You can put forth the most exciting marketing initiatives, and get rankings for some killer keywords, but without knowing how they perform, what’s the use? I make sure to identify the main goals of a website, and understand what sort of KPIs they’re looking for. Using Google Analytics, plus a few other goodies, I can generate great reports that show the most important indicators of user behavior and acquisition.
Expert setup
I know how to set up your analytics code to make sure you’re tracking a user’s visit. One small mistake might mean that you lose sight of the original source. Often, when you’re using a third-party checkout system, the visit session resets and you lose sight of the original source. It’s also important to track your site goals. If you have a newsletter sign up form, let’s track clicks to that, and find out what sources deliver the most signups. We can track and evaluate any behavior on the site – a user visits a page, signs up for your RSS, or enters the checkout process for example.
Custom reports
Everyone has different needs, and wants to see information relevant to their site. Aggregate data is useless in showing you the specifics. Let’s say you want to know how many people from Poland visit your site, and what browsers they’re using. You also want to know their engagement levels, like how many are new visitos, what they’re bounce rate and times on site are. Normally I pick a set of engagement metrics, like time on site and pages/visit, and then a dimensions – let’s say keywords.
Custom reports and dashboards:
Advanced segments
Most site owners want to know some very specific things about their visitors, and while Google does a nice job segmenting the basics – search traffic, paid search traffic, referral visits, mobile visits – often you’ll need to drill down into the data to find what you’re looking for. Custom advanced segments can be saved, and then used to filter the data. Common ones I use for SEO include nonbranded/branded keywords, nonbranded longtail keywords, Bing visits, tight groups of specific keywords that I’m optimizing. Understanding the subtle differences in quality of traffic on small levels can be very important, and segmenting your data helps with this.
Visual dashboards
As exciting as I may find them, managment doesn’t like reading through long Excel spreadsheets, and pages upon pages of data. So I create visual dashboards, which focus on the most important goals and metrics that tell us about how we’re performing. There’s a nifty Excel plugin that integrates with Google Analytics and allows me to build totally custom dashboards that tell you all the juicy details, without the boring rows of numbers and percent signs.
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