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Livelink’s guide to Google
Analytics Version 5
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Introduction ... 4
General Notes ... 4
Selecting a Website & Profile: ... 4
Home ... 5
Dashboards ... 6
Real-Time (Beta) ... 8
Real-Time Overview ... 8
Real-Time Traffic Sources ... 9
Real-Time Content ... 9
Intelligence Events ... 10
Overview ... 10
Daily, Weekly or Monthly Intelligence Events ... 10
Standard Reporting ... 11
Report interface ... 11
Side Menu ... 11
Report Search ... 11
Advanced Segments ... 11
Date Range Selector ... 12
Report Totalled Statics ... 13
Graph ... 13
Main Table ... 15
Audience ... 18
Overview ... 19
Demographics ... 19
Behaviour ... 22
Technology ... 26
Social ... 29
Mobile ... 30
Visitor Flow ... 33
Advertising ... 35
Adwords Campaigns ... 35
Adwords Keywords Report ... 37
Matched Search Queries ... 37
Day Parts ... 38
Destination URLs ... 38
Adwords Placements ... 39
Adwords Advert Positions( Keyword Positions) ... 39
TV Ads ... 40
Traffic Sources ... 41
Overview ... 41
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Campaigns ... 45
Search Engine Optimisation ... 46
Content ... 48
Overview ... 49
Site Content ... 49
Site Speed ... 51
Performance ... 52
Site Search ... 52
Events ... 55
... 55
Ad Sense ... 57
In-Page Analytics ... 58
Conversions ... 59
Goals ... 59
E-commerce ... 64
Multi-channel Funnels ... 67
Custom Reports ... 73
Admin ... 74
Adding a User ... 74
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Welcome to the Livelink’s complete guide to Google Analytics. This guide may seem overwhelming at first, however use the contents pages above to help find the report you are looking for and then from this see what other useful insights you can gain from these reports.
This guide will walk you through the general layout of the new version of analytics functions and then what different aspects of the report can be modified
Once you have logged into Google Analytics, check to see whether you are in the old or new version. Look to the top right of the screen, if you see a link to the “Old version” then you are
in the new version, if you see “New version” then click through. The old version of Google Analytics will be switched off imminently so it is important that you begin using the new version from now on.
Selecting a Website & Profile:
If you have access to more than one websites statics in analytics you will see a list of all the available accounts, similar to below. If there is more than one profile created for each account you will be able to expand the website and select which profile you wish to view.
Profiles: can be created under each website, these can be filtered to only show specific traffic, for example, you may wish to create a profile that displays external visits to the website and one that shows internal traffic. It is always recommended to leave a profile with no filters to ensure there is always a clear profile with all data.
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When you have logged into Google analytics and selected a website you will be brought to the “Home” section. From here across the left hand menu you can see the main navigation which is present across all of the reports in Google Analytics. The blue titles can be clicked to expand and show the more refined reports below. Within most sections there is an overview report to start, which also have links to deeper reports to help gain faster insights.
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Dashboards
We will look at Dashboards first, as this is the default page you are shown within the home menu when selecting a website profile. Google Analytics will have automatically created a default dashboard for you, based on key metrics. However you can create several different dashboards of your own; either from adding the data here or by selecting “add to dashboard” as you view regular reports within Analytics.
Using these dashboards will help you to quickly and easily see the top level data you need to make informed decisions about the site.
The dashboards you create will be unique to your email address, meaning that someone else who also has access to the website stats will not be able to see the dashboards you create.
Create a new Dashboard
To create a new dashboard click on the “+ new dashboard” link on the left hand menu
Then name your dashboard & select which type of dashboard to use, selecting starter dashboard will automatically populate
the dashboard with most used statists which can then be edited to help you show specific results.
If you select blank canvas you will need to add “widgets”
to the dashboard to see statists. Click the “+ widgets” button above the title of the dashboard, then you can select 4 different ways for your data to be displayed: as a simple figure (metric), pie chart, timeline (graph) or in a table.
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Once you have chosen the display type for your data you will then need to choose the metric which you wish to display data for. Clicking the dropdown list will display all the available metrics, you can search for the name of the metric, e.g. visits, unique visits, bounce rate etc. If you have selected a timeline
you can compare up to two
metrics, if you have chosen pie chart you can select a metric and then group by a dimension for a maximum of 6 segments, for example visits by medium. If you have chosen table you select one dimension and
view two metrics for this with a maximum of 10 rows.
For all the choices you can filter the results which are displayed. For example, if this was a dashboard to only show traffic from Adwords, you would add the filter to all widgets on this dashboard
to only show medium matching cpc and source matching google.
You also have the option to add a URL to view the full report, this would be useful if you want to see more detailed information based on what the widget is displaying in the dashboard. If you have added the widget manually in the dashboard as above, you will need to provide the URL. If you have added a widget whilst viewing a full report already in Analytics then the URL will be automatically copied over.
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Real-Time (Beta)
Real-time shows you live analytics data (who is on the website right now, and what they are looking at) This can be especially useful internally to track website visits after a large email campaign has been sent out, or to test url tracking codes to ensure campaigns are labelled correctly.
Real-Time Overview
The overview shows you the amount of visitors on the site and how many page views are being requested per minute and per second. Also a summary of the other reports available from the left hand menu:
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Real-Time Traffic Sources
This report shows live data on how the people on the website at the moment have found the site.
