How to set up Custom Reports in Google Analytics

You’ve set up your Google Analytics account so you can monitor your Internet Marketing but with the minefield of information that GA offers do you wonder where to go past the default dash board that is already present there?

Too much data without a purpose or a function is worthless so its important for you to decide what it is from your analytics that you actually want to find out.

For your SEO purposes you most likely wish to know if the keywords you are optimising for are actually bringing the traffic to your site that you expect. You will want to know about which keywords have been directly responsible for your goal conversions. Other important things you may wish to know when measuring the success of your SEO is which areas your visitors come from especially for local SEO campaigns and for e-commerce websites you will need to know the average value that each area or keyword has actually brought.

There are many variables which you can play with in custom reports so consider which are important to you and which results will enable you to create actions to improve your business and your SEO.

The main essential set up that I use for my clients is the Keywords Goals Report. You can set this up in a simple custom report which collates this information into one simple report. To do this you need to click on the custom reports tab and click to create a new report.

Within this set up you need to set the metrics which are to be reported and the dimensions on which they are to be shown against.

Type the metrics you wish to use into the search bar and when found drag and drop them into the correct box. For the Keyword Goals Custom Report use the settings in the image below. With this report the goal 1 has been configured against people visiting the contact page and goal 2 is where people have submitted an email enquiry and reached the contact process page (thank you page).

You can rename this report at the top by simply editing the date section and calling it Keyword Goals.
Click to save and then you will see the full report you have created.

The sources will be listed showing how many contact and contact process conversions there are, along with the contact process conversion rate. You can now click on the source to reveal the keywords that were typed to find your site under each source which brought the contact and contact process goals.

You can customise your report to suit your needs and make multiple reports in any one account. The great thing about custom reports is that once set up you can access the information your business needs to know about the performance of your website and your SEO quickly and easily without having to know how to navigate around the whole of Google Analytics.

To see the selection of variables you can choose from you can scroll the side bar to make your selection on the metrics and dimensions

The example of how to see which cities have brought the most traffic and the value of each visit is demonstrated below.

Planning before creating your reports is essential to ensure you create the right kind of reports for your needs and to make analysing your SEO a much easier task.

How to use Google Analytics Event Tracking

Your internet marketing campaign and the structure of your website consists of many aspects that need fine tuning to ensure that you get the best return on your investment. You need to be able to analyse your website with a program like Google Analytics to gain an insight into how well or not visitors interact with your site.

Google Analytics Event tracking enables you to take your investigations that step further by giving you a way to see how people interact with internal components of your site and not just what pages they have viewed.

These actions taken within your pages are great indicators as to where the strengths and weakness within each page lies and will most likely be contributing to the success or failure in getting your visitors to complete the conversions you are expecting.

Google Analytics has a method integrated within it called event tracking that you can use to gain these vital statistics that you can use to create actions that need to be taken to improve your SEO.

As with any marketing strategy, before you move forward with this you need to look at your site in conjunction with the objectives set regarding your website in your business plan and decide what aspects of your site you want to find out more information about.

What is the data you wish to receive results for? What internal components be it Flash web videos or “on click” actions, will give you useful information and knowledge into how a visitor experiences your site? Can you think of certain actions that can be taken from the possible data you will receive? If the answer is yes then this event will be worth tracking.

Now you have decided which events to track you need to take action by adding certain code to the pages of your site.

Each page object, widget or video that you wish to track the interaction with will need to use the

_trackEvent ( ) coding.

Within the brackets of this code, certain aspects need to be added including the category ( name for tracked objects), the action you wish to track, and two additional optional aspects being the label and the value can be used.

Detailed examples of how this coding should be written for different types of actions you wish to track is provided by Google within their page “Setting up event tracking”

One example they provide is:

gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Videos', 'Downloaded', 'Gone With the Wind']);

This code would track how often a video was downloaded from a site.

