in the report titled Event Count. If you have your tracking set up properly, this is where you would be able to select the drop down under the title and select a specific event, such as Conversion - Form Completion. This then answers the important question of what marketing activities (the Source / Medium) are driving the results (Conversions) that bring value to your business.  Based on this data, you can make informed decisions about where to invest your future marketing budget dollars (and time) and also you can make some predictable estimates about what results you can expect if you make these investments. So if your fishing lodge website content is attracting high quality traffic, you will be able to measure the value in terms of Conversions, or leads. Similarly, if your Facebook content is also generating traffic to your website, you will be able to measure the value of that traffic, and therefore, the value of your Marketing efforts.

Geo Location Report

Further down the left hand navigation, there will be a heading for User" Choose the Demographic details to initially see the amount of traffic on your website by country.  You can select the Country drop down to get a more detailed level or reporting such as Region which is equivalent to States and Provinces. There are also ways to filter this to specific countries and then the Regions within. Contact us if you need some help with this.  If you find 50% or more of your traffic comes from outside your target area, then your content is not well targeted, and likely your traffic is lower quality. If you are intending to target all of North America, but all your traffic is local, then you will not get the market response you want. This report includes the behavioral measures of Engagement rates and Avg Session Duration. These are excellent measures of how much visitors, from different geographies, value your content.

By Device

In the left hand navigation, click Tech to see the browser types or device types of your website users. There was a time when most websites were experiencing only about 30% of their traffic coming from a mobile device. Now, it is likely that your website sees 60% of it's visitors on a mobile device.

Web designers are almost exclusively designing sites to be mobile friendly, most often with a responsive website design that adapts the display to the device. (If not, find another developer.) But the important data in this report tell us how users on different devices interact with your website. If you find the Engagement Rate and Avg Session Duration is drastically lower, and declining with screen size, then you have a mobile user experience problem. Given the trends mentioned above, if you have a problem, it's only going to get worse. In the fishing lodge market, there is a heavy emphasis on most website design on the visuals, fishing trophy pictures, fishing lodge images, scenery. If your website, and website images, are not well suited to mobile, more that half of your potential leads may struggle with your site. Those users are far more likely to bounce to a competitors site.

Landing Pages Report

Moving back up the left side navigation, find the  Landing Page report. What we love about this report is that it gives you a hit list of pages that are ripe for content improvements. Assuming you want to appeal to your site visitors. You have put money and effort into getting visitors to your site. Now work on engaging them. Higher engagement makes a visitor more likely to interact with your site, more likely to contact you in regard to what products or services you offer.

The Landing pages report shows which pages on your site visitors most often see first, that is, which link they clicked on in the Google search results or referrals from other sources. Then those wonderful measures of Engagement rate and Avg Session Duration make it obvious if they like what they see, or if they are bouncing back to the search engine results to find a competitors page.