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10 google analytics reports you need to have
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Ken Pendergast
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10 Google Analytics Reports You Need to Have
Posted by Ken on Jun 16, 2011 | 15 Comments
Google Analytics is a free solution but that doesn’t mean you cannot have great
reports that speak the truth about your customers and your marketing portfolio. There are two buckets that
makes Google Analytics a true enterprise solution: Custom Reports and Segmentation.
I am highlighting the top 10 reports I find to be a must-have for any digital marketer. The listed reports are
completely unique in regards to the insights they provide. A couple of these reports are profile setups, you
will have to create a profile to achieve the report or configure a top level account.
These custom reports can be used on any type of profile and across multiple domains. The biggest
prerequisite is having goals setup within your profiles.
To use these custom reports; you will need to be logged into your Google Analytics account to view and save
them to your own account and profiles.
Complete list of Google Analytics reports
1. Global Rollup
2. Conversion Analysis
3. Organic Rankings
4. Landing Page Performance
5. Site Search Commerce
6. Paid Search Keyword Analysis
7. Customer Network Analysis
8. Organic Keyword Success
9. Visitor Acquisitions Analysis
10. New Customer Analysis
11. Campaign Commerce (Bonus)
Each of these reports can serve a different vertical within your organization and all can be shared. The most
important property between them, they are all actionable! Below is a common scenario for high to low level
analysis.
Manager / Director / VP – Very high level reports
Global Rollup
Visitor Acquisitions
2. Conversion Analysis
Customer Network Analysis
Content / Web Team – Content specific metrics and insights
Global Rollup
Landing Page Performance
Site Search Commerce
New Customer Analysis
Organic Rankings
SEO – Content and organic search visitor insights
Global Rollup
Organic Keyword Success
Conversion Analysis
Landing Page Performance
Site Search Commerce
Organic Rankings
Search / PPC / Display / Email Marketing – To effectively measure your campaign success
Global Rollup
Paid Search Keyword Analysis
Conversion Analysis
Landing Page Performance
New Customer Analysis
Visitor Acquisitions Analysis
Campaign Commerce
Global Rollup Report
This is an account structure not an actually report. However since it consists of multiple websites it is
considered more of a report. You can see your highest level of information across all of your websites on one
dashboard.
To implement, to do this you need to create a modified version of the original cut-n-paste GA script from
Google. It needs to track to 2 Google Analytics accounts. if you have already been using GA for some time
or if you only have a couple sites not 5 or more you can get away with just one but it will limit you when you
start creating more profiles.
Conversion Analysis – Macro and Micro Conversions
Conversions are the beginning of the customer life cycle and a big part of customer lifetime value. This is a
multi channel marketing report for all goals. What channels are producing conversions? Which channels need
improvement? How can we better serve our customers in lower converting channels? These are some of the
question I ask when using this report. Probably the most important report you need to have yesterday.
View the custom report in Google Analytics
Organic Rank in Google
To achieve this report, you must create a custom profile within an account in Google Analytics. The
profile/report is going to just include Google searches and clicks from organic listings, no paid ads. The lists
of filters needed to achieve this looks something like this:
3. It’s not as bad as it looks… I am going to list out each filter for you:
Include Organic Search
Filter Type: Custom filter, Include
Filter Field: Campaign Medium
Filter Pattern: organic
Case Sensitive: No
Include Google Search
Filter Type: Custom filter, Include
Filter Field: Campaign Source
Filter Pattern: Google
Case Sensitive: No
Add Position to Keyword
Filter Type: Custom filter, Advanced
Field A -> Extract A: Campaign Term = (.*)
Field B -> Extract B: Referral = (?|&)(start|first|b)=([^&]*)
Output To -> Constructor: User Defined = $A1 | page: $B3
Field A Required: Yes
Field B Required: No
Override Output Field: Yes
Case Sensitive: No
Ranking Page 1 (SERP)
Filter Field: User Defined
Search String: page:$
Replace String: Page: 1
Case Sensitive: No
Ranking Page 2 (SERP)
Filter Field: User Defined
Search String: page: 1[0-1]$
Replace String: Page: 2
Case Sensitive: No
Ranking Page 2 (SERP)
Filter Field: User Defined
Search String: page: 2[0-1]$
Replace String: Page: 3
Case Sensitive: No
You can easily modify the ranking filter and create as many tracking filters for organic clicks from deeper
SERP pages as you feel the need. Most SEO tools measure the first 10 pages of results for 100 results. you
4. would need 10 filters to use that as a standard. Make sure the filter order matches my image above. After all
that technical stuff…
The report lives inside: Visitors > User Defined and looks like this:
You are now successfully tracking some very insightful organic analytics.
Landing Page Performance
The ultimate page level report, it combines all similar page urls that are the same page but tracked multiple
times in Google Analytics, by using the “Page Title”. This report takes into account all of your pages that
someone is landing on from all sources and measuring how well it is serving as a entrance page. Your about
us page could be a big landing page from brand keywords from Google, Yandex, Baidu, and Bing, how well
is it serving as a landing page? Are you prepared for all of your pages to be a landing page or are you just
focusing on product specific pages? Be prepared for every page on your site in some way to be a landing
page. Every visitor has value, what is your per visit value? How much are you losing do to a high bounce
rate?
Even if you have multiple duplications of the same content this report will serve them all as 1 page in the
report. If you have duplicate page titles on multiple pages with different content. Then you have more
problems than just a bad bounce rate.
View the custom report in Google Analytics
Customer Acquisitions
This report shows you which channels and services are driving traffic to your site. Is Marketo and your email
marketing driving more than Google PPC, this will tell you. This is a high level report that drills down and
becomes granular within your campaigns. What’s really important is the total goal value for each channel.
