You have a new website and you have access to Google Analytics—at least that's what your web master has told you. But what does that mean to you? How can you decipher this mountain of digital code into something meaningful for your business?

Promotional Consultant Today shares three ways marketers can use Google Analytics to gather valuable insights and create an actionable plan based on those insights.

1. Page Performance In Number of Conversions. You can run the report for any channel to identify the best converting pages by source to get better insights. A helpful report to run is one that analyzes individual page performance during a certain date range compared monthly or yearly for organic sessions. This provides insight into whether or not your site is increasing in authority for all pages or just a couple pages on a website.

After analyzing what pages are contributing to a loss of conversions, an action plan should be created to fix the issues that may be causing the decrease. If it is only one page that is contributing to a large loss of conversions, then a quick assessment can be made at the page level.

2. Mobile Is Different From Desktop. With the importance of mobile, marketers should be looking at mobile data to make actionable steps to optimize the experience for their audience.

For example, instead of looking at how many users are coming to a website via mobile, look how mobile users interact with the site. A great report to run is one that uncovers the engagement metrics of the mobile users. There are a lot of engagement metrics to focus on such as time per page and average pages per visit, but I like to keep it simple by looking at the bounce rate on mobile devices.

Once again, you can view the number of conversions via mobile as that is always a good metric to track. Viewing the mobile bounce rate by itself doesn't provide too much context. Of course, you can view the mobile pages that contain the highest bounce rate and analyze each page to see what you should do to lower the bounce rate. Or, you can compare the mobile bounce rate with the desktop bounce rate of a particular page. This comparison will help you understand how different the mobile experience may be for users and what needs to be done to make the experience better for either the mobile or desktop version.

Use the mobile page performance as a means of getting buy-in to test different types of content for mobile users. Showing the difference between mobile data and desktop will help create ideas on how to frame and show content to each user.

3. Get Your Own Site Search Data. One often overlooked report in Google Analytics is the site search report under the Behavior tab. To access this report, you will need to set up the functionality first. Once set up, Google Analytics will track the search terms that people use on a website's internal search tool. The site search report is helpful because it will show you exactly how many times the site search tool was used, what terms people search for and the page they search on. All three metrics within the site search report are important.

The search terms report will provide a list of keywords that people used on your website. One way to use this information is to create additional content on the most-searched terms. Adding more content based off of what visitors are searching for will provide your audience with the content they want. Besides creating more amazing content for your audience, you may discover that visitors aren't finding the right page easily enough. Instead, they might be searching for a particular page that would benefit them if included in the navigational structure.

Become familiar with some of the basic reporting on Google Analytics to become a more effective marketer for your business.

Source: Kevin Cotch is an SEO analyst on the team at TopRank Marketing.