You can go deeper into this report and filter the results by selecting a medium or source. For example, if you select google you will then see an updated report with live traffic from only google. If you then select organic, you will then see the keywords visitors had typed into google before they came to the website. You can clear these filters by selecting the x next to the filter category at the top above the live visit count.
Real-Time Content
You can see which pages are currently being viewed on the site by selecting the content report. When people leave a page the column of the page URL will highlight red and disappear if only one person is viewing the page. When a visitor views a new page you will see the page URL column appear and be highlighted green for a short while.
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Intelligence Events
The intelligence events reports allow you to see what changes have occurred on the site. Google Analytics uses historical data collected from the account to make assumptions on certain levels of traffic and conversions. For example if your website usually receives 40 visits a day from google organic searches, it will take this as a standard of how many visits you should receive from this source, therefore if you receive a large % above or below this amount then it will flag up in this report.
Overview
On the overview report you will see a mix of daily, weekly and monthly alerts of changes both positive and negative, sorted by importance (which Google analytics believes is most important) you can view more details about each alert by clicking details to the right hand side of the alert.
Daily, Weekly or Monthly Intelligence Events
You can also view reports which show you only daily, weekly or monthly insights.
It is worth noting that daily insights may be very sporadic if you do not have a constant reliable stream of traffic then these insights may not be useful. We would recommend using the monthly insights at first.
What does this mean? This shows this month, visitors that have come from email and have completed goals are of a higher value than the previous month (114% more than last month) – which would show this month’s email campaigns have been optimised to aid conversions
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Report interface
We will briefly go through the reporting interface in Google Analytics and how the reports are laid out. Also how you can dig deeper into these initial reports to help gain useful and actionable insights quickly.
Side Menu
The side menu is integral in the navigation through Analytics. Each report is covered in this training guide. The main report areas are in blue, and then below them are several different reports which are then broken down even deeper, to see these reports you can click on the arrow to expand the menu and hide the menus again.
Report Search
One other way to find reports when you know what you are looking for is using the report search tool above the left hand menu. By typing the name of the report you want you can get to the correct report quickly.
Advanced Segments
You can use advanced segments to help segment the data you are viewing in the report. For example, if you are viewing all the visitors that have come to the site and made purchases, you may want to see which of these came from paid search and non-paid search. You can apply both of these segments at the same time and the table & chart will update.
An example of how the e-commerce report, for example would look is to the right, once you have applied the segments for paid and non-paid search. You can see above the chart there are pie charts indicating how much of the total site traffic these segments represent and then below the data is separated into these segments.
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You can select up to four segments at any one time. Please be aware that once you have selected these segments they will appear on all reports you view unless you remember to go back up to the advanced segment dropdown and de-select all apart from “All visits” Once you have selected multi segments, you can re-arrange which display in a certain order – which will define what colour on the graph they represent, You can do this by selecting one of the pie charts and dragging it up or down as desired. The tables and charts will then update.
There are 12 default segments which Analytics will make accessible to you: All visits
New visitors Returning visitors Paid Search Traffic Non-paid Search Traffic Search Traffic
Direct Traffic Referral Traffic Visits with Conversions Visits with Transactions Mobile Traffic
Non-bounced Visits
You can create your own segments for more information on how click here
Date Range Selector
You can change the date for which data is displayed by using the date selector dropdown in the top right hand corner. There are several ways to select a date range:
- You can use the predefined drop down of time frames
- Select the name of the month in the calendar to select that entire month
- While the first date range box is highlighted blue move your mouse of the date on the calendar you wish
the data to start from, then move to the date you wish the data to end on. You should see your selected date range then show in blue, as to the right.
You can also compare date ranges by selecting the tick box for compare to past. By default this will select the same amount of days exactly previous to what you have selected for the regular date range. You can amend the previous date range to another date by clicking on the date under the compare to past tick box and then moving over to the calendar and selecting the date you wish the comparison to start from, and then selecting the date you wish the comparison to end and selecting apply.
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Report Totalled Statistics
Each report will have a top bar similar to the below, which shows the totalled statistics for that report. If no date comparison is selected then this table will show the totals in comparison to the site average, if a date comparison is selected then it will show the previous date’s figures and the % change.
You can change the view of the data in the reports by selecting one of the menus on the grey bar.: - Site usage
- Goal Set 1 - Goal Set 2 - Goal Set 3 - Goal Set 4 - E-commerce
Selecting these different views in the reports can help to show insights further than just the general visits and bounce rate of certain pages & visitor sources.
By default the graph (or map in certain reports) will default to displaying data for the first metric on this top bar. In this instance this is visits. To change just select one of the other metrics from the bar for example: % new visits.
Graph
Hovering over the graph will display the data for that day.
By default the graph will display data on a daily basis, this can be changed to hourly (in some cases), day week or month.
We recommend viewing monthly for any period above 6 months and weekly for any period below 6 months to 1 month. If you are viewing data for one month we recommend a daily view, as trying to view daily data over 12 months can hide trends. See the example below:
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Daily View: 2011 visits vs 2010 visits
Monthly View: 2011 visits vs 2010 visits
The second chart shows that visits have steadily increased over the last 6 months of 2011 (blue) compared with 2010 (orange) with September in 2010 bringing the highest amount of visits and November in 2011 bringing the highest amount of visits in 2011.
