Google Analytics is the reference tool of web analytics for most of us. When you build a website, it’s one of the first things you set up so you can see how many visitors you receive and how they behave.
We’ve already talked about how to configure Google Analytics on your website. And we’ve seen how you can explore their reports to get the most out of this tool. Now, did you know that you can get a lot of fun facts about your website and its visitors with Google Analytics? Today we’re going to study some interesting points of Google Analytics that will help you spend some fun time researching data and getting to know your audience and your website better.
Interesting Facts You Can Discover Thanks to Google Analytics
The number of page views or the amount of time your visitors spend on your pages is well-known data that almost any article on Google Analytics will explain to you. To be a little more different and original, let’s ask ourselves 7 curious questions about our website and its visitors and see how to answer them with Google Analytics. I hope you like it!
Do You Have More Men or Women Visiting Your Website?
Men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Or so they say…. What is certain is that men and women in general see the world differently in some ways, so understanding whether your audience is made up of more men than women (or vice versa) can be interesting.
Depending on this, you can address your audience in one way or another (more direct, more informal, etc.). I don’t want this to be a war of genders to find out which one is better. But it’s clear that if you have a website about makeup and your audience is mostly male, you’re doing something wrong (or maybe not, and you’ve found a niche to exploit). I hope you see my point…
Google Analytics allows you to know the gender of your visitors in a very simple way. Go to the Audience menu and there you will find the Demographics panel. In our case, as you can see from the image above, we have a male majority. It’s that the web world in general and WordPress in particular is still dominated by men… but I hope this trend will change in the future and we’ll see more women interested in our blog!
It’s also interesting to see the age groups of the visitors. We have an average visitor age of 25-34 years, although this is perhaps somewhat obvious as it’s more difficult for the 55+ age group to be dominant, since they are not digital native generations.
In the same menu we can find the Interests option, where you can discover in which categories Google Analytics includes your visitors. In our case we see that our audience is made up of buyers and technolm philes from the business and web segment. It seems that we have not failed too much in trying to reach this kind of audience with the contents of our website, right?
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What’s The Weirdest Location From Where Visitors Visit You?
Google Analytics shows you a summary of the geographical locations from where your visitors visit your website. Usually, if you publish content in Spanish you will have visitors from countries that speak that language (Spain and Latin America).
In the Audience menu, go to the Geo option and from there to Location. There it is, the list with the ranking of visits by country. But have you ever looked at which is the strangest country from which you receive visitors?
At the bottom right corner of this list you have the option to advance in the ranking to reach the end. The result you’ll get is pretty interesting.
Our website has visitors from Guernsey, St. Kitts & Nevis, Palau and Togo, among others. Call me ignorant, but I have no idea where those countries are. It’s interesting to discover remote locations from where real people visit your website and view your content!
What Language is The Most Common Among Your Visitors? And The Least Common?
If you write your content in Spanish, the most common language of your visitors will be that one. To check that out, just go to the Audience menu, then go to the Geo information and finally to Language.
As expected, our visitors use Spanish and English as the most common languages. Nothing new here, as our website is in both languages. The curious thing is to go to the end of this list as we did with the list of countries in the previous section and see what we find out.
As you can see from the previous screenshot, there is one visitor who speaks Latvian (language code lv) and one who speaks Tamil (language code ta), which is apparently a language spoken in a region of India. You can find out which language each code is by looking at the ISO 639-1 language code reference found on Wikipedia.
From Which Devices do Your Visitors Access Your Website?
If you want the best possible user experience for your visitors, you will have to make sure that those who access your website from mobile devices do not have any problems. With thousands of different devices out there, a common option is to look at which devices are the most common and test your website on them.
In Google Analytics you can see the most used mobile devices for your visitors by going to the Audience menu and the Mobile Devices section. In our case we see Apple’s iPad at the top of the list.
We can also see which devices are the weirdest our visitors use. We can find here some curious gems, such as the device named Wiko Rainbow Jam, used by one visitor to our website. Apparently, it’s a cheap mobile phone from a French manufacturer. You can learn a lot if you pay attention to this Google Analytics data!
What Browsers And Operating Systems do Your Visitors Use?
In Google Analytics we go to the Acquisition menu, then to the Technology section, and finally to Browser and OS. There we find a list with the most used browsers by our visitors.
In this list you can find curiosities like that in our website there are 2 people who have accessed through their PlayStation 3. Are there really people who surf the Internet through their videogame console?
There are also some other rare features, such as Coc Coc (a Vietnamese browser), Maxthon (a Chinese browser) or Puffin (a Windows browser). I’ve never heard of these programs in my life.
Which Google Queries Lead to Your Website?
One of the questions you may ask yourself often when you manage a website is what are the queries visitors ask on Google that make them end up coming to your website. To find this out, you have to go to the Acquisition menu, then to Search Console and finally to Queries.
In our case, the query “how to start a blog” is one of the most popular ones in Spanish. This is something that we have facilitated by writing a lot of content on the subject of blogs and content generation.
On the other hand we can find funny things like the fact that people come to our website after searching “game of thrones quotes”. It seems that Ruth’s article on Game of Thrones quotes applied to the entrepreneurial world has been successful on Google!
What’s The Worst Page on Your Website?
It all depends on what you mean by “worst”. In this case, we will define the worst page as the one that brings visitors but has the highest exit rate. That is to say, it will be a page that attracts visitors but once they reach it, they don’t keep browsing your website and just leave. Which is something we clearly don’t want to happen.
Go to the Behavior menu, then to Site Content, and then to Exit Pages. In that view you will see which pages of your website attract traffic and repel it from your website. In our case we see that our blog post where we talk about common WordPress problems has a lot of visits, but also that 93% of the traffic that arrives there is lost.
Final Remarks
Interesting countries, unknown languages, gender wars, curious browsers and devices, funny keywords, or pages that are not as good as you think. All this data is in Google Analytics for you to spend some fun time exploring it.
Don’t stick to the surface data of your web analytics tool. If you dive a little into it, you’ll find some real pearls that will surely amuse you for a while. Have you discovered something interesting in your Google Analytics? Tell us what it is in the comments below. I’m sure you have some funny stories for us. We look forward to hearing from you ?.
Features image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.
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