What channels are really converting for you and where are your most valuable customers finding your
products? These are some of the question this report helps you answer.
View the custom report in Google Analytics
Site Search Commerce
Having insight to how visitors are searching on your site can be very beneficial for your search marketing
initiatives. This report gives you macro conversion level metrics. Internal search metrics provide great insights
to visitors searching for product customizations or product features. The data in this report can be used to
customize the user experience, product page information, and external marketing. How well is your internal
search converting into sales?
View the custom report in Google Analytics
Paid Search Analytics – Keyword Analysis
A look into all of your search marketing campaigns across the enterprise. Which keywords are you driving
high amounts of traffic to your site and how are they performing in regards to their landing pages. Are some
keyword converting better on specific landing pages. Do you see correlation between the value proposition
and keyword. This report can help you drive so much success with optimizing campaigns.
5. View the custom report in Google Analytics
Visitor Network Analysis
This report will display all of the ISP’s used to visit your site. This report is very beneficial for companies in
the B2B space. B2C sites will have limited use since most of your traffic is going to come from 1000’s of
different providers. The majority will be customers on their Smartphone’s or at home. There’s not way to
explicitly know who they are. For B2B you can do some filtering to search for specific company you that are
your customers or potential companies looking at your products. This would be a good report to show your
sales people.
View the custom report in Google Analytics
Organic Keyword Success
Have you heard of Google Insights, this is your version of that. how are your customers finding your site
organically. Aside from branded terms, this will show you what is driving organic conversions. Are their
some terms you are ranking very well for that could allow you to save on costs with your search marketing.
this can be very help full for you if you have a very limited PPC budget. Along with a search query report
and the Google Indexing Rank profile setup, this is the next best report for helping to scale out long tail
search phrases.
View the custom report in Google Analytics
New Visitor Analysis Report
This report gives you high level insights to your new customers month over month. How well is my site
meeting the needs of a new visitor and are they converting into and engaged visitor?
By no means the end of the data, you may want to look at new visitor funnels and see which content is
driving successful conversion for new visitors. Possible segmenting these visitors by conversion and by
region if you serve the world with your products. Is there possibly a seasonality with your products in a
foreign country? This type of data will help you plan better campaigns and will be a very important piece of
your data driven marketing reports.
View the custom report in Google Analytics
Campaign Commerce Report
Very similar in regards to metrics to the customer acquisition report. However, we are mearuing campaigns
and not the sources, since campaigns can be run on multiple channels across many sources. We want to focus
on the high level of the campaigns and view them holistically for our ROI or ROAS. Our return will include
all macro and micro conversions, just how much of a return to we can measure is up to you and the value you
put on a micro conversion.
View the custom report in Google Analytics
Please feel free to distribute to your social networks, friends, and colleagues and edit to fit your goals and
profiles. I hope these report help you on your way to better data driven marketing.
Keep in mind, I am in the process of elaborate more on the benefits and insights within each of these reports
in later articles so Like me on Facebook, Follow me on Twitter, or subscribe to my RSS feed.
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Info 4 months ago
Solved, I think one "" was missing between "(" and "?"
1 person liked this. Like Reply
Dave Sabol 2 weeks ago
The reports look fantastic and exactly the type of info that I'm looking for but I can't seem to get the reports to open. I'm sent directly to my default
account page. Any thought or idea what I may be doing incorrectly?
Like Reply
Ken Pendergast 1 week ago in reply to Dave Sabol
You can add the report to all your profiles from the dropdown, near the botton of the page where it tells you which profiles are using this
report.
Like Reply
Ian 1 month ago
Just what I'm looking for. Question though....when I open them up it goes to my default analytics account. Is there anyway of forcing it to use
another account i have access to under the my default one? Thanks!
Like Reply
Ken Pendergast 1 week ago in reply to Ian
All you need to do is add it to your other profiles from the drop down. It should tell you whihc profiles are using the report. You default
profile will always be selected.
Like Reply
Jannerick 1 month ago
the custom reports aren't opening up in my GA...
7. Like Reply
Ken Pendergast 4 months ago
I will have to look into the formatting here and put the expressions into a syntax highlighter. The expressions were copied right out of my filters.
Like Reply
YewREwrew 4 months ago
yeah this is awesome
Like Reply
Lukas Zaplatilek 4 months ago
There is one thing that I would warn you about. In your "New Visitor Analysis Report" the goal related metrics are from both new and returning
visitors. The only way to achieve what I would suppose you were trying is to use Advanced Segments.
Like Reply
Ken Pendergast 4 months ago in reply to Lukas Zaplatilek
Yes you are correct in regards to the metrics. I added more to the report then needed. You can kill 2 birds with one stone here as they say.
What are the monthly new visitors metrics and what did our conversions look like.
Like Reply
Sltbaum 4 months ago
Organic Rank in Google report setup, I get an error saying the following is "nota valid regular expression",
(?|&)(start | first | b)=([^&]*)
Like Reply
Xteenb 4 months ago
"(?|&)(start|first|b)=([^&]*)" is not a valid regular expression.Or so GA is telling me.
Like Reply
Ken Pendergast 4 months ago in reply to Xteenb
The problem here is a missing /
a comment above addressed this issue, just so there is not confusion it is (?|&)(start|first|b)=([^&]*)
Like Reply
Reactions
8. RGWE 1 month ago
From Twitter
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danieltrost 4 months ago
From Twitter
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dotcomken 4 months ago
From Twitter
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imediabar 4 months ago
From Twitter
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edubarredo 4 months ago
From Twitter
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From Twitter
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expertanalytics 4 months ago
From Twitter
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dcEmerald 4 months ago
From Twitter
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ManueldeF 4 months ago
From Twitter
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panelectric 4 months ago
From Twitter
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