8 Custom Reports from the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery

The following is a guest post from Rachelle Maisner, who recently transitioned from Sr Analyst to Account Manager at Digitaria, a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

New analysts have it easy these days. Back in my day, we have to walk uphill in the snow both ways to get decent enough web reporting. My first blush with web analytics came upon me when I was a marketing coordinator for an advertising agency several years ago. I got the hand-me-down grunt work of pulling stats for one of our client's websites using server logs. Server logs, people. It was painfully slow, and gut-wrenchingly inefficient. So for the sake of my sanity, I started looking into better solutions, and I knew if it could help the client out with more meaningful reporting, that would make me look really good. When I found a solution I liked, I needed to pitch the client for their buy in. That conversation went something like... "I found this great tool, and it's free- we can install it on your website and try out this fast new reporting. It's called Google Analytics."

Since then, there are now so many fantastic resources available to budding young analysts. From the Analysis Exchange to Avinash's own Market Motive courses, not to mention GA's recently revamped Analytics Academy, there's a wealth of quality education and training just a click away to anyone who’s willing to learn. 

I'm blogging to tell you all about one of my absolute favorite new resources-- a tremendous goldmine of knowledge sharing unlike anything else this industry has ever seen-- Google Analytics’ very own Solutions Gallery.

The Solutions Gallery is a free and public platform that allows users to share custom reports, segments and dashboards. It's invaluable resource not only for those that are new to digital analytics, but also for analytics veterans looking for fresh ideas and new approaches. I mean, wow, you can download reports and dashboards from experts all over the globe and instantly apply them to your own Google Analytics account. 

I was so excited about the Solutions Gallery that I uploaded 8 custom reports of my own to share with the community, and in about a month I had over 1,600+ imports. 

I have received awesome feedback and gratitude for the custom reports I created, so I am absolutely thrilled to be able to share them here on the Google Analytics blog and showcase them to a wider audience. I hope you find these helpful and I hope they encourage you to not only get more from your data, but to upload some of your own solutions to the Gallery.

All my custom reports are organized into four categories. These categories are based on the ABC's of analytics, plus D for bonus points: Acquisition, Behavior, Conversion, and Diagnostics.

A is for Acquisition

Visits and Goal Conversion by Traffic Source: Take your traffic source reports one step further by understanding volume & conversion by each channel. This is one way to see how your best visitors are getting to your site. I recommend setting up a goal for “engaged visits”, for this custom report and some of the following reports. When you import this custom report, change Goal One to your engaged visits goal, or another significant KPI configured as a goal.

B is for Behavior

Page Effectiveness: Ever ponder the question, “How is my content doing?” This custom report provides page-level performance, allowing you to discover your top and bottom performing pages using various traffic and engagement metrics.

Social Sharing: A four-tab custom report chock full of site-to-social reporting. Tab 1 is the Shared Content Trend, showing how top pages are shared to social networks over time. Tab 2 is Top Shared Content by Network, a first step to discovering what content works for specific channels. Tab 3 is a report on Socially Engaged Visitors, providing a quick profile of visitors that engage in social sharing links. And finally, Tab 4 is Social Outcomes and Conversions, tying social engagement to site goals.

C is for Conversion

Simple E-Commerce Report: A starting point for trending revenue or purchases against visits, with a traffic sources breakdown.

PPC Campaign Goal Performance: Analyze paid search performance against goal conversion by search engine. Change goal one completions to your engaged visits goal. This report filters for Google campaigns. To filter for Bing change the source filter for "Bing" or delete the filter to include all search engines.

PPC Keywords: Get a paid keyword report with traffic volume, CPC, goal conversions, and cost per conversion.

D is for Diagnostics

Page Timing: Use this custom report to QA page load timing and reveal problem pages. Switch from the "data" table view to the "comparison" table view, and compare load time to bounce rate, allowing you to view the bounce rate for each page against the site average.

