How to Read your Google Analytic Report.

Jul 5, 2016 | Bridgetown Marketing

Here are two quick facts for all Small Business owners out there trying to get ahead in online marketing.

1. Your Marketing Efforts are nearly useless if you are not tracking your results.

2. Google Analytics presents you with more information than you will ever have regular time to look at.

My goal with Bridgetown Marketing is to collect the information that is truly vital to creating the most effective use of your marketing dollars and to present it in a way that requires not more than a 10 minute look each month.

Do you have 10 minutes each month to look at a report?

Yes. You do.

Here is an example report for a client of Bridgetown Marketing. Below, I will take you through a step by step guide in understanding this information and how it applies to your marketing efforts.

Monthly reports are run so that a comparison of Month over Month can be reviewed. This helps to show growth as well as problem areas.

  1. ORGANIC TRAFFIC: This report is set up to filter organic traffic from traffic that you may be attracting from paid advertisements. The display will show you changes over the course of a months time. This specifically speaks to your social and Search Engine Optimization efforts and will help to inform you on days and times during a month when your site is seeing the most visitors.
  2. ORGANIC ENGAGEMENT: This report will help to determine which pages on your site are getting the most traction and therefore deserve more of your attention. These are your conversion pages. We will talk about adding more calls to action here. A good goal is 2 minutes on a page.
  3. ORGANIC GOAL COMPLETION: This report is one of the most important and therefore deserved some specific attention. Goals are set up uniquely for your site to track specific behavior. For instance, in this report we are tracking the number of users who have actively engaged to send a contact form submission to the company. You can take these statistics and compare them to conversions to get an idea of return on investment from your website.
  4. ORGANIC BY CITY: If you are a service provider, this report can help to tell you where your more grass-roots marketing efforts should be focused. This report will tell you where the majority of your audience is viewing from. For instance – we can see here that this particular company is seeing most of their audience in Portland, Oregon.
  5. ORGANIC TRAFFIC: By the numbers, this report is very simple and tells you a month over month number of the visitors who came to your site. In order for this number to be accurate and effective, certain filters should be applied to your analytics to discount visits that could be contributed to spam or spiders. Would you like to know more about those filters? Keep an eye on this blog – coming soon.
  6. SEARCH ENGINE: This pie chart is a nice visual to show you which of the search engines your users are finding you on most often. Not surprisingly – Google with often take a larger piece of the pie. But it is useful to know where secondary resources can be put.
  7. AVERAGE PAGE LOAD: Though this may seem like a deep analytic, page load times can have a severe effect on your rankings. This report will help to show you a month over month comparison of your pages with the slowest load times to help you monitor and adjust content.  Compare this report to your ORGANIC ENGAGEMENT report to see if perhaps some small changes to a page adjust its placement on that list.
  8. ENTRANCE AND USERS BY KEYWORD: Keyword reports are the bread and butter of analytics. This is telling you which phrases and words your audience are using most often to find you. If you are seeing great performance in a few variations – try adding more content with those exact chain of words into content of pages that are not performing as well. Also – consider whether or not the content on your site is answering that query as well as an audience member may hope.
  9. REFERRAL & LINK ANALYSIS: This report will help you to know who your best advocates are online. Keep an eye on this report to see which social media platforms are directing traffic to your website. You may also want to keep an eye on well known spam websites in this list. It may be time to set up a new filter or two to make sure that your analytics are clean and truly reporting real and relevant information.
  10. ORGANIC M VS D: This is a report displaying which device your audience is using to view your site. How is your site displaying on mobile? Tablet? When you start to see those numbers climb you will feel more motivated to ensure that your audience there is getting the best experience possible.

 

I hope that this information has shed some light on how simple and IMPORTANT accurate and well cultivated reporting can be to your business.

With Bridgetown Marketing, I focus on the following:

  • Saving my clients time
  • Making my clients money
  • Honoring my clients business
  • Educating my clients on the power of Integrated Digital Marketing

Let’s set up a time to chat about what I can do for your business