Compare Metrics
You can select to compare two metrics on the graph, for example you may want to see visits and revenue on the same graph to see if an increase in visits has resulted in more revenue. You can select from the “compare metric” dropdown and select revenue under the e-commerce section. The graph will show the visits axis on the left and the revenue on the right. From this report you can see in September more visits actually meant less revenue on the website.
Annotations
When hovering over the graph you can add annotations to the graph, this can help to note down when events have occurred which would explain peaks and drops in traffic or revenue.
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For example when an email campaign is sent we highly recommend adding an annotation, or when major events occur such as a site re-theme or re-build, advertising begins or other offline events such as conferences or mail drops which could all bring large amounts of traffic to the site. Recording these annotations can help everyone who uses analytics for the site to see how these efforts have affected the key metrics.
These annotations can be set to public or private, for which we recommend public, which will allow all users who have access to this website profile the right to view these annotations.
To see a full list of all the annotations you can click the downward arrow below the graph.
Main Table
The main results table which is displayed as standard in most reports looks as follows: Here you can change the first row dimensions; usually there
will be several recommended options and then the dropdown for other, which will display the list of dimensions
Here you can add a second row to segment the table further using another dimension. For example to the table above you could
add the dimension
“keyword”
Here is where you can search the results in the table there is more about this in the next section
Here you can change the view of the table to other useful formats. More info about this in the next section
Here you can change how many results are displayed in the table and which page to skip to
You can add columns to be displayed in the graph by using the tick boxes and the plot rows button. There is more about this in the next section
Selecting any of these rows will sort the table in highest / lowest order
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Plot Rows
You can select up to 2 rows in the table to be shown in the graph alongside all visits, once you have selected the two rows, select plot rows button at the bottom left hand corner of the table for the graph to update.
View
You can change the view the data is displayed in (usually table format) by selecting the view drop down you will have the following options:
Data (In a table)
Percentage (in a pie chart) Performance (in bar chart)
Comparison (in a bar chart compared to site average/previous dates figures) Term cloud
Pivot table (which allows two metrics to be compared)
Secondary Dimensions
At the top of the table you can select to filter the results by a second dimension. Select the dropdown menu, as shown to the right. Then select the secondary dimension, for example you may want to see which keywords have brought traffic to the site when looking at the source/medium report. This would alter the report to look like below:
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Searching
You can query any table by either typing the keywords you wish to be filtered in the results.
Or you can click “advanced” to have further filtering options. Through the advanced search you can use regular expressions – which helps you search for results which match certain criteria rather than words.
Add Report to Dashboard
When viewing any report in the standard reporting suite of reports you can choose to add these to the dashboard. To do this click the add to dashboard button at the top of the report. This will then give you the choice of which dashboard (if you have more than one) to add the report to, and in what format (if available)
Export Options
You can export the raw data for any report you are viewing in Analytics. To do this select the export button at the top of the report and then select the format of the data you wish to export. Currently there is CSV, TSV and CSV for Excel. If you wish to export data for use in excel I would recommend using CSV – as the CSV for excel does cause problems in some versions of excel. There is due to be PDF option available, as this was available in the previous version of the analytics.
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Audience
The audience reports show you the main metrics about the visitors to your website. You can view information such as how many new or returning, what devices they use to visit the site and if they have been socially engaged on the site.
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Overview
The overview report shows the top metrics of how many visitors have come to the website and how many pages they have viewed. You can also see the top level stats on some of the deeper reports below.
Demographics
Location
The location report shows by default a map of the world and where on that map visitors to your website have come from, it uses the ISP server of that visitor to pin their location, so therefore the locations may not be exact, but are still reliable.
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By the primary dimensions you can change the report to view from region to city. Once you have chosen the country you wish to view, you can then change this report to look by city – as below:
To further segment this report you can select a secondary dimension, for example “medium” from the table below you can see that traffic from London are equally using CPC & organic as a main source of traffic.
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Language
The language report shows you which language visitors have set as their primary language on their web browser (they are displayed using the generic country codes for web browsers) click here to view the entire index
Custom Variables
By default you will not see anything in this report unless you have set custom variables code on your website. Custom variables can display certain aspects of your visitors in Analytics, for example you can set custom variables to report in analytics if visitors who come to the site are registered users or guests.
User Defined
The user defined values are set within the custom variables for our example above we are tracking different user types on this website
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Behaviour
The behaviour report shows you the frequency and visitor traits to help you gain more insights from your general audience.
New vs Returning
The below report will show you the % of traffic which are new and the % which have visited in the past 6 months. You could gain useful insights from this report by adding a secondary dimension to show the conversion rate of goals or E-commerce. This will show you who are really keeping your business going.
Frequency & Recency
Count of visits
The following report shows the frequency of the visitors to your website. The majority of sites will find that they have a large amount of visitors who only come to the site once and never return. Visitors of over 100/200+ could be people internally or other stakeholders using the
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website as a daily resource. Recency
This report shows how many days are between visits when people visit more than once. If you see that there is a large amount of days between return visits, it may be worth looking at beginning email campaigns to help keep your audience engaged on the website and returning more frequently.
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Engagement
Visit Duration
This report shows you how long visitors have remained on the website once they arrive. If you see a reduction in time on site this may be due to out of date, incorrect or non-compelling content which makes the visitor leave the website.