Internal and External 404 Report: A custom report to help resolve 404 errors. Includes two report tabs. Tab 1: bad inbound links, and Tab 2: bad internal links. Be sure to change the filter for "page title" to the page title used on your site's 404 page.

Posted by Rachelle Maisner, Account Manager at Digitaria, a Google Analytics Certified Partner

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New: AdWords Reports for App download campaigns

Today we’re happy to announce a deeper integration between AdWords and Google Analytics for Mobile Apps that will help advertisers make faster and better decisions about marketing their apps.

To put it simply: link your AdWords and Google Analytics accounts and enable auto-tagging, and you’ll start receiving a new set of detailed reports on things like day parts, destination URLs and keyword positions. These automatic reports show exactly how your search and display campaigns are performing and offer rich insights into the kind of users they’re driving to Google Play. 

Any user of both AdWords and Google Analytics can have this set of reports by just enabling auto-tagging. We handle the rest, so you can focus on optimizing rather than manually tagging AdWords campaigns.

These new reports can be found under the Acquisition menu for Google Analytics App Views. They’ll become visible to everyone over the next few days.

Insights for display & search campaigns

These new reports cover both display and search campaigns. You can: 

• Check the Campaigns report to better understand users being driven into your app, and see how they use your app. 
• Find out from the Day Parts report when users are interacting with your campaigns.
• Use Search reports to find out which keywords and search queries are acquiring the most new users.

Click image for full-sized version

A step towards measuring lifetime value of your customers

Ad campaigns should help you find the best customers. These new reports go a long way towards identifying them. Whether you track in-app revenue or specific goal conversions, you’ll be able to tie user quality to the campaign that brought them to your app.

One of our early Beta testers was Nubee, a Singapore-based game development studio. They shared their experience with us:

"We were satisfied that we could track which keywords attributed to sales. Using this data, we were also able to modify the download page." - Shizuka Watanbe, Head of PR, Nubee

We hope you’ll find these new reports useful. You can get them running by linking accounts and enabling auto-tagging today.

Posted by Rahul Oak, Product Manager, Google Analytics for Apps

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Ensuring Data Accuracy with a Tag Management Policy

The following is a guest post from GACP Michael Loban, CMO at InfoTrust.

The quality of the website analytics data we have is directly related to the tag management processes adopted by an organization. Most likely, you can remember days when the following incidents may have occurred:

1. You find that one (or several) of the pages on your site is missing Google Analytics, or some pages had Google Analytics deployed twice causing duplicate pageviews and inflating traffic.
2. Google Analytics custom variables were inconsistent or missing on some portions of the site, leading to data quality issues.
3. An unauthorized marketing tag was piggybacking off of another tag.
4. One of the tags on an international site you managed did not follow the new EU Cookie Laws related to privacy.

Adopting a Tag Management System like Google Tag Manager is a great way to go, but having a great tool to organize and deploy your tags is often not enough. You still need a system, a process, and ongoing review. Here are the steps for creating a tag management policy for your company:

1. Know where you are – what tags are currently firing, where and how? Whether you have a small site with a few hundred pages or an international publication with thousands of pages, it is important to assess your current tag deployment. 

Can you say, with 100% confidence, that your analytics tag are located on every page?  Are you sure the cookies set by your analytics tag/tool are accurate and not over-writing each other?

Regardless of whether you are confident or not, I suggest using a tool like TagInspector.com (Tag Inspector is an InfoTrust product). It will help you locate:

1. All the tags on your site, split up by specific pages’ tags, and even pages they are missing from.
2. Cookies set by various tags and what pages they are set on.
3. How the tag is deployed – through a tag management system or directly from a page source.
4. Instances of tag piggybacking – one tag being loaded by another tag.

Here is a screenshot from an example scan. It shows how tags load (commonly referred to as tag hierarchy). We have removed the website URL, but as you can see there are instances when Google Analytics is being loaded by the TMS, and instances where Google Analytics is being loaded directly from the source of the page. 

