Google Analytics reports: how to get meaningful insights

Google Analytics has over 200 metrics available for tracking and reporting, how on earth do you know where to start?

We’ve covered a lot of information about website and marketing analytics, tracking technology, vital marketing and performance measurements, and more in our Series.

But we aren’t finished yet!

Today’s blog will bring everything together for the next step towards Data Mastery with Reports!

By the end of this blog, you’ll know:

• Why reports are vital for your marketing planning and implementation
• What FREE tech tools will best set you up for success — and why those on your website may not be cutting it
• How to refine your metric selections to generate the reports you need
• How to cut through the clutter and customize your reporting in less than TWO minutes
• How to pull data from ALL your lead generation channels — from your website, social media accounts, lead pages, and more

**Pro Tip: You should be pulling reports for weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly marketing review meetings and strategic plan creation and action setting. If you aren’t, this blog is a must-read!

So let’s get started, shall we?

Why are Data Reports Vital for Your Marketing and Success Strategy?

In previous posts, we discussed how vital Website Analytics is for ensuring your systems and sites are user friendly and well-functioning. This is important to avoid wasting lead generation dollars by directing people to pages that turn them off through poor functioning and cost you potential revenue.

But that’s only ONE aspect of data collection, analysis, and use.

The flip-side of that is using your data for Strategic Growth and Marketing!

After all, every business wants to run as successful, smooth, and smart as possible. Running reports through your data collection and analytics programs is one of the fastest and most efficient ways to do that, no matter what stage your business is at.

The best part? Once you have your systems set up, running performance reports only takes a few minutes and saves you hours of tracking things down bit by bit the old fashioned way.

Collecting, creating, and reviewing reports from your analytic data allows you to:

• Measure the progress of your recent marketing activities
• Compare that progress with your current strategies, goals, and actions
• And see what needs to be adjusted and made better for your next efforts to further propel you towards your targeted goals and KPIs (key performance indicators)

***Pro Tip: Set a reminder on your calendar to check out your key data points when you’re doing your weekly review and planning sessions for the upcoming week.

If you’re not doing these, make this a top priority, and you’ll be shocked to see the time, money, and headache you can save yourself!

What FREE Tools and Tech are Required for Report Generation?

Ok, ok, so reporting is a bit more compelling now, isn’t it? So where’s the catch? Does it take expensive software and alien language skills to be able to do it yourself?

Those alien language skills may come in handy at some point, but not for this.

When it comes to marketing analytics, there’s a pretty good chance your current website HAS an analytic tool built into it already. Popular platforms like Shopify, Wix, SquareSpace, etc. do this, but many are very basic (and they know it), so they also contain built-in integrations connecting to the tech we’re featuring today.

What is that tech? Google Analytics!

Google Analytics is one of the most popular, well-rounded, and user-friendly (when you do it right) analytics systems available, and it’s FREE!

Even better? It’s easily integrated with any website connected to your business (more on this in upcoming sections.).

If you aren’t familiar with Google Analytics or haven’t worked with it in a while, check out our blog post on eCommerce Marketing Analytics where we give you the down and dirty on Google Analytics for your benefit.

Another FREE tech tool you’ll enjoy if you aren’t collecting and tracking data from your website yet is another popular Google tool, Google Tag Manager.

Here’s another post of ours that gives you a breakdown of what Google Tag Manager is, how it works in partnership with Google Analytics, and why you need it for gathering key data metrics that’ll fill your reports.

Google Data Studio is our final FREE tech tool feature for this blog, and we’ll jump into that a bit later in this post.

Now let’s get into the reports!

How do You Know What Reports To Run?

First things first: to generate reports that hold relevant and usable data, you need to understand your report goals.

As we stated above, Google Analytics can track and measure over 200 metrics! Surely you won’t have to review ALL of those every time you pull a weekly/monthly report, right?

Sounds overwhelming… but you can relax, you DON’T have to waste your time checking every metric available!

This is where the strategy side of marketing analytics comes into play. It’s not all about the tech, and if you aren’t coming at your data with strategy combined with tech, you’re in for a messy and confusing experience.

A good place to start is by identifying your current goals. A few helpful questions to ask may be:

• What do I need this report to accomplish?
• Is it time to check my overall website performance?
• Is there a breakdown in my sales or nurture funnels?
• What are my greatest traffic sources that might be ideal for next month’s campaign feature?
• Why are people leaving halfway through their checkout process?
• Why did we make more money in the 1st quarter than the 3rd?
• Did that ___ investment pay off?
• Are we reaching our KPIs (key performance indicators)?

Different reports will be needed at different times, depending on what project is on your plate, so don’t be afraid to play around.

How To Cut Through The Clutter Of Confusing Data Options For Clear And Informative Reports

Google Analytics is a beefy tool and can be confusing when you first drift around that learning curve of managing business data yourself!