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This report shows you how many pages a visitor viewed on your website. This report could show you two things, such as a large amount of page views on a website which does not have a megamenu and has a determined audience would show they are going through many pages to get what they need to. In terms of a new or re-themed site which has an improved navigation you would expect to see a reduction on the page views as visitors can find the content they want faster than before.
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Technology
Browser & Operating System (OS)
This report shows you which browser visitors to your website are using. This report can come in handy if you are having a site re-themed or debating which browsers to test your site in for any errors. The main browsers used by your audience should take priority.
You can also view which browser version they are using by selecting “browser version” as a secondary dimension:
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Within this report you can also view what operating software the visitor is using:
You can also use the primary dimensions tab to select different metrics such as screen resolution, flash version etc to see if your site is compatible with what visitors are using.
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Network
Service Provider
The following report shows which Internet service providers have brought traffic to your website. This report at first may seem not very useful, however in B2B if you have clients or potential customers this report if configured correctly can be very useful. You will expect to see a long list of internet service providers but businesses which are large enough to have their own IT infrastructure will be displayed in this report separately, e.g. Mercedes, Asda, Fujstu, sony are just some of the names you will possibly see within this report – if you use the search box to have a look for a few of your customers and then add the secondary dimension of city, to see which office they have come from, as some of the visits may be from another location than where you have a contact.
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Social
The following reports are new to analytics and show how many of the visitors to your website have been socially engaged with the content provided. By default this will not work for Facebook or twitter and does require some extra development work to begin reporting. However any shares on Google+ will work straight away. It is interesting to see people who are more socially engaged have a longer time on site and a lower bounce rate – showing they are more engaged on the website.
Engagement
Action
This report shows you what social actions visitors who have been socially engaged have made, for example: Facebook: Share Like Twitter: Tweet Google+ +1 Pages
The following report shows you which content has had which type of social actions (pivot table) This report is most insightful, if not to see what content is popular and engaging people in sharing with their friends. The ethos from this report would be to produce more content similar to what is most popular to encourage sharing and building engagement.
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Mobile
The mobile reports are becoming more important as mobile internet usage increases year on year and has now surpassed desktop internet usage in the UK.
Overview
This report shows you the total amount of visitors by a mobile device, If you change this report to the pie chart you can then see the percentage of traffic which view the site on a mobile device. If you select the past 12 months to the previous 12 months you should expect to see almost a 50%-100% increase in traffic from mobile devices.
Devices
This report shows you what are the main mobile devices used to visit the website. You can also view the goal or ecommerce conversion rate for this report also, showing which mobile devices are bringing you how much revenue. You need to ask yourself if your website is easily viewed on a mobile device and can users complete your webform or a sale.
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This report shows you which manufacturer of mobile people visit the website through. This report can help in choosing how to prioritise mobile development for these devices.
Input selector
This report can help in the consideration of creating a mobile site and usability, in terms of the interface users have, e.g. touch screen to pinch screen and zoom or click wheel to just scroll up down, left and right.
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One example of actionable insights from the mobile report in e-commerce view compared to non-mobile traffic e-commerce is below:
The below table shows the top revenue by cities in the UK on mobile devices:
The following table shows the top cities for revenue from non-mobile traffic:
It is clear to see from the above that revenues on both mobile and desktop mainly come from London, however Cambridge and Kensington have a high revenues from mobile devices in comparison to other cities. This can help to show where there are geographical trends accruing.
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Visitor Flow
This report shows you the entire flow of visitors on your website. At first this can look quite overwhelming, however it is best to begin by selecting the metric you wish to see traffic grouped by (e.g. city, device, browser, source) from the green dropdown box. In some cases this report may not show a true figure of all the page views due to large amount of data, therefore you will see a message in the top left corner which states the % of visits the report is based on.
This dropdown allows you to select a metric for which traffic entered the website
From here you can increase or decrease the level of detail between the pages on the site You can apply a
segment to the visitor flow report
Selecting this red area will show you the amount of visitors who left the
site at this stage (drop offs) This is area shows the first page
people entered the site from This allows you to zoom in
closer to look at specific traffic between pages
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You can select a specific line of visits by clicking on the pat and selecting “highlight traffic”
You can also find out more specific information for each page by hovering over the page title
You can create a custom dimension by selecting the cog at the right hand side of the green drop down. For example you many only want to see what paths visitors have taken that have purchased more than £200
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Advertising
If you are seeing nothing in this report and you are running Adwords you may need to enable the Adwords data to feed through to Analytics. You can do this by following these steps… Click here
The advertising panel displays all metrics concerned with Google Adwords’ paid advertising. This section is dependent upon having an active Google Adwords account integrated with Analytics. What you will notice to begin with is the ability to filter the Campaigns by the medium on which they have been viewed, either non-mobile, high-end Mobile or a tablet. (Shown below) The E-Commerce option within the Explorer tab makes it possible to view the monetary results of each campaign. Here, the revenue, number of sales, average value and conversion rate are all displayed.
The ‘Clicks’ option displays all standard metrics that appear in Adwords itself. Impressions, Clicks, Cost, Click Through Rate (CTR) and ROI are all displayed in an easily digestible format.
If you have defined goals, these too will appear in the Explorer tab alongside E-commerce and Clicks metrics.
Adwords Campaigns
Here you are able to see how effective various campaigns have been. These are the campaigns defined in your Google Adwords account, and being pulled through by Google Analytics’ integration.