2. Document all approved tags. The average enterprise website might have 25-50 marketing tags. Not all of them have to be present across all pages. However, even if you are considering moving to a Tag Management System, or already are using one, it is not a bad idea to have the following documented and categorized:

1. Tag name and functionality
2. Pages or the category pages the tag needs to be on
3. Information collected through the tag about visitors (cookies set)
4. Firing rules

Check out Tagopedia – a wiki of tags to learn more about the many different types of tags.

3. Consider the implementation of a Tag Management System. There is a reason this is step three, and not step one or two. A lot of companies jump to this step first, thinking that a new technology will miraculously make all tagging issues disappear. The first step in moving to a TMS is knowing what tags you need to keep, and where they are or how they are loaded on your site so you can remove them from the source after the tag management system is deployed.

When considering the implementation of a tag management system, think about your team. Every website of a TMS vendor says you will no longer need your IT team to make changes to the tags thus simplifying and expediting the process. I have met plenty of marketers who do not want anything to do with a TMS. Even though you will free up your IT resources, you will still need a person or team with the technical training to manage your tags. 

Naturally, your first step in evaluating Tag Management vendors should be outlining what features you really need. Google Tag Manager is free, and is one of the few TMS systems that works for both mobile websites and native mobile applications. 

NOTE:  If you do decide to migrate to a TMS or if you have already done so, you still should scan all the pages across your site to ensure that your tags fire correctly, such as, once per page for analytics tags – and only from your TMS. You certainly want to avoid having a tag in the source of your page and inside a TMS – this will inflate your data and cause data quality issues.

4. Run ongoing site audits to ensure correct tags are deployed across correct pages. Ideally, this will only serve as the insurance. However, ongoing site scans or audits can help you avoid the moments when you realize you did not capture AdWords conversions because your GA or AdWords conversion tag was removed from the conversion page. Keep in mind certain tags might only fire when a user looks at your website on a mobile device, and your scan might need to simulate different user agents.  Doing this manually for all the sites you manage, or across one very large site, can be quite challenging. Again, TagInspector.com can help speed up this process and dramatically reduce the effort required. Here is an example screenshot of the scanning options:

5. Think ahead – will you be able to innovate? Complete lock down is in nobody’s best interests. What happens if there is a new platform for A/B testing that you would like to try? How long will it take you to get the tag approved, implemented on your site, verify its performance, and launch a campaign? Keep innovation in mind and make it relatively easy for marketers in your company to adopt new technologies.

One way to go about this is having an application that needs to be completed and approved prior to implementing a new tag. This will help you ensure only tags that meet company standards are implemented on your site. 

At the end of the day, tag deployment and data collection will only get more complex. If you do not have any process for managing your tags, it is time to start. If you have some kind of process, perhaps it is time for optimization. Get all the stakeholders in the room, and decide who will be your tag management team, and what the first step will be to ensure tag accuracy. You can’t do analysis if the data isn’t accurate. And your data won’t be accurate if your marketing tags aren’t implemented correctly. 

If you would like to learn more about implementing a tag management policy, we would like to invite you to attend a free webinar on March 26^th at 1:00PM EST where we will discus items outlined in this post, and a lot more. 

Posted by Michael Loban, CMO at Google Analytics Certified Partner InfoTrust

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Just Add AdWords

You've signed up for Google Analytics. And, you have an AdWords account. So why not link your AdWords account to your new Google Analytics account to get the most out of both services? If you already use AdWords to drive traffic, Google Analytics is the perfect instrument panel. ROI, Revenue per Click, and conversion rates correlated by search result position -- all right in front of you. Plus there are a few reports that have been created specifically for AdWords users: the AdWords Analysis report and the AdWords Keyword Positions report.

