Exploring Google Analytics Reports

            Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that provides insight into website performance through measurement of multiple metrics.  Google Analytics data can be segmented into four groups; audience, content, conversions, and traffic sources.  Each group provides valuable, actionable data to improve site performance.  We will examine each group and the reports available in more detail.

Audience

            Audience data measures unique variables about the visitors to a website.  Some of the most important metrics in this section include visits, unique visitors, pages per visit, average visit duration, and percentage of new visits.  These metrics can shed light on the level of engagement users are having with a site.  For example, pages per visit measures how many pages on average are being viewed during a visitor’s session.  If this number is increasing over time, users are viewing more content on the site.  If this number is decreasing, then users are not exploring multiple pages and ways to increase engagement should be explored.

            The percentage of new visitors is also a useful metric, identifying new visitors compared to returning ones.  Measuring the number of returning visitors shows how much loyalty users have to the site.  Reports can also show other dimensions segmented by new or returning visitors, such as pages per visit and average visit duration.  This data could show whether returning visitors spend more time or view more pages than new visitors.  If returning visitors do have higher engagement, then focus should be on converting new visitors into returning visitors.

            Lastly, the audience segment includes a breakdown of the technology used to get to the site.  Visits can be segmented by browser, device, and network.  This information can be used to test how the website looks on each browser to ensure the user experience is as good as possible.  Device data can be used in multiple ways.  For example, when deciding to create a mobile site or application, data on which pages are accessed the most on mobile devices can be a great starting point for the content that should be included.  Also, if the majority of mobile traffic comes from iPhones, an iPhone application should be created with priority over the Android platform. 

Traffic Sources

            The traffic sources section provides useful information about how users arrive at the site.  Google Analytics has a great feature that displays a pie chart outlining where traffic came from bucketed into search traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic, and campaigns (or paid) traffic.  Then one can drill down to learn more specifics about each bucket.  For example, drilling down into search traffic will display the percentage of organic versus paid, as well as the keywords searched.  This data can help SEO efforts or be used to evaluate how well paid search is performing.

            Drilling down into referrals can help users understand what other sites are driving traffic to a site, including social.  The referral report can identify where users are sharing the site link on Facebook or blogs, and how many people are visiting from those sources. 

            The campaign traffic section pulls together any paid advertising a company is running.  It can track how display, video, mobile, or social advertising is driving traffic to the site.  In looking at all the traffic source reports, Kaushik (2013) states “you quickly end up with a robust understanding of all the things the company is doing and a detailed understanding of paid and organic search performance” (para. 17).

Content

            Content is one of the most insightful sections for understanding what pages are performing well and which ones need some improvement.  In this section, each page can be analyzed by the number of visits, pages per visit, average visit duration, and bounce rate.  One useful way to use these metrics is through the landing page report.  This report shows the top landing pages that users enter on a site.  Kaushik (2013) recommends starting by looking at the top 20 landing pages and analyzing bounce rate.  Specifically, the pages with highest bounce rate means the users came in on that page and left before exploring other pages.  Reasons for high bounce rate can include missing calls to action, broken links, or not enough content.  This is an easy place to see where optimizations should be made.

            The content reports can also identify which content has the most pageviews and which pages users are spending the most time.  Using these insights, a company can focus on creating similar content to the best performing pages.  Another metric under the content section is site speed, which can identify pages that are not loading quickly and could have a negative effect on visits and engagement.

Conversions

            The conversion section is one of the most important sections for measuring performance.  Goals can be set up in Google Analytics to track specific actions that a company wants users to take on the site.  These actions can include downloads, sign-ups, or registrations.  Goal reports can be very effective at tracking return on investment.  Once goals are set up, reports can show the actions leading up to a goal, number of completed goals, and the value of those conversions.  One metric that is often used as a key performance indicator with conversions is conversion rate.  Google Analytics makes it easy to view conversion rates across goals and can depict trends over time. 

            Another report that can help identify how users convert is the conversion funnel report.  This report can show the steps a user takes leading up to a goal.  Through this report, a company can identify where drop off occurs in purchases or conversions.  Not only can the pages leading up to the conversion be reported, but also the traffic sources.  Knowing that paid search visitors have a higher conversion rate than social referrals can help determine where budget should be applied to increase return on investment. 

            Overall, Google Analytics provides mountains of data, everything from visitor locations to highest visited pages to where quality traffic originates.  While there are at least 80 standard reports to view this data, Google Analytics also offers custom reports (Maisner, 2013).  Custom reports are a valuable way to analyze dimensions and metrics that are specifically relevant to a business.  Since goals, conversions, and KPIs are unique for each company, the custom report feature is a necessity to successfully analyze performance metrics.    

References

Kaushik, A. (2013, January 2). Google Analytics tips: 10 data analysis strategies that pay off big. Occam’s Razor [Blog]. Retrieved on June 23, 2013 from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/google-analytics-tips-data-analysis-reports/

Maisner, R. (2013, May 23). 9 downloadable custom Google Analytics reports. iMedia Connection. Retrieved on June 24, 2013 from http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/33968.asp

Lights. Camera. Action!

            The goal of Web analytics is to produce actionable data.  Online marketing is the first channel that can provide marketers with volumes of data in real time.  The key to using Web analytics is to filter out the important data with which marketers can take immediate action.  This ability for immediate action doesn’t exist in the other channels of advertising.  For example, when a TV buy is placed, a marketer must wait until the actual ratings are published to see how many people “watched” their commercial.  If they wanted to measure awareness or brand lift, research that could take weeks or months would need to be done.  There is no ability for a marketer to take action until the campaign is over.  The ability to optimize digital performance in real time is what makes digital unique.

