How to customize your Google Analytics Reports

Google Analytics (GA) has a lot of useful data insight it can provide for your website. Unfortunately, not many people know how to set it up to get the best from their Google Analytics reports and I do agree, sometimes it can be overwhelming.

Here are some tips on how to customize your Google Analytics reports for the best results.

Customize Your Keywords Data

Keywords are back in Google Analytics. Google has improved the integration between Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Analytics so it’s now possible to get a lot of keyword data. The keyword data is a goldmine that helps you to recognize which words on your website help you to get found by users.

Connecting your GSC account is quite easy, just 2 steps are needed:

  • Create a free Google Search Console account and verify that you have access to your site. This is easy to verify especially if you already have Google Analytics installed.
  • In your Property settings in Google Analytics, scroll down to connect to your Google Search Console. After the accounts are connected, all the reports under Acquisition – Search Console will start populating. There may be a short delay so give it a few days before going back to check for data. It is also good practice to set up 2 or 3 alternate views for your reports. This will prevent you from losing all your GA data if you should accidentally click on the wrong button. Once the data is gone, Google has no way of recalling the past data since it is created on the fly. So just to be safe create for example a “test” view where you can run all your tests and analysis without deleting your main data.

Set up and Monitor Events on your website

There are other actions that you may want to track apart from the standard data such as session times,  page views, bounce rates, and time on site. You might want to track:

  • Email/webinar signups
  • PDF downloads
  • Product sales
  • Video plays
  • Contact form submissions
  • Clicks on important links

Really, any important user interaction on your site can be turned into a Google Analytics event so you can track how often it’s happening. To trigger events, you will have to add some code to your site that sends the event data whenever the action occurs. If you need help with this, give us a shout!

goals

Define your Goals

These are closely related to the monitoring of events. You may want to set up 1 or 2 goals per event. The best ones to define are the goals that closely track to revenue. So if the goal goes up, revenue also goes up.

Examples of such goals include:

  • Sign up for a free trial or demo of your software
  • New email subscription
  • Consultation or Demo request
  • Webinar registration which may also lead to a sales funnel.

There are really two ways to set up goals like these:

URL Goal

Every time a user clicks or lands on a particular URL Google Analytics will trigger a goal. This is very useful for example with “thank you” pages.

Event Goals

These are set up and are dependent on the event firing first. Google Analytics triggers a goal any time an event fires. Turning an event into a goal makes the tracking of conversions in your data reports a lot easier.

ecommerce revenue

Implement Ecommerce Tracking

If you have an eCommerce store, Google Analytics eCommerce tracking can pull in all your revenue data into your reports. For example,  it can tell you:

  • Which traffic sources produce the most or least revenue
  • The pages that bring in new visitors who end up purchasing
  • The user flows on your site that results in revenue/purchase

However, note that Google Analytics doesn’t track any of your eCommerce purchases right out of the box. But you can overcome this problem by looking for eCommerce carts or tools that have eCommerce tracking built-in. Once linked to your GA account, the data will start showing up. WooCommerce has these features built-in. And of course, do remember to turn on eCommerce tracking in your Google Analytics settings.

Create Custom Alerts

To help catch major problems, Google Analytics has Custom Alerts. You define a set of criteria to alert you if something has gone wrong with your site.

  • Alerts by day are the most useful. This will catch catastrophic problems that could affect your site data immediately. You may want to set up alerts to trigger if there is a sudden massive drop in your traffic or even set up an alert for an increase in positive events.
  • Don’t set up too many custom alerts, just a few will do.

IP Filters

Finally, if you tend to visit your website pages every day to the extent that you will skew your pageview results and other metrics, you might want to consider filtering your data to exclude your own visits. Google can do this by allowing you to filter your data and exclude your sessions from the analytics report. All you need to do is to set up a filter to remove the internal traffic that is generated from your own visits and clicks on your website. Once you know your IP address set up a filter within your Google Analytics dashboard to exclude your IP address.