Within the campaigns tab, all campaigns are displayed along with standardized metrics. Here it is possible to filter the campaign into its specific Ad Group by changing the Primary dimension.
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Adwords Smartphone Visits
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Adwords Keywords Report
This option displays all Keywords that have resulted in people visiting your site through an Adwords ad. For example, if you are selling coal and someone enters a Google search for ‘coal merchant’, this section will display the visits derived from an advertisement when that was the search query. By clicking on an individual keyword, we can further breakdown the result into its various components. The E-commerce value can be viewed by reverting to the e-commerce tab, likewise the Adwords metrics by changing to the Clicks option. You can also add a Match Type dimension. There are various forms of matching. Ads can be programmed to appear under different match criteria;
1. Phrase Match – Consider ‘Smokeless fuel’ as a desired search term. Ads will appear when ‘Smokeless fuel’ appear in that order, before, after or in between other words. Like ‘buy smokeless fuel’, ‘smokeless fuel london’, or ‘buy smokeless fuel london’.
2. Broad Match – ad will appear when someone uses ‘smokeless fuel’ or any combination of those two words with other words. Like “smokeless fire”, “cheap fuel”. Both those are eligible terms under Broad Match criteria.
3. Exact Match – Ad will appear when someone uses ‘smokeless fuels’ with no other words, before after or in between.
Matched Search Queries
Matched Search Queries differs from the Keywords tab. Where the Keywords page displays the sponsored Ad term that has resulted in people visiting the site, the Matched Search Queries page displays ALL the queries made that match a keyword in one form or another. As a result there will always be more matched search
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queries than keywords due to the latter being the terms which have been sponsored and more specific in nature. Again, you can change the Primary Dimension to ‘Match Type’.
Day Parts
Day Parts represents an hourly or daily breakdown of when your ads are most effective. By switching between the Hour/Day of Week Primary Dimension you can determine the most effective time for ad conversions, and by adding a Secondary Dimension, it would be possible to narrow it down to the most effective time for conversion in a specific region or city, or what queries are most popular during these times.
By selecting a wider date range at the top of the page, it’s possible to determine trends over time with these metrics, and going forward you can base your ad placements on such information.
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As the title of this section suggests, you can see where your Adwords have led to. At its most generic, the display page will show the pages of your website that your ads lead to. However, further analysis can reveal much more insightful statistics. By adding a Secondary Dimension such as placement domain, or campaign, we reveal more useful data about the origins of the traffic that has ended up on your site through these Adwords. Often sites like YouTube and Ebay will fill many of the top slots on ‘placement domain’ given their reach, although it is dependent upon your Adwords budget and settings.
Adwords Placements
Placements initially will display the Placement Type. Managed placements are website chosen by the Adwords administrator if they are aware of a site that many of their customers spend their time. Otherwise, Google will choose automatically where to place the ads (Automatic Placements).
Adwords Advert Positions( Keyword Positions)
Keyword Positions illustrates the position of each respective keyword ad. It graphically displays in the information in a dummy Google search page, within which it shows the position and frequency of each ad. It clearly shows whether the keyword has been displayed in one of the top feature ads or just on the right hand column.
As with many columns throughout analytics, we can change the visits drop down to one of several metrics including Pages/Visit, Bounce rate, etc.
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TV Ads
TV Ads, for the most part, are irrelevant to most users of Analytics accounts; however it does shows the scope of detail covered by the platform. With TV Ads, it’s possible to upload a video to our Adwords account, and based on our requests and predefined scope of campaign, the video is then distributed to various nationwide TV stations where the ad is aired. That information, much like all other Adwords data, is fed back into Analytics, and displayed here.
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Traffic Sources
Traffic Sources enables visitors to see where their traffic has come from. Sources are broken down into Search, direct, referral traffic, as well as Adwords and Email (Campaign).
Overview
The Overview acts a dashboard for the entire Traffic Sources section. It displays the most common metrics such as Search, Referral, Direct and Campaigns. This is by default for the entire site in the defined date range, but by adding an advanced segment it’s possible to look closer at the overview for one particular area, i.e. just Search traffic.
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Sources
All Traffic
All Traffic is the traffic that visits your site in its most raw format. It can be viewed in terms of site usage, set goals or E-Commerce.
The initial display includes all sources, but by selecting Source or Medium in the Primary Dimension toolbar, you can view more specifically where the traffic has come from. All stats come are accompanied with a line graph that can be viewed by Day/Week/Month.
Source/medium selected as primary dimension in the top toolbar, will show both metrics in the same column, allowing for essentially three metrics in the one report if you select a secondary dimension.
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Direct
Direct Traffic is traffic that has come directly to your site, either through someone typing the site URL in the address bar, or through a previous bookmark they may have created. The default Primary Dimension here is Landing Page, which shows what page on the site they have arrived on. For the majority of sites, the home page (denoted by /) will be the most visited page via direct traffic.
Referrals
Referrals occur when another site is responsible for directing traffic to yours in the form of a direct hyperlink. The Source is the default primary dimension and will show the URL of the site responsible for the referral. By adding Landing Page as a secondary dimension, it’s possible to see exactly which external sites directed traffic to your site, and to what pages.
