Practical Google Analytics Reporting

The Search Console Report in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is organised into accounts, properties (web sites, apps) and views.  The initial view created contains all data and is unfiltered.  You can apply filters to the default unfiltered view to see subsets of the analytics data.   Filters that may be applied to create other views include a subdomain, a folder, or Adwords only data.   Users can be added to the account, property or view level.
Search Console is where Google actually shares the juicy information about what was searched for (queries or keywords), where your pages appeared (average search ranking position) and how often they were clicked.   If you select pages it will show which pages where actually clicked, how often they were shown (impressions) and the position they appeared in.   It doesn’t show the relationship between pages and queries or which pages Google selected to show for which queries.  You can see either keywords or pages but not both together.  The data is partially obscured by the way it is grouped, but it gives the best indication available of which pages are performing for which search terms.
Under your analytics account in property settings, there is a section ‘Search Console’ where you can link analytics to the data in Google Search console.
Once analytics is linked to search console, in your analytics reporting under Acquisition there is Search Console and Landing pages.  It’s a great report showing which landing pages got the most impressions and clicks from Search Console data.  Once clicked you also get bounce rate and transactions resulting from these visitors.
Things you can do from this report:

1. Are you getting the click throughs on the high impression pages?   Could the title or meta description do with some improving?  Try CAPS for the keywords in the title or meta description.
2. Sort by bounce rates, check the high bounce rate pages and see if the experience is up to scratch or does the content need a refresh?
3. Sort by clicks, from the pages which the highest clicks are you getting the transactions that you should be.  Is conversion at least site average conversion rate or better?  If not what are the roadblocks on your content or user experience which need improvement.
4. Schedule a weekly report to see whats happening with your organic search results.

Landing Pages and Bounce Rate

Often sorting the Behaviour / Site Content / Landing Page report by bounce rate results in a lot of pages with 100% bounce rate that are only visited once.   Typically the pages visited only one time have unique session info attached to the URL.  To avoid the 100% bounce single visit pages do an advanced search where you filter by bounce rate less than 100, meaning you show pages that have 99% bounce or lower, these pages by definition have more than 1 visitor and therefore data has a little more meaning.