It’s key to understand how engaged your users are and how they interact with your site. The following tips will help you use Analytics to visualize user interactions on your site, and understand why engagement and loyalty metrics matter.

In-Page Analytics provides clickthrough data in the context of your actual site, and is a highly effective tool to let you make a visual assessment of how users interact with your web pages. You can answer questions like “Are my users seeing the content I want them to see?” or “Are my users finding what they’re looking for on the page?” This feature also helps you determine the best location to place your ad units. You can access your In-Page Analytics through the ‘Behavior’ section on the Reporting tab.

Real-Time reports allow you to monitor visitor activity as it happens on your site. They help you understand how your systems are reacting, such as when you send out an email campaign or engage in marketing that is temporary in nature. Real-Time reports provide alerting, giving insight into things that are new or different such as a sudden increase in site traffic. Additionally, you can use them to measure the immediate impact of social media.

Google Analytics provides you with behavioral reports that illustrate the engagement and loyalty aspects of your visitor behavior. The Frequency & Recency report lets you see the level of user interest in your site based on frequency of visits and length of time between visits. If visitors come once but don’t return, you might infer that your site content and design are not sufficiently engaging or not easy to navigate. Some additional relevant reports such as New vs Returning and ‘Engagement’ are available under the Audience section on the Reporting tab. For more detailed information about how site visitors interact with each page, I suggest you use the ‘event tracking method’ that Google Analytics evangelist Justin Cutroni shared on his blog to get an accurate measurement of which articles are actually read.

I’ve created a custom Engagement & Monetization Dashboard for you to download. Once downloaded, just select which profile you’d like to import. You can access this dashboard any time by clicking ‘Dashboards’ under the Reporting tab in your Analytics account.