Which Google Analytics Reports are Most Useful for Small Businesses?

There are simply thousands of ways to carve up the vast amount of data it can give you, but here are the reports that I find most beneficial (at a top level) and come back to time and time again.

CATEGORY: AUDIENCE 
REPORT: MOBILE
This shows you your percentage of mobile traffic, which is important for your site optimisation as well as targeting ads.

CATEGORY: ACQUISITION
REPORT: ALL TRAFFIC > SOURCE / MEDIUM
The best thing you can do with your traffic is add tracking parameters to the end, which I have previously explained here. This will signal to google where the traffic has come from and allow you to analyse and compare results between your difference marketing channels.
If you are using these parameters the source/medium report will show you results per marketing activity. Add a ‘secondary dimension’ of 'campaign' or 'ad content' to get even more granular.

CATEGORY: ACQUISITION
REPORT: TRAFFIC > ALL CHANNELS
Google will automatically segment your traffic by marketing channel even if you don’t use tracking parameters, so this report will give you a very top level view of what it/isn’t working at the very top level.

CATEGORY: BEHAVIOUR
REPORT: SITE CONTENT > ALL PAGES 
What pages are your visitors spending the most time on and which do the leave quickly from? Knowing this will help you prioritise your optimisation strategy and also identify any problems on site.

CATEGORY: BEHAVIOUR
REPORT: SITE CONTENT > LANDING PAGES
Where do people enter you site? Knowing that will make sure you maximise what they are seeing on those pages. This is especially useful when broken into marketing channel.

CATEGORY: BEHAVIOUR
REPORT: SITE SPEED
If your website is slow it will negatively affect your search engine optimisation, so it is worth checking in on this every now and again.

If you need help with your analytics and gaining insight from the myriad of marketing data then check out my insights service here.