            When deciding where to start with the data, marketers should first look at their key performance indicators (KPIs).  KPIs are metrics that help a marketer understand how they are doing against their objectives (Kaushik, 2010).  These metrics are usually unique to the company and directly tie into the business objectives.  This is where actionable data can be found.

            The KPIs should be established from marketer’s business objectives.  These objectives should be “DUMB: Doable. Understandable. Manageable. Beneficial.” (Kaushik, 2010).  It is critical for a company to have business objectives defined up front because they clarify what marketers hope to accomplish with their site.  Defining those specific objectives helps web analysts decide whether to focus on visitor data or conversion data, for example. 

            Once a marketer has clearly defined objectives, goals should be created.  Goals are the specific strategies used to accomplish business objectives (Kaushik, 2010).  Goals should be 100% measurable.  This is where optimizations will come in.  KPIs will reflect metrics that are related to specific goals.  For example, a goal could be to increase sign-ups.  Therefore, the KPIs could be number of sign-ups, sign-up conversion rate, or bounce rate on pages within the sign-up process. 

            One vital step that many marketers miss is setting up targets.  KPIs are specific metrics that can clearly define performance.  Once marketers have those metrics though, how do they know if the results are good or bad?  In order to know whether 125 sign-ups or 300 downloads is a success or failure, marketers need to have targets.  Targets are numerical values that a company pre-determines as indicators for success or failure (Kaushik, 2010).  Targets help marketers evaluate their performance metrics against another value.  For example, if your company decided the target for quarterly sign-ups is 200, you could use that number to evaluate your performance each quarter, as well as track pacing along the way.  Establishing targets for KPIs is essential to determining success.

            With these steps in place, marketers can optimize their websites from actionable data.  Business objectives and strategic goals paint the framework, while KPIs and targets provide numerical data.   Analyzing these metrics provide insight into actionable areas.  Knowing what metrics are KPIs ensures you analyze the right data.  With the overwhelming amount of data available, clearly defined objectives and goals keeps the focus on the most important data points.  Comparing performance to targets will determine success and the next course of action.  Using actionable data to optimize site performance should be a continuous process.

References

Kaushik, A. (2010, April 19). Web analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, metrics, KPIs, dimensions, targets. Occam’s Razor Blog. Retrieved on May 29, 2013 from http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-101-definitions-goals-metrics-kpis-dimensions-targets/

How Unique are You?

           One of the first things a marketer does to begin the process of analyzing their website performance is to determine how many people are coming to their site.  Measuring unique visitors is one of the foundational web metrics available to marketers.  Ideally, this metric tells us the “number of individual people (typically having spiders and robots filtered from calculation), within a defined reporting timeframe, that visited a site.  Each individual is counted only once for a TBD reporting period” (“Lesson 2”, 2013).  This metric is foundational because it can be measured on its own or as the denominator in other web metric formulas.  While this metric is widely used, it comes with a few caveats that marketers need to keep in mind.

            While the definition quotes “number of individual people”, unique visitors really measures the number of unique “browsers”.  This is because people use browsers to access websites.  Unique visitors can be “influenced by browsers that don’t accept cookies or those that reject third-party cookies” (Kaushik, 2010, p. 39).  Most analytics tools use first-party cookies which are rejected less than third-party cookies.  First-party cookies are rejected 2 to 5 percent of the time, while third-party cookies are rejected 10 to 30 percent of the time (Kaushik, 2010).

            Another nuance to keep in mind, especially now, is how users are accessing sites through multiple channels.  Since analytics tools track unique visitors through unique browsers, they count each visit per device by the same person as a unique visitor (Gianoglio, 2012).  For example, I visit a website on my PC to shop for shoes while I am at work.  Later at lunch, I visit the same website on my phone to show my friends at work the shoes I want to buy.  Finally, when I am at home on my couch, I use my tablet to visit the site and purchase the shoes.  Although I am one unique person, because I visited the site through three separate devices, I would be counted as three unique visitors.

            Lastly, not only do different browsers and different devices qualify as a unique visitor, but so does a direct visit from a mobile application.  When a user is in Twitter or another application and clicks on a button to open a link in another page, that visit is counted as a unique visitor.  Even if the user accessed the website previously through their mobile browser, traffic from an application will come through analytics tools as a unique visitor (Gianoglio, 2012).

            Overall, the unique visitor metric is an important metric for all marketers.  Even though it may not be 100% accurate, it is the best indicator of the number of people that visit a website.  This metric can be used to analyze traffic on a daily or weekly basis, or any determined time frame.  It is not only valuable on its own, but helps create ratio metrics, such as visits per visitor or conversion rate.  The unique visitors metric builds the foundation for all web measures.  These important measures can be key performance indicators and provide vital actionable information for marketers to improve performance.  

References

Gianoglio, J. (2012, July 10). Unique visitors in a multi-device world. LunaMetrics [Blog]. Retrieved from http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2012/07/10/multidevice-multibrowser-visitors/

Kaushik, A. (2010). Web analytics 2.0: The art of online accountability & science of customer centricity. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing.

Lesson 2: Basic Web Analytics. (2013). P.I. Reed School of Journalism, WVU. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webct/urw/tp0.lc5116001/cobaltMainFrame.dowebct