For marketers, there are few skills more important than a deep understanding of Google Analytics and its data measurement capabilities.
After all, this is the tool that tells you if your efforts are paying off.
Unfortunately, mastering Google Analytics can be a challenge, even for experienced marketers. There is too much data and not enough user-friendly sections.
To help you, I've put together a list of seven standard and custom reports that you can use right away to get a better view of your marketing performance.
1.- Mobile performance report
You already know this: Our world is a mobile world. The total number of mobile users already exceeds the total number of desktop users…
…And mobile e-commerce represents almost the 30 percent of all e-commerce in the US…
In fact, mobile is so important now that Google penalizes even non-mobile websites.
For sellers, knowing how their products perform on smaller screens is vital to staying alive in the SERPs and gaining more customers.
The mobile performance report shows how well your site (not app) is optimized for mobile and where you need to make improvements.
You can even segment the new report to see which mobile devices/browsers are being used to access your site. This will tell you if your site is performing poor on some devices.
Accessing this report is easy: just go to Audience -> Mobile -> Overview.
You will see the performance of your site on different platforms:
Take note of bounce rate, time on site and page views to see if your user experience is failing on one or more mobile channels.
2.- Acquisition traffic report
Want to know if people are actually clicking on your ads? If that guest post you published previously – is it driving traffic to your website? What about your SEO strategy? Is it really working?
The traffic acquisition report will tell you all this and more. For many sellers, this will be their first step in the process of obtaining information.
This is a standard report, so it can be found under Procurement -> Overview.
You will have a quick summary of your traffic sources.
An interesting fact is the Referral “References” tab (Acquisition -> Overview -> All traffic -> Referrals). This report will tell you which external sites drive traffic to your site.
Clicking on a referring website will show you the exact pages that visitors use to enter your site.
3.- Content Efficiency Report
Do you generate a lot of content on your website and find tracking each time a little more overwhelming?
Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 and a Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, created this report to solve this problem.
This report tracks posts, page views, bounces, and goal achievement to help you answer questions like:
- What content is engaging my audience the most?
- What type of content (images, videos, GIFs, infographics, reviews) works best with my readers?
- What content converts readers into customers?
- What content do most of your users share?
Here is the direct link to generate this report (you must sign in to Google Analytics first).
4.- Keyword Analysis Report
Getting organic traffic from Google is great. Unfortunately, since Google started encrypting search data in 2012, the Organic Traffic Keywords report has shown this:
However, you can still gain a ton of knowledge about your visitors by tracking raw keyword performance.
This report created by Econsultancy analyzes the most popular keywords coming (and available) to your site. Shows visitor values, conversion rates, goal attainment, and page load time for each keyword.
Use this data to find out which keywords are working best, how many of them are actually contributing to your goals, and which keywords you need to optimize in the future?
5.- New and returning visitors
Getting a user to your site for the first time is great. Getting them to visit you again is even better. After all, Return visitors usually end up becoming readers, followers, and customers.
This standard report in Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your users are returning to your site.
You can find it by going to Audience -> Behavior -> New VS Returning Visitors in the Analytics account.
Typically, metrics for new and returning users are quite different. Returning visitors tend to stay longer and have lower bounce rates.
6.- Landing pages report
Users will enter your site from all types of pages. Some will type the URL directly, some will find a page through search engines, and some others will click on a link shared on your Twitter account.
This report will tell you which pages visitors are landing on when they come to your site. Based on the data in this report, you can find out how users interact with your site.
For example, if the report shows that some pages have a substantially higher bounce rate than others, you can take steps to make the high bounce rate pages more attractive.
Find the report under – Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.
7.- Bounce Percentage VS Exit Percentage
El "Bounce Rate” is the percentage of visitors who take no action and leave from the same page they landed on.
El “Percentage of Exit” measures the percentage of visitors who visit more than one page on your site before leaving.
This report compares bounce rate vs exit rate for different pages on your site.
You can find this under Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages:
Next, select “Bounce Rate” and “Exit Rate” in the Explorer tab.
This will give you a visual comparison between bounce and exit rate for all your pages. You can drill down further to get data for each page.
Use this report to find pages with low engagement and detect UX problems on your site. For example, if visitors are leaving a three-page article after reading only the first two pages, there is probably something that is making them leave on the second page (too many ads, bad copy, a distracting link in the sidebar, etc.
Now up to you
Google Analytics is an essential analytics tool for any marketer, but getting the most out of it can be a challenge most of the time. By using a mix of pre-built custom reports and standard reports, you can gain valuable insights about your users.
Google Analytics Solutions Gallery is particularly useful for someone new to analytics. You can import expert-created report templates into your Analytics account to quickly build powerful dashboards. You can also use these reports as guides to help you understand this amazing tool better.
Source: Search Engine Land