Finding Social Media in Referrals Report
If you wish to find the role that social media is playing in the referrals to your site, simply switch the primary dimension from medium to source, and type Facebook, or Twitter, into the search box as shown below. These results show that Facebook has contributed to 139 referrals over the specific time period, while Mobile Facebook (App/Browser) has resulted in 14 visits.
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Search
Search Traffic can be split into Organic and Paid Search Traffic.
Organic Search traffic is traffic that comes through a search engine (most of the time through Google, Bing or Yahoo). The keyword displayed as the primary dimension will show the query submitted in the search engine while source will show exactly which Search Engines were used.
Paid Traffic is traffic derived from PPC/CPC (Pay/Cost-per-click) platforms such as Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing or Microsoft adCenter. Keywords and Matched Search Queries are available primary dimensions. These terms are defined the Advertising>Adwords section of this report.
In the below image, we can see the matched search queries and how much revenue they have brought in respectively.
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Campaigns
Within Traffic sources, campaigns displays more bespoke data than the generic results from organic, direct and referrals. Here it is possible to see the results of individual campaigns defined by yourself, through email or PPC.
While organic, direct and referral traffic is difficult to control, campaigns are directly influenced by you, and as such, the results in this section of the report provide invaluable data that can be used going forward.
You can see the direct performance of a particular Adwords campaign, or a promotional email sent out.
The above image shows the email campaigns conducted. Christmas Newsletter 201o brought in 530 visits. The second diagram shows the source of all campaign traffic during the same period. The search shows that Yahoo was responsible for the majority of campaign traffic through Sources 1, 2 and 3.
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Search Engine Optimisation
Queries
A query is a term searched for in a search engine. Impressions and clicks are listed here, as well as their average position on the SERP (Search Engines Result Page). This is the same information that appears in your Google Webmaster tools account.
Landing Pages
Landing pages again show the page where all of the organic search results bring you to on the website. Depending upon the specificity of the query and the SEO of the website, the most clicked on page need not necessarily be the most visited.
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Geographical Summary
Geographically summary presents the search result data in the form of location. The results are also able to be broken down into their Google property, namely Web, image or Mobile.
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Content
Content focuses on the pages on your site. It enables you to break down your site into manageable chunks, creating an easier platform to analyse data from.
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Overview
Much like the other sections of Analytics, the Overview here again acts as a dashboard, summarising the information from the various different sections with the wider Content scope.
Pageviews may be viewed several times by one person in one session. Unique pageviews however is the aggregate total of all pageviews by individual visitors in the same session. Also included in this section are Events. Event tracking can be enabled by inserting code into your website, or via an integrative plug-in. Event tracking can register outgoing links from a website, PDF downloads or anything you deem worthy of analysing. Events are discussed in more detail later in this segment of the report.
Site Content
Pages
The performance of each page is visible here. In the Page column, the relative path of the page will be listed in
the form www.yoursite.com/xxxxx. Alternatively, you can switch to show the Page Title instead by changing the Primary Dimension. Each option will displayed the pages, by default, in descending order of pageviews numbers with other metrics alongside.
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Content Drilldown
The Content Drilldown section becomes very useful in sites with a defined folder structure, most common in CMS platforms. An illustration of its use is shown below with a site structured around its different languages.
Landing Pages
Landing pages, as discussed previously in the report, represent the page where a visitor first enters the site. We can see that files within the UK English directory have been the most viewed over
the course of the site. The “/” listed below represents files with the main non-language specific site. From this we can tell that this site has a non-language preference center that enables users to select their region.
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Exit Pages
Exit pages represent the page from which the visitor leaves the site. A homepage will often be ranked the most exited page, but this does correspond with it also ranking number one in the Landing Pages ranking.
Site Speed
Site performance can be used to specifically monitor individual variables of site performance. By selecting primary dimension as Campaign, you will be able to see which of your campaigns experiences slower speed, or by selecting a geographical dimension, you can maybe see where an area of your visitors experience slower speed and target them accordingly.
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Performance
Site Performance is a secondary Site Speed tab takes site speed to greater detail. It breaks down the Site speed into further metrics. By adding a advanced segment measuring conversions, it would be possible to measure the effect that site loading time has on your site’s conversion rate.
Site Search
Overview
While Keyword and Queries show you what people search to reach your site, the Site Search function enables you to see what people are really looking for once on your site. This is particularly useful in terms of site design, enabling users to reach their desired destination quicker and more efficiently.
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Usage
The Usage section simply splits up the overall site traffic into those who have searched the site, and those who haven’t.
Search Terms
Search terms outline those keywords and queries used within a site search. Beyond the basic metrics such as total unique searches, search terms with high % search exits show areas that your site maybe hasn’t addressed in its content, while Search Depth shows the amount of searches made in succession, again representing a hig demand, or an area not covered in enough detail on your site.
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Pages
Pages carries all the standard data associated with Site Search but details which pages the search occurs, and where it leads to. This data is accessible through the Start Page and Destination Page options on the Primary Dimension toolbar.
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Events
Events, as explained briefly earlier, provide a means of tracking actions like Outbound links from your site, clicks on email address, brochure downloads or capturing of any action on the site. This is done by including a tracking code in the desire source code.
Each event must have Category, Action and a Label, with each getting more specific respectively. It is possible to attribute a value to an event. For example, if you have calculated the average value of a submitted enquiry form in £x, then that value can be added to that event and Analytics will display the Overall and Average of the event.
