Simple Google Analytics: Looking at the Pages Report
Google Analytics sounds complicated -- and it is -- but since it will help you reach your reading audience, every author should have and use Analytics. But let's simplify by looking at just a couple of reports and ignoring the rest.
The Google Analytics that is currently available to us is GA4, which is quite a bit different from the old version, so some of us are still learning how to understand where the data is. There used to be a report called "All Pages," but that information is now reported under "Pages and Screens: Page Title and Screen Class." "Pages" refers to website pages and "Screens" refers to mobile apps. Most authors will have websites and therefore pages and page titles.
This report is useful because it tells you what people are looking at when they are on your website. When you know on which pages they spend time you can give them more of what they want and less of what they don't. Then they'll stay on your site longer, come back more often, and tell their friends so you can sell more books. You'll also figure out where to stop wasting your time so you can focus on efforts that will give you a better return on your investment.
The Pages and Screens report may already be loaded on your Reports Snapshot page in GA4. If not, click on the Reports tab in the left-hand column and then on Engagement. Pages and Screens will be listed under there.
In the Reports Snapshot, you can click on "view pages and screens" to see the full report.
The graph at the top shows how many times the most popular pages were viewed. Below is a list of the pages viewed by order of popularity. Your list may be longer than one page, so you can click on the arrow to see more.
Usually, the Home page is the most-viewed page because that's what you put on your business card and what author fairs use when marketing your attendance. If you share links to your blog posts in a newsletter, or if you are running ads on social media, these may be your next most-viewed pages.
You'll also be able to see how many times a page was viewed and an average of how long folks spent on each page. Obviously, if you're blogging or have a lot of content for folks to see, you want them to spend a good amount of time seeing it.
New on GA4 compared to the old version is "Event Count" and "Key Events." It used to be that Google Analytics would report that someone went to your page and they stayed there for so many seconds or minutes. Now, Google can tell you more about what that someone did while they were on that page. "Scroll" is an event, for instance. If your visitor is scrolling, they are more engaged with the content on your page than just glancing at the headline. Events include actions such as submitting a form to be on your email list or watching your video.
Getting feedback can be inspirational, especially for writers who spend so much time alone with their computer. If you consider GA4 in that light, it's pretty interesting to peruse the reports and then try beating last month's numbers. Take a look for yourself!
This article was updated August 2024.