Top 5 Analytics Reports You Can’t (& Shouldn’t) Live Without

August 12, 2011 | by Chrissie Alquinta | Posted in Web Strategy

Even if you’re not a Google Analytics (GA) guru, you can still get insightful data about the status of your website with just a little time invested. And when I say a little, I really mean it. We’re talking 30 minutes, tops.

I’m not promising anything mind blowing – for that you would need to dedicate time and effort to sift through and analyze your site’s data. But, if you’ve got half an hour to spare and know how to log into your GA account, you can gain some pretty significant insight. These reports will answer the following basic questions and help you get information on how effectively your website is performing:

• How is your site trending over time?
• Which keywords are visitors using to find you?
• How loyal are your visitors?
• Who’s sending you the most traffic? The most valuable traffic?
• How do your landing pages perform?

Report #1: Trends

Total traffic to a website doesn’t matter one bit. Except of course if you aren’t getting any at all. But most sites do get visitors. the important thing isn’t how many visitors you get, but what they do on your site and how this trends over time.

To find this out, go to your dashboard, which should look something like this:

Viewing the timeline will allow you to see trends in visits over the time period selected. The great thing is that you can:

• Edit the time period (by clicking on the down arrow next to the date in the upper right hand corner of the dashboard)
• Change the metric you are measuring (by clicking on the wheel on the Visits timeline widget). This allows you to review trends for pageviews, visitors, bounce rates, clicks, goal completion, etc. so that you can quickly and easily see trends for all relevant metrics pertaining to your site.
• Filter the data. For example, if I wanted to see how the bounce rate has changed for different visitor types over time, I would graph the bounce rate metric over time and filter for visitor type as in the example below.

Report #2: Keywords

It’s important to have your finger on the pulse of your audience. Understand where they are online and how they are finding you. This allows you to reach out to them where – and in a way – they are most comfortable.

The keyword and traffic reports are critical to gaining this understanding. The keyword report tells you exactly what the name implies – which keywords visitors are using to find you on search engines.

You can access this by clicking on the My Site tab at the top of the dashboard page, selecting Traffic Sources, Overview, and then clicking on View Full Report under the Keyword table.

This is what your report should look like:

To get even more insight into how these keywords are performing, click on the box next to View and select Comparison. Select Bounce Rate from the drop-down menu next to (compared to site average). A report like the following will be generated that compares the top 10 keywords’ bounce rate performance to the site average.

Report #3: Visitor Loyalty

We all have friends and acquaintances. (Well, I sure hope you do, anyway!) Websites do too. Friends are the ones that visit the site time and again for regular updates. Acquaintances might stop by only once in awhile or rarely, if ever. The visitor loyalty report will tell you if your site has more friends or acquaintances.

Access this report by clicking on Visitors > Behavior > Frequency & Recency. You’ll see something like the following:

This report tells you how often your visitors come to your site, from once to more than 201+ times in the specified time period. You really want to see fewer one-timers (acquaintances) and a larger curve of those coming more frequently (your friends).

Report #4: Traffic Sources

This report will tell you where your traffic comes from. At the very basic level, this is what you need to see. If you have more time or advanced capabilities, you can filter this data to find out which traffic source is most valuable – in terms of bounce rate, goal completion, revenue, etc.

To access this report, click on Traffic Sources > Overview.

Report #5: Landing Pages

Your website’s landing pages are your chance to make a good first impression. These pages should either give the user all the information they need right there on that one page (for instance an event listing will often do that or a blog post) or contain clear and concise calls to action that invite the user to explore the site further.

To access this report, click on Content > Site Content > Landing Pages. This will give you a general overview of your landing pages. To compare for the bounce rate, select Comparison next to View and change Visits to Bounce Rate.

For simplicity’s sake, the red bars are pages that are performing poorly. However, you’ll want to look at these pages and see if they are indeed giving the user the information they need right there on that page. Also, a time-on-page analysis will help you determine if users are spending time on that page or leaving without consuming the information presented.

If this seems all too overwhelming to you, we are pleased to offer a host of web analytics services from quickstart training, to more in-depth training, to a complete web metrics analysis, report, and walk-through of the data and recommendations.

How can we best help you assess your website’s effectiveness?