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website reporting

Website Reporting with Google Analytics

In this guide, you will be learning how to use website reporting using google analytics tool to optimize your marketing efforts.

Website reporting will also help you optimize your paid advertising campaigns.

Web Analytics Basics

Web analytics is the collection, reporting, and analysis of website data. The focus is on identifying measures based on your organizational and user goals and using the website data to determine the success or failure of those goals and to drive strategy and improve the user’s experience.

Some of the sources of Website Reporting Analytics data

  • Web traffic data reports.
  • Web server performance data reports.
  • Web transactional data reports.
  • Usability studies.
  • User-submitted information and related sources.
web analytics content
Source: usability.gov

Google Analytics Reporting

Google Analytics Reporting provides various insights that would help us to improvise our digital marketing strategies for achieving the campaign objectives.

Let us get started with the google analytics website reporting basics.

Google Analytics Basics

Understanding google analytics basics that is about the google analytics metrics and traffic sources details will help you get insights on website reporting.

Google Analytics Metrics

  1. Visits – Number of people visiting your website in a span of time. 

    Example         If a visitor visits your site 33 times in 30 days. For those 30 days analytics will count as 33 visits.

  2. Unique Visitors – This is a unique visitor that might have visited your site numerous times, but is only counted once as a visitor. Unique visitors are identified using a cookie on their computer. 

    Example     If a visitor came to your site 11 times in 30 days. For those 30 days analytics will count as 1 unique visitor.

  3. Page Views – This is the number of pages viewed on your site. 

    Example     If a visitor came to your site 22 times in 30 days, but each time He came and viewed 11 pages.

    For those 30 days analytics will count as 242 page views.
  4. If you want to calculate Page Views per visit – Below formula would help you in calculating the same.

    FORMULA – (Page views per visit = Page views ÷ Visits)

  5. Average Duration or Average Time on Site – This is the average time a visitor spent time on your site during any visit. 

    FORMULA     – Average time on site = Total time on site ÷ Total visits

  6. New vs. Returning Visitors – This is the difference between people who have been to your site before versus people who are returning to your site.

    These numbers are determined through the use of cookies.

    If I have been to your site once I was counted as a new visitor and your analytics placed a cookie on my computer that expires in a predetermined timeframe (frequently 2 years unless customized).

    If I return to your site before that cookie expires, I will count as a returning visitor now.

Traffic Sources

Direct – This is traffic that has come to your site by either typing in your URL in their address bar or clicking a bookmark.

Referrals – This is traffic that has come from another site to your site. This is generally referred to as backlinks.

Search – This is traffic from search engines. This can further be divided into organic and paid traffic from the search engines.

Other – This data could be from social media links, email marketing links or direct marketing.

**Cookies – A piece of code that sits on user browser using which analytics determines whether he is visiting your website for the first time or multiple times.

Google Analytics Setup

Follow the below steps to setup your Google Analytics account.

  1. Go to google.com/analytics

  2. Provide a name for your analytics account

  3. Setup a property by entering the name and website address

  4. Choose the relevant industry category

  5. Select reporting time

  6. Copy and save your tracking code for implementation for direct implementation

  7. You can install the plugin to integrate analytics and WordPress accounts

Google Analytics Filters

1. Google my ip address to know your IP address. Copy it.

2. Follow the below steps to block the internal traffic for better analysis.

  • Go to Admin Tab
  • Click on Filters from the View section
  • Click on +Add Filters
  • Give filter a name
  • Select exclude
  • Choose traffic from the IP addresses from the dropdown
  • Select the that are equal to expression
  • Paste your copied IP address from the step 1

3. Save it

Google Analytics Audience Behaviour

1. Check the audience tab in your analytics account to know about the

  • Active users
  • Demographics
  • Interests
  • Geo
  • Behavior
  • Technology
  • Mobile
  • Users Flow

2. Install Page Analytics in Chrome Extension to know the user activity on your website

3. Install Google Tag Assistance Chrome Extension to know if you have implemented your analytics code on the website properly or not

Google Analytics Web Page Performance Report

Go to Behavior tab and analyze the data from

  1. Site Content > All Pages

  2. Use secondary dimension to know the audience interaction on each page (Source/Medium, Referral Path etc.)

  3. Landing Pages

  4. Site Speed

  5. Site Speed > User Timings 

Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels

Google Analytics Alerts

One most important thing when you have a website is traffic, its is always advisable to keep track of the performance of the traffic.

To create an alert please follow the below steps.

  1. Select Custom Alerts from View Settings

  2. Click on +New Alert

  3. Give your alert a name

  4. Check the option to send an email

  5. Add your email address

  6. Select the condition suggested below
 
If you want to get noticed by the increase in traffic with a 50% on your website use the below specifications
 
 
If you want to get noticed by the decrease in traffic with a 50% on your website use the below specifications
 

7. Click save

That’s it.

Adding annotations to know which marketing effort has driven more traffic to your website

Understanding Different Google Analytics Attribution Models

12 Key Metrics to measure in Google Analytics

 

You should always keep track of these google analytics metrics to optimize your digital marketing campaigns.

  • Conversion Rate.

  • Goal Completions.

  • Visits.

  • Goal Completion and Conversion Rate.

  • Top Landing Pages.

  • Traffic Source/Medium.

  • Session Duration.

  • Visitor Location.

  • Traffic by Day of the Week.

  • Organic Visits by Keyword.

  • All Pages (Top Content).

  • Mobile Visitors.

Google Analytics Custom Dashboards

 

You can directly import the google analytics custom dashboards created by experts from the below link and start measuring your digital marketing efforts.

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/gallery/

Recommended Custom Dashboards

  1. Occam’s Razor Awesomeness by Avinash Kaushik

  2. New Google Analytics User Starter Bundle by Google Analytics Team

  3. Content Analysis Dashboard by Vagelis Varfis

  4. SEO Dashboard – Finding Top Content and Keywords by Kevin Pike

  5. Social Media Dashboard by Justin Cutroni

These 5 Google Analytics Pro Tips will help you get high level data Insights in less than 11 minutes

Follow the steps to analyze, tweak, and optimize your Digital Marketing efforts using Google Analytics.

  1. Check if your goals are working correct by manually testing with dummy details once.

  2. Check how people are finding you.

    >> You can find that here – Audience Tab.

  3. Find out the best keywords.

    >> You can find that here – Acquisition > Overview and then click on Organic.

  1. Know the bounce rate for specific pages of your website.

    >> You can find that here – Behavior > Site Content > All Pages and

    choose source/medium in the secondary dimension and then click on unique page views.
  1. Laser focus your marketing efforts with advanced segments

    • You can find that here – Audience > Overview.

    • Create a segment.

    • Give segment a name.

    • In demographics, Change the location to India.

    • Set the first drop down to Country & second to Exactly matches [To check if you have had got a spike in traffic from India].

    • You can narrow down the data using age range or gender.

    • You are free to use other options too to dig deeper to get valuable insights.

Web Analytics Tools

SUGGESTIONS

I hope you have liked this website reporting guide with google analytics.

If you have any suggestions on the above topics or have some experience and knowledge to share on the above topics. 

Kindly do share with us, as most of the other people do get help from your valuable suggestions. 

Your comments are highly valued and appreciated. Thanks!

~ Vikram C L