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Google Analytics is a brilliant but overwhelming tool. Every website should take advantage of its insights, however, the convoluted user interface and occasionally unpredictable behaviour make it that much harder. We have browsed the Google Analytics Solutions Library and hand-picked the best Google Analytics reports and dashboards for any site, from simple business brochures to large e-commerce stores. Importing the reports only takes two simple steps, and each report comes with quick instructions on how to make the most out of it.
Google Analytics and other web usage analysis tools provide an abundance of data. But that’s not enough to optimise your website. Avinash Kaushik, the author of web analytics books and Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google came up with the 10/90 rule for analytics, which is:
To get the most value out of web analytics you have to invest £90 in analysts for every £10 the analytics tools cost you.
Avinash Kaushik
While this might not be the actual “golden rule” for analytics, investing more in web analytics is crucial for businesses.
This introduction is a little, fair warning from us – everything we’ll show you next provides great value to your web analytics efforts. But you won’t be able to magically identify all the issues with your website. This takes a trained eye, knowledge and lots of experience.
Before you dive into our more advanced tips, please take a moment to read our guide on easy website navigation analysis in Google Analytics.
After following the link to a report, you’ll see the title of your report and an “Import” button underneath it.
You will be redirected to your Google Analytics account and see an import screen similar to this one:
If you aren’t interested in the full package, you can uncheck the features you don’t want to import. In our case, we wanted to import all the goals in the package.
After verifying the settings, click on “Select a view” at the top. The dropdown contains all the Analytics accounts you can access.
Select the view you wish to use the specific reports on and click the blue “Create” button at the bottom. Your brand new package will be imported and you can locate it depending on its type. Custom dashboards and reports can be found in the “Customisation” menu:
Imported goals will act as if you created them yourself and can be seen in any report that includes a goal view.
This package of Google Analytics goals contains 11 goals that your WooCommerce store might want to track. The included goals help you track how many customers have:
The “Order Placed” and “Placed Order” goals aren’t strictly duplicating one another, as there might be instances when one of the two goals won’t register an order, for example when the /order-received/ page fails to load. It’s worth to have both of the goal types.
Accessing the same data repeatedly or trying to compare it using standard Analytics reports can be a daunting task. Sometimes your filters will just disappear or you’ll go from one report to the other and forget the exact numbers you wanted to compare. Dashboards will fix that.
This dashboard puts together several metrics crucial for your content marketing strategy. It includes side-by-side statistics on:
The merged view can help you identify pages that have a high bounce rate and a low average time on page, meaning the page is underperforming, you can see which pages attract new visitors, and so on.
Get the content marketing analysis dashboard
Google changed AdWords to Google Ads but we can’t get AdWords out of our heads, can we? Regardless of the minor naming scheme mistake, this report proves to be an excellent summarisation of your customers that found your site through ads.
Not only does it calculate your Google Ads revenue and cost, but also:
Get the AdWords target customers dashboard
Our next package includes a bunch of reports, dashboards and segments to track the performance of your site, the search traffic and social engagements.
Included data segments contain organic traffic separated by the device type (desktop, mobile and tablet) and 4 segments that optimise your data due to the way Analytics handles time.
Two segments are dedicated to include or exclude pages with “time on page” equal zero and the other two do the same for sessions with “session length” reported as 0.
The latter was created to avoid errors in time reporting, which are still frequent and the sessions with a length of 0 are included in the average session length calculation, which would skew the results.
Since it’s not uncommon for visitors to browse a website and then get occupied with something else without closing the page, it would often inflate the average time on page. Because of that Google always sets the “time on page” value of the last page in the session as 0.
Two included dashboards display the data about social engagement and site performance.
The package includes seven custom reports:
The seventh report is optional, as it’s a custom experiments report. Experiments are Google’s A/B testing feature that was implemented in Analytics. However, Google is soon deprecating the tool and encourages its users to try the free Google Optimize instead. If you don’t have experiments set up, don’t import this report.
Get Site Performance Dashboard
Dan Barker has created a great Hours & Day Google Analytics report with four separate tabs and an e-commerce version.
Evaluating the peaks in traffic can be especially important for your content marketing. The report includes the following tabs:
The e-commerce version of this report includes additional transaction metrics.
Get the general Hours & Days Report.
While it’s not a custom report, it’s a Google Analytics report that comes off as almost hidden to even some intermediate analysts. We have recently published a quick guide for navigation analysis in Google Analytics which walks you through the report, showcasing its capabilities and explaining various metrics.
While everyone should be able to get a lot of useful information out of our selection of reports and dashboards, unlocking their full potential requires a lot of knowledge and experience, as we mentioned before.
For that, you need to know that the last page in each session has a “time on page” value of zero. You need to understand when and why to include (or exclude) these pages from your data and how that affects the results.
However, it’s a great place to start. A cohesive presentation of key metrics will help you notice the weak – and strong – points of your site.
Let us know what you think about these reports in the comments down below. We’re happy to answer any questions about these packages. Tell us which ones have you tried and how did it go.
Our experts also offer professional website consultancy services. Discover our approach to website & marketing optimisation.
Originally published May 30, 2019 11:12:01 AM, updated October 23 2020.
