- There are probably over 50 reports in Google Analytics.
Which one should you be using?
In this video, I'm gonna show you my favorite report in Google Analytics and why I chose
this one over the others.
Hey there and welcome back to another video of measureschool.com teaching you the data-driven
way of digital marketing.
My names is Julian and today we wanna talk about my favorite Google Analytics report
of all times.
Now, Google Analytics implementations, it's actually pretty custom to what your functionality
is in a business and what report you should be looking at.
In the end, Google Analytics is really just a question answering machine where you ask
the question and you look in the right report and then try to find the answer through the
tools that are available and the visualizations that have available but I wanted to show you
what my favorite report in Google Analytics is and maybe you have guessed it already or
maybe you're using that report as well and I'd love to hear from you later on down below
in the comments if that is the same report that you were thinking about or if you have
another special report that you look on often.
So, without further ado, let's dive into my favorite report.
All right, so welcome to my favorite report.
This is the Source Medium report.
You can find it under the Acquisition and the Source Medium.
Now, why's this my favorite report?
It's actually a report that I would choose to look at if there would be no other reports
in Google Analytics.
This is the most valuable part of it all at least for a first analysis and it's really
about being an online marketer and caring about where my users come from and this is
the question that this report answers quite well and even goes a step further telling
me how it's performing and some instances how I can improve it.
Now, first up, what is Source Medium?
Source Medium is a classification of Google Analytics determining where your users came
from, when they entered your website.
As opposed to the other reporting that we have about channels, source medium is really
the raw data point that comes in that you can influence through UTM parameters.
If you don't know what UTM parameters are, then I'd urge you to check out the video I'm
gonna link up in the description below or you see it up here in the card as well.
So, every time a user enters your website, starts a new session, he gets sorted into
one of these rows here that tell us where the user came from.
We can quickly analyze the most important traffic sources for us, so in this case, the
organic source results of Google, any other important referrals, how well paid advertising
is doing, Google CPC, for example, and also the traffic that Google couldn't classify.
I always call this dead traffic.
It doesn't really hold any insights because we don't know where this traffic actually
came from.
So, my inclination's always to try to decrease that amount and actually send in traffic with
UTM parameters attached.
Now, in these metric fields, we get a great overview of what happens to the traffic once
it enters our website.
We have this model of ABC analysis.
That's Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions.
You might be familiar with these terms from the big reportings up here, Acquisition, Behavior,
Conversions.
These really are digging deeper into these aspects of our analysis and these really answer
the question where does our traffic come from, what do they do on our website, and do they
reach our goal of our website?
Now, down here everything is broken down by these different source mediums and we can
see line by line how these stack up against each other.
This is quite great because we can quickly compare different sources against each other.
For instance, Google is bringing us most of the traffic but the e-commerce conversion
is much lower as opposed to this referral source, much lower traffic but the conversion
is much higher.
Maybe you should be working on increasing this traffic source here as it has a much
higher chance to convert.
If you don't see any data in your e-commerce reports it might be that you have goals installed
but if you see no data at all, then it means you don't have goals installed and this is
something that you definitely should do.
We have some videos on this channel as well on how to set up goals in Google Analytics.
Back to the e-commerce reports, let's have a another look at the different metrics that
we see right where.
So, for example, in the Google CPC column, we can analyze how effective our traffic is
that comes from our paid advertising on Google.com.
We get a decent amount of traffic and that traffic bounces to 57%.
What does that mean?
Well, 57% of the users that actually enter the website through the source Google CPC
only have one page view in that session which gives us an idea how relevant the actual landing
page is in connection to the actual ad, so what does the user expect once he clicks on
an ad?
To come to a website where he can find a product, for example, if he doesn't find that, he will
bounce.
So, overall, you will try to decrease this bounce rate and help the user at least to
go to the next page and interact with your page further but this only happens if your
ad is really relevant to the user and he finds on the next page when he clicks through that
there's a relevant product that he wants to buy.
Well, once the user is on the page, he clicks through and on average looks at 3.61 pages
in that session and stays for an amount of one minute 52 seconds.
Again, these numbers don't mean anything by their own.
You would need to compare them against your other traffic sources and see where you might
need improve a traffic source if that's in the realm of your marketing efforts and then
we see how many people of those people who entered the website and clicked through actually
converted and how much revenue they have generated.
Now, revenue is also a great indicator if you are responsible for these AdWords ads,
you probably know how much you've spent on the account in a given period and therefore
can do a quick IOR analysis and see if this is still a profitable campaign for you.
So, really quick insights through this report just through asking these questions, where
does my user comes from?
What does he do on the website?
And did he convert and reach my goal?
Now, obviously we can go deeper into some of these traffic sources like Google CPC but
that's really what these other reports are all about.
You have your AdWords reports, your Search Console reports if you wanna dig deeper into
the organic aspect of your traffic and referral reports which help you to analyze these different
source mediums under the aspect that is important when comparing referrals to each other or
social sources to each other.
And once you have a broad overview of what data you wanna dig into, you will have more
questions and this is what Google Analytics is all about to actually start investigating,
start analyzing, using the tools like the Custom Segment Builder up here or different
visualization methods to understand your user behavior whether answering those questions
that you have asked and getting to a conclusion, a recommendation or an actual action that
you take in your marketing account, for example, to influence these different metrics.
But the starting point for most of my analysis is really this Source Medium report that lets
me start forming the first hypothesis, the first questions that I want to investigate
further and that's why I think that this is the most valuable report within Google Analytics.
All right, so there you have it.
This is my favorite report in Google Analytics.
I might be biased because I'm first and foremost still a marketer and I want to control where
my traffic's coming form and how it's performing so I can optimize, and bring more qualified
traffic to the website that I'm using.
Now, this said, I actually dig deeper into different other reports because this is first
my starting point.
It's my favorite report because I get questions from it.
I see something in the report that is interesting and then I try to find out or I get a new
question and I try to find out in different other reports why that is so and maybe I will
go deeper into the AdWords or the SEO section of Google Analytics to find out more about
how I can optimize this given channel.
Now, that said, if you are a PPC guy or an SEO guy or you are an e-commerce manager,
or you are a developer of the website, you might be looking at totally different reports
and this is totally find as well.
This is just my personal preference and I'd love to hear from you what you find so interesting
in the reports that you look at most often.
Please leave a comment down below and let others know about your experience with your
favorite report.
Now, if you haven't yet, then consider subscribing right over there 'cause we bring you new videos
just like this one every week.
Now, my name is Julian, 'Til next time.