Google Analytics is an invaluable tool with some great reports available out of the box, but to get the most out of it, you should try building your own customised reports.
Google Analytics experts have built a number of templates for custom reports in the Solutions Gallery which are freely available. These can help point you in the right direction to which reports you may find useful for your website. These templates save you time and can also be customised and tweaked to fit with exactly what you need.
Reports on Site Performance and Acquisition
Websites can sometimes be incompatible with certain browsers – which can then lead to a loss of visitors. A report that examines conversions per browser that segments the report by device can help you understand if this is happening.
Understanding your traffic based on goals can be a helpful way to target the right audience. This report breaks down your traffic flows by unique users, total sessions, conversion rates, and value metrics set by you.
You may want to have a look at how new and returning visitors behave differently on your site. This report will help you by looking at overall traffic and conversion and event finishing patterns.
Some sites will perform better on different devices. You’ll want to make sure that you can identify which devices and platforms do well and which ones could do with some improvement.
Some pages on your site might have a high bounce rate. This could be due to long load times and this custom report will be able to help you identify problem pages against the site average.
Reports on your Content
You can use this report to identify at which times throughout the day and during the week your site gets the most traffic. You can use this to help you to work out what time you should be posting your blog content.
If you want to see which referring sites bring you the most value through conversions, you can do so using this report.
If you’re looking for a report on which of your content is performing well and which could do with some tweaking then this report can help. It will help you to identify which subject matter gets the most interest and what content adds the most value to your site.
SEO Reports
SEO Insights for Google Organic (not provided)
Now that Google doesn’t provide as many keyword reports, you can identify keywords through landing page URLs as well as titles to help you to identify themes.
This report helps you to list the keywords you can see, along with conversion rates and goal completion, page load times and visitor metrics. You can see which keywords get the most traction with visitors.
All of these reports can help you to identify trends and insights for your site. Do you use any custom reports for your site? Let us know below.
Image credit: Jacob Gube https://www.flickr.com/photos/31288116@N02/3731108469/ under the license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ (unaltered).
