Google Analytics has a lot of reports that help you get data and understanding of your customers in terms of their channel preference, their campaign codes and search terms. Which campaign strategies that have worked for your organization. Which affiliates are sending more profitable business to your digital platforms? All these are key questions that you will have to answer before taking any decision about your marketing strategies.
Some of the reports that you can access to answer the key questions listed above are:
1) Overview: You can get a glimpse of your acquisition channels here. How many sessions you got, how many new sessions, new users, and then behavioral data about your users.
2) All Traffic: Within All traffic reports you will get other sub category of reports:
a) Channels: It would showcase you the metrics like sessions, users, bounce rate, conversion etc broken down by different acquisition channels like referrals, Direct, Social, Organic Search, Paid Search etc.
Within this report itself you get options to view data by source, medium, and other user attributes like technology, state, city etc.
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Detour: What is source and what is medium?
In simple terms source is the origin of your traffic, like www.nameofwebsite.com, google.com, etc. Medium though is the general category of the source, like organic search, paid search, social, referral, email etc
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b) Treemaps: Now this is a relatively newer reports in Google Analytics, but extremely important to give you a good understanding of the ongoing behavior of people coming from different sources. It will show you, with a color coded scheme, about customers from different sources, which sources are giving you better conversion. On the basis of ecommerce or conversion of goals. This way you can very well plan for your investments
c) Source/Medium: Agian, very much like channel reports, you can see visits coming from different sources of mediums, or combination of both to give you a better view of the correlations.
d) Referral: This will show you the exact websites which are sending you the visitors. Like other reports you can add the behavior metrics of different customers like average session duration, bounce rate and conversion metrics to understand their behavior and conversion preferences.
3) Adwords: Google Analytics gives you an option to see the behavior of users coming in to your digital platforms from adword campaigns. You can actually view clicks, bounces and conversion information from the adword campaigns. The best part is that you can view all tree maps report, hour of the day reports will give you insight about the times of the day when you should increase your marketing efforts, and keyword reports to help you gauge the effectiveness of the various adwords that you have made investment on.
4) Search Engine Optimization reports: For this you will first have to integrate Google search console with your GA account. Once you have done that now you would be able to get data related to impressions, clicks, ratio of clicks to impressions, position of your webpages in the search listings and the pages users landed on from organic search.
5) Social Reports: To activate Social Reports, you would need to integrate Social plugin within your GA account, and once you o that, you would be able to access Social reports. Within social reports you would be able to see and observe how visitors coming from Social media channels are actually behaving on your website.
6) Campaigns: Campaign Reports will let you observe the return on your investments and efforts for multiple paid campaigns that your organization would be floating. These campaigns can be email campaigns, affiliate campaigns or social media campaigns, depending upon your channels.
The whole point of the Acquisition reports is to helps us all gauge the most profitable channel of customer/visitor acquisition so that you can exploit it to the full extent.
As we discussed earlier in our blog posts, it would be extremely important to understand the bigger picture from these reports. In some of the next posts we will talk about these sections of reports in detail before moving on to the B of Google Analytics, that is Behavior Reports.
Please add in your comments/questions/opinions in the comments below.
Some of the reports that you can access to answer the key questions listed above are:
1) Overview: You can get a glimpse of your acquisition channels here. How many sessions you got, how many new sessions, new users, and then behavioral data about your users.
2) All Traffic: Within All traffic reports you will get other sub category of reports:
a) Channels: It would showcase you the metrics like sessions, users, bounce rate, conversion etc broken down by different acquisition channels like referrals, Direct, Social, Organic Search, Paid Search etc.
Within this report itself you get options to view data by source, medium, and other user attributes like technology, state, city etc.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Detour: What is source and what is medium?
In simple terms source is the origin of your traffic, like www.nameofwebsite.com, google.com, etc. Medium though is the general category of the source, like organic search, paid search, social, referral, email etc
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
b) Treemaps: Now this is a relatively newer reports in Google Analytics, but extremely important to give you a good understanding of the ongoing behavior of people coming from different sources. It will show you, with a color coded scheme, about customers from different sources, which sources are giving you better conversion. On the basis of ecommerce or conversion of goals. This way you can very well plan for your investments
c) Source/Medium: Agian, very much like channel reports, you can see visits coming from different sources of mediums, or combination of both to give you a better view of the correlations.
d) Referral: This will show you the exact websites which are sending you the visitors. Like other reports you can add the behavior metrics of different customers like average session duration, bounce rate and conversion metrics to understand their behavior and conversion preferences.
3) Adwords: Google Analytics gives you an option to see the behavior of users coming in to your digital platforms from adword campaigns. You can actually view clicks, bounces and conversion information from the adword campaigns. The best part is that you can view all tree maps report, hour of the day reports will give you insight about the times of the day when you should increase your marketing efforts, and keyword reports to help you gauge the effectiveness of the various adwords that you have made investment on.
4) Search Engine Optimization reports: For this you will first have to integrate Google search console with your GA account. Once you have done that now you would be able to get data related to impressions, clicks, ratio of clicks to impressions, position of your webpages in the search listings and the pages users landed on from organic search.
5) Social Reports: To activate Social Reports, you would need to integrate Social plugin within your GA account, and once you o that, you would be able to access Social reports. Within social reports you would be able to see and observe how visitors coming from Social media channels are actually behaving on your website.
6) Campaigns: Campaign Reports will let you observe the return on your investments and efforts for multiple paid campaigns that your organization would be floating. These campaigns can be email campaigns, affiliate campaigns or social media campaigns, depending upon your channels.
The whole point of the Acquisition reports is to helps us all gauge the most profitable channel of customer/visitor acquisition so that you can exploit it to the full extent.
As we discussed earlier in our blog posts, it would be extremely important to understand the bigger picture from these reports. In some of the next posts we will talk about these sections of reports in detail before moving on to the B of Google Analytics, that is Behavior Reports.
Please add in your comments/questions/opinions in the comments below.