With videos that are viewed on site you can not only track if visitors clicked  to play them, but also if they were paused or stopped half way through. This information will guide you into how useful your content is and may highlight areas in content that may need updating to make the site more engaging and relevant to what your visitors are looking for.

The tracking of quick contact forms displayed on the homepage that on click of the proceed button will copy and paste the details into the true contact form to complete the conversion, are great to track. You can identify from this what percentage of visitors who use this form carry on to make a full contact page conversion.

It is also an excellent method to see how many near conversion you have from your site and may highlight possible area for improvement within the conversion funnel process.

Websites for showrooms or actual shops where the customer would be more likely to just visit them can track on site actions to Google Maps to see if web visitors have gained enough from the site to make them want to know how to find their location.

Look at your site and see where you can use the google analytics event tracker to assess the quality of your web pages and improve on the goal and conversion rates you currently achieve.

They key to online success is to identify your goals and objectives. Many clients believe the success of their campaign is measured by how many page 1 number 1 listings they have in the search engine results. There is no denying that rankings are a vital element in SEO success, they should not be your main goal, it may or may not be true that you could be missing out on visitors for not being page 1 number 1, but it is important to realise that rankings will not make sales, and that different rankings will produce different bounce rates.

For example if you look at buyer behavior, it consists of needs or wants (in my case it is usually a want) a period of research, to see what if on offer to fulfill that need or want, and then the act of purchasing. From personal experience I will browse the first, sometimes the second page and then re-visit the site that most suited my requirements. The point I’m making is that although a good ranking might bring more in through the door at position 1, they might not be as ready to buy as those at who come in the door at position 5.

Goal Setting and Monitoring

• Visitors: Again a common misconception, once you start performing for your keywords you will notice a rise in visitors to your site. Without being negative its not quite time to declare victory just yet, and my next point will lead on from this. If the visitors you are receiving are not converting, you are going to have to have a good look at changing the direction of your focus, it could be identifying new keywords, re-assessing your products, updating your website, you will need to identify where the problem lies and work on improving this. Monitoring visitors is very useful, but its not a numbers game and should not be your main goal.
• Conversions: In my opinion this should be your ultimate goal, this is the biggie! SEO is more than just rankings and visitors and I cant stress this enough. It is vital that before progressing forward with your plans for world domination, you define these goals to your web designer and SEO consultant, or if undertaking a solo mission; yourself. A conversion will be personal to your business, for an online shop it will be people making a purchase, if you are a blog it might be how many people leave you a comment, it could be a new follower on facebook or twitter. Without understanding and defining these goals you will have no way of monitoring your success or return on investment.

Can you track your conversions?

Installing analytic tracking on your website is a must for you to be able monitor your goals and objectives. Some of the most basic data you will need to get to grips with are the amount of traffic (visitors) your site receives, where these visitors are coming from (traffic sources) and how they are finding you, how the visitors use your site and bounce rates, and identify the best method for monitoring conversion rates personal to your goals. Rebecca wrote a post last week about how webmaster tools can help you can develop your SEO, and Nick’s video blog is a good place to start for installing analytic tracking to your site.

We all know SEO is evolving, with Google rolling out personalised searches, and anytime search results, meaning not all users will see the same 10 results dependent on their settings. What does this mean for SEO… well, you can no longer quantify a successful SEO campaign based on the highest listings in Google. You will need to identify goals and then the data needed to prove the success of the goals you have chosen.

You only have to do a little research around Google Analytics (GA) to realise there are true fans, there are those who sceptical and those who sit on the fence. We use google analytics, we send our clients a monthly report through GA, the simplicity of the dashboard interface allows them to monitor how their SEO campaign is working.

For those who have no desire to jump into the murky depths of the true capabilities of GA, lets look at the basics of what they can highlight for your website:

1.Traffic Sources overview: Without analytics (doesn’t have to be GA) you wont know how visitors use your site, or come to find your site. If you look at your dashboard you will notice a pie chart in the bottom left hand corner. This will tell you:

2.Content Overview: You can monitor the most visited pages, the time spent on those pages. Which means you can focus your highest converting keyphrases around these pages.

