My Favorite Report in Google Analytics

As digital marketing becomes the standard way to market and sell products the importance of tools like Google Analytics will become increasingly more important.

Using and understanding Google Analytics is a fundamental part of what we do at Anduro Marketing. Some days it seems that we eat, sleep and breathe numbers, tables, charts and ratios. 

One area that many of our clients struggle with is setting up and understanding Goals. It is actually easy: Go to the Admin section, click on Goals and set up a goal. You can even turn on Value to track the dollar value of a specific action that happens on your website. There are advanced features that are tricky but to track the performance of a specific page is quite simple.

A common example is to count up the number of times a visitor fills out a form such as the form on a Contact Us page. It is easy, at the end of the month, to look at the Conversions section of Google Analytics and count how many times the form was completed. In addition, you can look at Source / Medium and determine which marketing channel is doing the heavy lifting and bringing in the most inquiries. 

Results will look like this:

Using this area of Google Analytics to determine the marketing channel is less than optimum because there is too much information - there are too many Sources. A better way is to click on Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. This report looks like this:

This is one of the most useful reports in Google Analytics. On one screen you can see all of the following by Marketing Channel:

• Sessions

• New Users

• Bounce Rate

• Pages/ Session

• Avg Session Duration

• AND Conversions

That is my favourite report in Google Analytics.

In my next post, I'll look at some complications between Goals, Pageviews and Segmenting Data.