5 Useful Google Analytics Reports

Published in

digitalmarketing101

5 min readFeb 5, 2018

For me Google Analytics is the bible of digital marketer. If you are in digital marketing business, Google Analytics should be your first tool to integrate with your website (well, maybe just after Google Tag Manager) to monitor the affect of your marketing efforts. You can be in e-commerce business or content marketing (ie. running a personal blog) or lead generation for a call center. No matter that KPI’s you have, GA has built-in reports for you to track your traffic.

In this blog post I wanted to share the reports I use but before getting into that I’ll cover a couple of to-do's for a healthy start.

Install Google Tag Manager to your website

Actually GA can be integrated to a website without a tag manager. GA script should be added near the top of the <head> tag and before any other script or CSS tags, and the string UA-XXXXX-Y should be replaced with the property ID (also called the "tracking ID") of the Google Analytics property you wish to track. For more information, please click here.

I suggest integrating GA via GTM in order keep your website code clean and managing all the tags you might be using in the future from the same place. GTM has a custom tag for Universal Analytics. All you have to do is to create a trigger that fires on each page view and configure the tag with your GA account tracking ID.

Create IP address filter

In order to get more reliable data from GA, you should exclude internal traffic by creating IP address filter. This will let you to see reports that reflects only your external (real) traffic. But to be able to exclude your IP, you need to have a static IP. You won’t be able to exclude dynamic IPs as you might guess.

Make Goal Definitions

What is your expectation from a visitor? Filling an application form? Making a purchase? Downloading an e-book? Reading your content? If you can answer to this question, you are ready to configure Google Analytics Goals for your website. Goal settings will allow you to track certain user actions, if those are fulfilled or not. There are various goal types according to your targets.

1- All Pages

You can find this report under Behavior -> Site Content section.

In this report you can see the most visited pages of your website together with unique page views (number of sessions during which the specified page was viewed at least once), average time on page, bounce rate (single-page sessions in which there was no interaction with the page). This report gives you an idea about how your visitors like your content, which pages visited most, if they bounced or read your content.

2- Source/Medium

You can find this report under Acquisition -> All traffic section.

Source/Medium report shows goal completions apart from the users. On this report you can see which source (utm_source) assisted with how many goal completion during the date range you picked and it breaks down the report per utm_medium. This is one of the most important report to track your PPC campaigns (I recommend adding “Campaign” as a secondary dimension to get your reported segmented by utm_campaign as well).

3- Browser & OS

You can find this report under Audiance -> Technology section.

In this report you can see Browser, Browser version or Operating system of your visitors. Your website should support the browsers you are getting traffic from. Browser report might give you very valuable insights. For example, if your bounce rate is very high on a specific browser, maybe your website doesn’t loaded nicely in that browser. You should test and fix.

4- Location

You can find this report under Audiance -> GEO section.

In this report you can see the list of countries & cities you are getting traffic from together with goal completions. You can add City column as a secondary dimension if you are interested in this detail. If you have considerable amount of users from a specific location but no goal completions, this indicates an issue to focus on. Do you support the language of that region? Can your website accept payments from that location? (ie. you support only paypal but you have visitors coming from a country where paypal doesn’t give service).

5- Speed suggestions

You can find this report under Behavior -> Site Speed section.

On this report you can sort your pages by total number of page views and focus on which pages gets most traffic but has the lowest PageSpeed Score. On this report you will also find links to suggestion of Google Page Speed Insights.

Homework: Lifetime value

Lifetime value is in beta phase, hence I didn’t experiment with it. Also it doesn’t make much sense for my business. But I believe it will be a valuable report for e-commerce sites. Therefore, please experiment with it if that’s a metric you want to follow and let me know your thought.