3.Keyword tracking: you may find over time your carefully selected keywords might not be the most appropriate, or that you are missing out on a little golden nugget you had not initially thought off.

4.Track and improve your conversions. A website is there to promote your business, by tracking your conversions you can build upon what works. Monitor market/seasonal trends.

5. Bounce Rate: You will see how long visitors spend on your site (bouce rate), this indicates that visitors are not finding what they are looking for and are clicking away instantly. It is well worth taking the opportunity to re-think your content, design or products.

Google analytics can provide you with an extensive never ending amount of useful information about your websites performance. This blog literally scratches the surface, well it doesn’t really even do that, but I hope it at least gives you an understanding of what is on the surface. The sceptics don’t like that google being the “super power” it is, has the ability to see how visitors from all search engines find and use your site. Meaning should they want to, they can undermine all your SEO efforts, in all fairness SEO is constantly evolving and nothing is set in stone. Google’s aim is to bring the searcher the most relevant results to a query, should google wish the change the game, SEO consultants are going to have to up theirs.

How using advanced techniques can help improve your SEO and conversion rates…

Google Analytics is my absolute favourite website analytics tool. I cannot tell you enough how important it is to have it installed on your website so you can track visitor numbers, trends and more. Anyone with an SEO campaign to run, whether they are employing a company, such as Creare to run their internet marketing, or are doing it inhouse should definitely get involved with google Analytics on a deeper level.

Of course, Google Analytics provides some fantastic data, even if you don’t apply any ‘extras’ to the package.

I have recently been playing about with a lot of the features and wanted to share my findings with you all - and explain how useful they are.

eCommerce Tracking

Google Analytics can track your eCommerce site. It can show which keywords bring the most sales, which landing pages lead to sales and ultimately how much revenue is made directly from the search engines. Pretty useful stuff methinks!

Install eCommerce Tracking into your online shop is a little bit more complicated than the usual ‘bog standard’ analytics but is well worthwhile. The best advice I can give you is to follow the advice on this page to get the tracking code installed correctly.

Once it is installed, you will have to wait for a day (or two) and then you will start to receive really useful data. You can use this data to determine the best way forward for your business. For example, if the keywords you currently optimise for don’t bring much revenue, then it’s time to change tack. Or, perhaps you campaign is bringing revenue from sources you didn’t realise were so lucrative – you can start to transfer efforts to where it’s needed to make the most of your online sales.

Advanced Segmentation

This is another cool little feature that I have found useful. Basically you can segment off your keywords to see exactly the kind of traffic they bring and whether your keyword choices are the right ones for your business. I call this pretty powerful stuff. You can set several variables, so you may optimise your site for 5 keywords, so you can put these all in a group together choosing ‘match’ – where the tracking code will see if visits to the site originate from the keyword alone. What I find useful is to also create a segment with all your keywords in, but choose ‘Contains’. This means you can look at the traffic that comes to your site by searching for your keywords in the longtail. This can then be compared against your actual keywords.

Funnels

You can also set up funnels to track the path a user takes towards your desired goal – this could be a sale, or a completed contact form, or a downloadable e-book. This is useful because it can tell you where people ‘drop-off’ and you can then make improvements in order to retain them.

Get the Best out of Google Analytics

It’s then useful to combine your segments and funnels with the eCommerce tracking as it can tell you which keywords bring consistent revenue over time.

The best way to get the most our of Google Analytics is to have a play about with it, find what works for you.

Google Analytics has a lot of features. Some will be red herrings for your purposes, some will be the golden nuggets you dream of finding. It’s up to you to discover which features are going to suit your needs best. Make yourself a list of all the data you would find useful for your site and then play with Google Analytics until you can get the data you need from it.