Google Analytics Reporting Features You Must Take Advantage Of

Google Analytics has variety of reports to analyze different kinds of metrics (visits, page views, time on site, traffic source, conversions, geographic location of visitors, visitor loyalty, etc.). The most significant function of the analytics tool is to measure, identify potential area of improvements, bring actionable recommendations, and report the key performance indicators (KPI).

Google Analytics support e-commerce site, and the reports from e-commerce is really helpful in a sense that it can tie the metrics in terms of dollar value. It provides an insight into the e-commerce activity on your website, and better understands the success of your e-commerce site. Conversion rate, average order value, revenue, transactions are some of the main reports of this section that determine your website activity.

There are reports for various sections which include traffic (visitors), traffic sources, content, goal conversion, and e-commerce. The reports under these sections could be added to you dashboard to get an overall look, in one screen, at the metrics that matter most to you.

Google analytics has recently introduced the customs reports. They are those reports, which you create, save and edit to give you a specific view of the data. With the help of these, you can determine which information and metrics you want to see. You can organize them in the way you want to highlight the relevant data by using drag and drop interface. You also have the option to create a tab if you want to see related data in other dimension of metrics. In addition, when you create the custom report, you’ll have the option in creating a drill-down or multiple levels of sub-reports, by selecting the sub-dimension.

Certain features and functions of Google Analytics reporting that are very useful that I recommend you to take full advantage of:

• Export: Google Analytics has an export feature that allows you to download the reports in PDF, XML, CSV, and TSV. Certain reports may only allow PDF or XML. These downloads will give you the flexibility to cater the reports to your users in different ways. You can pass along the PDF file without altering it, or pass XML into other reporting tools in a form of data-feed, or manipulate CSV file and enhance the reports/charts as you wish.
• Time frame: Setting the time frame is one of the most important feature when reporting out of Google Analytics, because you able to select your reporting period grouping the data by day, weeks, or months. It is easy to select the day, date or month you desire by the calendar interface. You can also compare a date, date range to another date, or date range by choosing the “compare to past” option. This helps you to know the performance trends on your site before and after a change made on your site or landing pages. The interface also provides you with a timeline feature, which shows you a bar graph of visits over time. A particular range can be selected which gives you a graphic representation of the fluctuations in your report.
• Email: This is a great feature when you want to share your data, reports, or dashboards to certain people by email. You can send a report instantly or schedule the report run and email it on a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly basis. If you are sending out to a group of users, you may want to consider creating a group account email address so your IT admin can control the email list when a member leaves the company or what not (Google Analytics will only have that one group email address set).
• View/Chart options: There a several options to represent the data in various ways. Some options are ordinary table view, pie chart, bar graph, etc. Most reports contains a pie chart, a basic table vie and bar graphs. An extra highlight is the trend graph that is in default mode in most of the reports. It gives you a snapshot view of your site’s performance for various data points like conversion rate, bounce rate , visits etc.
• Dashboards: a dashboard is a collection of various reports. You can add a favorite report on your dashboard for a quick look into the site performance. It shows you a snapshot view of the reports that is customizable. Handy and quick access to your entire data of your favorite reports is the greatest advantage of dashboards.
• Advanced segmentation: It is the recent development of Google Analytics, which help you to segment the data to get a better insight into it. I recommend setting up advanced segmentations and utilize the segmentations against the custom reporting to take advantage or your useful reports with meaningful metrics to you.

Some advanced segmentation I’ve set up when the feature was first enabled were, Engaged Audience and Not-Engaged Audience segmentations. This is simply to show the difference in performance from those two segments against the reporting metrics you choose to run.

Engaged Audience will defer for all of you, but you can say, visitors who did not bounce and spent on your site more than the one minute, and had 4 page views per visit. Not-Engaged Audience could be visitors who bounced and spend on your site less than 30 seconds (this is just an example). When you use these segmentations against your traffic sources or site sections, you’ll definitely gain some great insights.