But there ARE steps you can take to ease and expedite the process when you need a report — contrary to what you may think when viewing the dashboard for the first few times.

Below we’re giving a few tips, tricks, and How-To’s for report creation regardless of what your current level of experience is! If you find yourself getting overwhelmed in your efforts, start simple, and move up in complexity from there as your skills increase.

If you hate it? Don’t worry — that’s what data experts like Wym Analytics are here for. Your data-savvy skills (or lack of) should never be the reason your business is held back.

Pep-talk aside, here are the tips!

For the Data Savvy!

If you’re pretty fluent in Google Analytics, you may prefer custom creating your report parameters to meet the detailed information you’re looking for.

In general, most online businesses have a series of metrics they measure most:

• Traffic — Free and Paid Sources
• Navigation
• Site Performance — PC and Mobile
• And Conversion.

You can manually create customized reports with advanced functions by telling GA what to track through Destination Goals, and once these are set it’s merely a matter of pulling those reports when you need them.

**Pro Tip: Destination Goals are fantastic for getting more unique and fuller data for conversion tracking above and beyond what standard conversion tracking collects.

For the Data Curious!

If you’re not super experienced with Google Analytics but aren’t afraid to jump right into learning something new, you may enjoy the halfway point between full-on customized reporting and standardized reporting: custom templates!

These can be created in TWO Minutes or less! Pretty sexy, right?

Google Analytics has a delectable little library to help you with this, and you can have a new report in just a few steps!

The Secret Sauce:

• Login to your GA account;
• On the sidebar, click “Customization” and then “Custom Reports”
• Then click “Import from Gallery”
• Choose a template that fits your needs.
• You can search the templates based on:
• Your Industry/Business
• Specific needs
• Most Popular
• Latest
• Ranking
• or filter by Category.
• Click “Import”, select a view from your account, and select the content you want.

After that, you can start customizing your view so you can easily see the numbers that matter!

And Voila, done! Pretty savvy feeling, isn’t it?

**Pro Tip: Feel free to experiment with multiple templates until you find the ones that really bring home the bacon! Here are 12 top templates, according to Neil Patel, just in case you need some encouragement to start.

For the Data Shy!

If you’re not very experienced in this area at all, and the above options make you want to run for the hills, you can create standardized reports right from your sidebar navigation.

This can be found on the left of your dashboard, and all you have to do is click through the options to begin getting more familiar with the process and running standard reports.

For example: Under the “Reports” heading,

• You can click “Behavior”
• Then click “Site Content”
• And finally, click “Landing Pages”
• Boom! Now you can see the standard metrics for what’s happening on your landing pages!

After that, you can save, share, import, and explore more insights to your heart’s content!

Creating these is relatively quick and simple — as long as you can make your way through a navigation menu. ;)

Alternatively, if that feels too basic, you may want to start with the same template process as the Data Curious, but save and further customized modification until you’re more comfortable with using Google Analytics.

Websites Aren’t The Only Data Stream To Include, But How Do You Get Data From ALL Of Your Marketing Channels?

Once you’re comfortable running reports on your website marketing data, the next step is making them better by including data from the rest of your outreach channels that aren’t housed on your website.

Channels like social media, blog publications, membership sites, and more.

You COULD do this platform by platform, but that’d be incredibly tedious and time-consuming, not to mention the fact that you’d be hand-crafting a complete report to house it all!

That brings us back to Google Data Studio!

Google Data Studio (GDS) is another FREE tool that works to collect all your widespread data to create organized, attractive, and interactive visual reports.

For example: Say you have a sales funnel that involves multiple destinations.

• Maybe it begins on Facebook
• Directs to a Leadpage landing page
• Then to an Interact quiz
• On to an email funnel
• And finally to your Kajabi for a sales and membership site

Instead of jumping from platform to platform pulling individual information, you can track each one through Google Analytics, and that information is then gathered by GDS to give you complete reporting on funnel performance and improvement needs.

We won’t be covering all the details in this post, but we ARE dedicating an upcoming blog to this in a few weeks.

However, if you aren’t using data tracking and reporting, as discussed above, you’ll have zero benefits from this, so take this time to make sure you’re putting these skills to use!

In Closing

Wow, give yourself a high-five for making it through the whole blog! By now, I’m sure you can see how smart and frequent use of Google Analytics can save you time, money, and wasted marketing efforts.

We know it can be challenging to jump into any new and complex undertaking, even for experienced professionals. However, this is a vital element worth investing in — whether you DIY your data management or outsource to a company that can handle this for you.

If you’d like more information on our data management solutions, visit us to learn more and schedule a complimentary consultation with one of our data experts.

Otherwise, stay tuned for our next blog in this series and revel in the sensation of sweet, savvy data potential!