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Overview
Summarises information regarding Events into an easily digestible format.
Top Events
Top Events displayed the most frequently occurring events over the selected time period. Unique Events are shown separately, along with Event Value and Average Value.
Shown below is an Event reduced to its Action, as denoted by the Primary Dimension. Here we have the events listed that have been downloaded, either JPG images or PDFs.
Pages
Pages represents where the event took place. In the above screenshot, the home page (/) contributed to the most events.
Seeing which pages contributed to which individual events, rather than an aggregated total, is possible by adding an advanced segment.
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Ad Sense
Overview
Adsense is Google’s revenue generating platform for blogs or small businesses. It works on the reverse model of Adwords, and the published (the site) receives a fee every time a visitors clicks on the advertisement. The site publisher can make bespoke ads, both in image and text format. Like Adwords this report is not visible unless you have enabled Adsense-Analytics integration
AdSense Pages
AdSense Pages displays the pages where revenue is generated through ads.
AdSense Referrers
The referrers pages displays the external sites that are responsible for directing traffic to your site that then go on to click on an advertisement, and thus generate revenue for your site. Not that the number of Ads clicked through referrers need not match that on the Adsense Pages, since this does not take into account possible conversion via direct or organic search traffic.
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In-Page Analytics
In-Page analytics pulls through the full site display and shows the traffic paths through the annotation of navigation links. It acts in exactly the same way as the standard top-level Overview function but with the handy display element, it makes it easier to spot issues in the design that perhaps are limiting the site’s functionality.
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Conversions
Goals
Goals provide an excellent means of tracking revenue streams that are not tracked by the Analytics e-commerce function.
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Overview
Goals are presented in aggregate form to begin with, but through the Goal Option format, you can segment the data in specific goals, as shown below.
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Goal URLs
Goal URLs display the page where the goal has occurred.
Reverse Goal Path
Analytics tracks the path from the moment a visitor enters the site until they complete a goal. This is displayed in the reverse goal path section.
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Funnel Visualisation
Funnel visualisation takes Reverse Goal Path and drills down into greater detail. Where Reverse Goal Path just lists the previous three pages, funnel visualisation also shows the nature of the entrances and exits at each one of the those previous steps. It provides a much better visualisation for spotting trends and potential problem areas in your site.
In the below visualisation we can see there is an extremely low (1.85%) proceed rate from contact page to contact form. More people compared to the entrance rate, rather than leaving the site, seem to navigate elsewhere on the site. This would suggest that a greater call to action is required to proceed, and stop people drifting to other areas of the site.
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Goal Flow
Goal Flow can be a confusing visualisation to begin with. It essentially shows the flow of all traffic that convert to goals, from when they enter the site. The dimension (listed as Source above) can be changed to interpret the data from different metrics. For example, it can be changed to campaign which will split the specified goal up the conversions into constituent campaigns.
By highlighting Google as our desired Source, we can see it has contributed 313 of the 333 visits to the Contact Us Page. It has also sent 16 visitors straight to the Contact Form.
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E-commerce
Overview
In order to see the Commerce Report, you must have enabled the Commerce integration with your site. E-Commerce data provides an invaluable tool to measure the performance of your site in the role of a revenue generation engine
The Overview screen provides a synopsis of the most important metrics of E-Commerce performance. From there, you can view more detailed reports in terms of transactions and individual product performance.
Product Performance
Product Performance breaks down the site revenue into its constituent offerings or products. This detailed look at each offering on your site can highlight products performing well, or badly, in real-time.
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Sales Performance
Rather than a focus on product performance, sales performance takes a more holistic look at e-commerce on the site. The default filter is by date, and this breaks down the revenue chronologically.
Transactions
This is another extension of E-Commerce that displayed the sales conducted through your site, displayed through various other metrics.
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Time to Purchase
The above image shows an average Time to Purchase statistic. 51.2% of visitors complete their transaction by the end of the same day of their visit. However, there remains a considerable percentage of those visitors who take a month plus to convert. This statistic shows there could be a call for a reengagement campaign, sometime after the first seven days, in an effort to expedite the sale and reduce the Days to Transaction.
Visits to Transactions
Visits to transactions is another ratio metric of the time taken to conversion.
This metric again shows that there is room for a reengagement campaign to bring the visits to transaction much closer to 1 visit.
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Multi-channel Funnels
Overview
Multi-Channel funnels show how different sources of traffic interact with each other in sending traffic to your site.
It also shows conversions that require two or more visits to your site before eventually converting.
Through this Venn diagram, it’s possible to see the contribution to conversions that each source has made, and how that source interacts with the others.
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Assisted Conversions
Assisted Conversions are where the channel has assisted in the conversion, but was not the last interaction before conversion.
In the below example, Organic Search has been the most influential Channel Grouping in terms of assisting conversions. It has played a part in 117 conversions that have an aggregate of over £9,000. Organic Search has also been the last interaction itself 156 times, as denoted by the Last Interaction column. While Organic Source has contributed the most in terms of a medium, Google leads the way by Source as shown in the second table below.
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First Interaction Analysis
First Interaction Analysis is an option with the Explorer tab, and differs from Assisted Conversion by showing the first interaction in the conversion path. This is gives you an excellent insight into the source of your conversion traffic.
For example, if Email ranks number one in terms of First Click Conversions then it’s obvious it’s a channel worth expanding on, providing the pro-rata costs are not excessive.
