Overwhelmed With Google Analytics? 10 Reports to Get You Started

If you feel a little overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data in your Google Analytics, don’t worry you’re not alone.  It is important when you first take on the task of using your analytics that you approach it like you would any other area of your business; so after your initial gathering session, isolate your baseline (your current key metrics) and then write down specific goals to improve those key metrics each month.

Depending on what is realistic for you, you may want to set specific themes for each quarter, and not try to fix everything at once; “This quarter I will decrease homepage bounce rate by 30%” etc. Contrary to most people who take on Search Engine Optimization (getting more traffic) first, I like to do a round of conversion optimization first; this is marketing speak for making sure key pages are doing their best to either capture leads, generate inquiries, or in e-commerce, complete a transaction.

1. Traffic

Everyone gets excited when they get 10 million hits on their site, and so they should, but what really matters to us marketing folks and business owners alike, is the people who hit our site that will buy.

I once had a customer that was so well optimized in her image names and alt tags, that 99% of their 100,000 visits came from people simply looking for images of the San Francisco Bay area on the Google images search. She was a little disappointed to find out that really only 1% of her traffic number really mattered.

To really understand this, take a look at traffic by keyword and by referral sources.

Traffic Sources Report

Traffic Sources > Overview

Key Traffic Reports:

• unique visits per month
• return visits per month
• referral sources: direct | search engines | other site links

You can observe that there were 1,453 search engine visits and 437 via direct traffic. Many people misinterpret where this is coming from. It is important to look at the actual pages, as many people think this is existing customers or referral business, but email campaign traffic will be included in this statistic.
Top keywords have been summarized in this report as well. We have blurred these to protect the website owner.

2. Keywords

Take a close look at your keywords. If you are getting a lot of traffic from one particular keyword, make sure your site offers a very relevant call to action to turn that visitor into at very least an email or RSS subscriber.

Also, as discussed above, focus your SEO goals on getting more relevant traffic, not just traffic!

Keyword Report
Traffic Sources > Keywords

3. Geography

Another critical aspect to knowing if you are capturing your correct market is to look at your geography.

There are easy things to do to optimize if your site is not coming up enough in your target markets; google local listings, adding customer references and cities, adding links to partners in your market, and of course, your inbound links, local business associations etc.

The Map Overlay Report
Visitors > Map Overlay

This report shows a map overlay with the darkest colors being the highest traffic areas.

At the bottom of map overlay is a list of countries, total visitor numbers & percentages.

4. Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of single page visits on your site versus the total unique visits on your site.

Most people start by reducing homepage bounce rate, and increasing overall time on site. You may also want to know what your top 5 other exit pages are, and work to improve content and “calls to action” on those pages.
Look closely at your top pages and top pages with high bounce-rates. This means they are arriving directly to that page and bouncing.
Examine keyword relevance: what were they looking for?
Examine calls to action: did the page have clear, engaging, enticing calls to action in content?

Finding Bounce Rate: Top Content Report
Content > Top Content

This is the best report to do a deep dive on exit rates. It shows your top content pages, their bounce rates and exit rates.

What’s a good bounce rate? There’s no firm answer, but my target is usually to keep 80% of my target market, so it does depend on your visitor quality. As you spend more time on Analytics, you may want to look at reports that show bounce-rate for specific keywords.

5. Top Exit Pages
Check out any pages that result in exits. perhaps they are not providing info customers are looking for. Doing some deeper digging on initial keywords etc. may tell you why they are existing.
Top Exit Pages Report
Content > Top Exit Pages

Shows top pages by exit volume. You may also want to sort it to identify top pages by exit rate %. To do this, simply click on the column heading labeled “% Exit”.

6. Time on Site

Average time on site can be a great benchmark for your site’s content quality and site usability (a fancy word for ease of use). This is definitely worth comparing month over month.

Remember: as much as we want our analytics to be an exact science, monthly changes can be directly affected by a single blog article or if you have an email campaign that is pushing visitors to a landing page which has been included in your analytics. Remember: be very sure that you have properly filtered out internal staff IP addresses otherwise you may get unusual spikes in visitor times.

Need to filter your IP Address? Watch this video

Where to find time on site: This metric will appear in the traffic report summaries and on the main dashboard.

7. Goals

Google Analytics makes it easy to build goals. People sometimes call these conversion funnels. Experiment with these as soon as possible; it’s easier than it sounds. This allows you to map out the optimum way you think the “personas” (your various target markets) move through your site.

This will give you a clear picture of how many people make it from your homepage to product page to inquiry form etc.. some other examples:

• home page > products page > demo request
• home page > services page > contact us page > call me form
• home page > free evaluation > form completion page

Goals Overview Report
Goals > Overview

8. Most popular pages internal navigation

if you have one page that is dominant, consider why, consider the following:
“    is this the logical next place I would go if I was in “buying mode”
“    what is the logical next place to go if I’m in “evaluation mode”
“    consider providing direct “call to action” buttons on your homepage content (as well as in the menu) example on the 1Path site: “Free Demo” “Join A Webinar”
Top Content Report
Content > Top Content

9. Site Search

Google offers an easy to implement, free site search tool that provides very useful analytics about what people are looking for.

There are 2 useful pieces of info here:

• what do people search for most commonly (this means they’re not finding it)
• what do people search for and not find

For the first question, consider making significant improvements to your site architecture to make that information more prominent

For the searches that result in abandonment, just add content.

10. Blog & Newsletter Spikes

Keep an eye on spikes in traffic to individual blog posts; there may be big opportunities to capitalize on any articles that really rise to the top. Use the ’sticky’ feature in your blog to make sure any top articles get a little more play before being archived.

Also, ensure that with any significant traffic, you may want to drive a ‘conversion’ from the bottom of the article, like “Download a Complete Report Now” etc..

More Free Tools, Tips & Tricks for B2B Lead Generation