Internet Marketing: Google Custom Reports.
Author:
Rebecca
Internet Marketing Service
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.