Facebook Assisted Conversions
Viewing social media as a conversion path can be done by switching the Primary Dimension from the default Basic Channel Grouping to Source/Medium, and searching for “facebook/twitter” in the search bar beneath.
We can see that Facebook, and the Facebook Mobile app, has played a part in over £1000 worth of conversion, but only been responsible for £312 worth of value directly as the last interaction in the path.
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Top Conversion Paths
While Assisted Conversion, and Last Click Analysis, only showed interactions at either end of the conversion path, Top Conversion Paths shows the complete path taken to a path length of your choosing. The path length in the above image has been limited to 3 paths.
The Conversion Paths can be filtered by Conversion Type, Path Length (number of different interaction) and the conversion itself. For E-Commerce sites, the most important conversion metric is obviously transactions. There have been 528 conversions, with a value of £54,994 via Email>Email. This means that email played the initial role in referring traffic to the site. Then, most likely, the user left the site to come back at a later date, but crucially, again through email. It was at this point they purchased.
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Source Medium Conversion Path
Drilling down further is possible by looking at the Source/Medium Path. Since Basic Grouping Channel only illustrates medium, it’s possible to miss some detail, such as the performing, or underperforming, Search Engines, or the exact source of the referral.
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Time Lag
Time Lag is defined at the time taken from First Interaction to Conversion. The table above clearly demonstrates that conversions are most likely to occur with the first day, or after the 12th day.
Path Length
Path length is the number of interactions required to reach conversion. Ideally, it will take just one email, or one well-place Adwords ad, to successfully complete a conversion. The percentages, of conversion and conversion value, show in comparative terms how each path length contributes to the overall conversion total and value. Path lengths with a lower conversion value percentage to conversions percentage will be underperforming relative to other path lengths.
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For examples where having to drill down several times to gain the information you require is time-consuming each reporting period, you can create custom reports which will show you all the stats you wish to see straight away. If you want to create a custom report for the first time it is best to give us a call and we can tall you through the process to ensure you are going to get the correct stats.
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At the top right hand corner of the screen you will see Admin, If you click on this you will be able to set up goals, add users, link your Adwords account, add multiple annotations and change the general settings of your analytics account.
Once you have gone to the admin page, you should see something similar to below:
When making any changes to the setting of a profile, please ensure you have the correct profile set from the drop down list. From this first page you can manage the advanced segments, annotations, multi-channel funnels channel groupings and set up custom alerts.
Adding a User
You may want other people to have access to the Analytics profile. That can be done, as per below: 1. Select + New user
2. Enter the email address of the person you wish to gain access. (please not this email address will need to be registered with Google, either by going to google.com/account and using that email address to register for a Google account or by creating a brand new Google email address by going to
google.com/Gmail
3. Select the rights you would like the user to have, administrator rights will mean the user will be able to view all profiles within that website, they will also be able to make changes to the goals, settings and add other user. Read only will only allow the user to view and export the reports.
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Advanced Segments
Within the Profile sub-section, and within Assets, you can find Advanced Segments. This displays all current Advanced Segments and gives you the ability to create new ones. This functionality exists with Standard Reporting too, but this advanced segment offers increased power such as copy and sharing options.
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Editing Annotations
While annotations can also be editing underneath the graph in the Standard Reporting graph, this section offers another, and easier, interface in which to do it.
Setting up Goals
Goals and their usage were covered earlier in the report but what wasn’t covered was how to create a goal in the first instance. There is only the capability for 20 goals in total at any one time however.
Adding a goal is straightforward. Click on the link below, which must be noted, will only be visible providing all 20 goals are not in use. If they are still in use, then you have to edit an existing goal.
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New Goal
Adding a Goal monitoring Sales/Transactions:
To add a Sales goal, you would find the URL of the cart, or purchase review, and enter in the Goal URL. The Match Type is a drop down containing three options:
1.
Exact Match – matches exactly the Goal URL entered. Leading or trailing whitespaces will
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2.
Head Match – will register any URL containing enter address. I.e If you enter
http://www.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1,
http://www.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=9982251615 will still be matched.
3.
Regular Expression – Is useful to match URLS with varying stem or trailing parameters. By
using Regular Expression. By using
checkout.cgi\?page=1,
it will match both
http://sports.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&id=002 and
http://fishing.example.com/checkout.cgi?page=1&language=fr&id=119
.
A value can be attributed to the goal, which will be used to calculate overall goal revenue throughout reporting.
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Contact Us Form
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Event Based Goal
Using Events as goals is a way of determining the monetary impact of your events. As described previously, each event has a defined Category, Action and Label, while value is optional. By configuring the relevant fields, it’s possible to track your events as goal.
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Engagement Based Goal
Rather than viewing one-off events, such as a PDF download or submitted web form, goals can also be used effectively to track the engagement level of your site, either through time spent on site, or the numbers of pages viewed each session.
Pages Viewed
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Custom Alerts
It’s possible to have email alerts to your inbox of a change in the site’s performance. Below, the example alert is the decrease in revenue of 40% or more from the same day in the previous week. This can be applied to any number of site metrics.
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Adwords Integration
Without integrating Adwords with analytics, you will be unable to view your reports. It’s extremely straightforward and requires only a few steps. It may take up to 48 hours for the accounts to sync properly.
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