When you link your accounts, everything is done for you: Analytics will automatically tag your AdWords links so you can see detailed campaign tracking data, and Analytics will begin importing cost data from your AdWords campaigns for ROI calculations. By simply linking the two accounts, you'll be able to easily identify which campaigns and keywords are working and which aren't.

Here's how you do it. First, make sure that you have used the same Google Account for both your Analytics and AdWords accounts. If not, don't worry - just add your AdWords username to your Analytics account as an Account Admin.

Then just follow these 5 steps:
1. Log in to your AdWords account at https://adwords.google.com
2. Click the Analytics tab
3. In the "Steps to get Google Analytics" box, click "I already have a Google Analytics account" (at the bottom of the page)
4. From the Existing Google Analytics Account drop-down list, select your Analytics account number
5. Click "Link Account"

That's it! Your two accounts are now linked. If you want to learn more about using AdWords with Google Analytics, you might find this article from Conversion University helpful: Optimizing your AdWords ROI with Google Analytics.

Posted by Alden DeSoto, Google Analytics Team

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Watchfinder clocks 1300% ROI using precision Remarketing with Google Analytics

Watchfinder is a leading UK retailer of premium, pre-owned watches. The company was founded in 2002 as an online-only store selling watches from more than 80 premier manufacturers. Today, it has an annual turnover of £25 million and has recently opened a flagship boutique in the London Royal Exchange.

Counting the hours 

Considering the average order value on Watchfinder’s site is over £3,500, the company found buying decisions tended to take time, often spanning weeks or months. In fact, less than 1% of visitors were completing purchases on their first site visit. Watchfinder’s challenge was to re-engage and also maintain a conversation with these visitors, encouraging them to return and make an order. In addition to driving customers back to its site, Watchfinder also wanted to encourage customers to visit its new physical boutique in the London Royal Exchange.

A moment to reconnect

Watchfinder’s agency Periscopix – a Google Analytics Certified Partner – suggested Remarketing with Google Analytics as a great way to reconnect with users. Remarketing with Google Analytics allows advertisers to tap into valuable insights about website visitors who show an interest in products, identify the most relevant audiences, and run ads across the Google Display Network that are tailored to that audience using the industry’s most powerful segmentation capabilities.

Periscopix created 20 highly focused lists of visitors who demonstrated intent but did not purchase. Specifically, lists were based on various aspects of user context such as location, language, and what stage of the purchase funnel they were in. On-site behavior helped establish groups that had spent a certain amount of time on the site or had viewed a certain number of pages. Other lists were created around users who had viewed a specific watch brand on the site.

Additionally, traffic performance analysis across a variety of GA dimensions revealed that certain ISP’s in the London financial district yielded traffic with much higher engagement and above average conversion rates. As a result, Periscopix designed segments around investment banks like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs to engage with employees at these companies.

Google Analytics’ functionality enabled Periscopix to convey tailored messages to these key groups of interested consumers. For example, London-based users were retargeted with ads encouraging visits to the new London store, while visitors to the .co.uk site from France were retargeted with ads promoting the French site. 

Time well spent

Thanks to clear reporting in Google Analytics, it’s been easy to see the impressive results from Watchfinders’ remarketing campaign. Six months in, Periscopix reveals the return on investment is 1300%. Average order value on the site has also increased by 13%, resulting in 34% lower CPAs than Watchfinder’s non-brand search campaigns. 

Across all tactics used, the remarketing list that produced the highest conversion rates, both in terms of goals and transactions, was made up of visitors who browsed for 10 minutes or more on their initial site visit without purchasing.

Given Watchfinder's early success with Remarketing with Google Analytics across the Google Display Network, the brand is excited to increase investment in this area going forward.

Be sure to check out the whole case study here.

Posted by the Google Analytics Team

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Zillow uses Google Analytics Premium to make data-driven decisions

Google Analytics Premium lets Zillow grow and scale their company.

“A host of functions at Zillow use Google Analytics every day… Marketing, business intelligence, design, engineering and usability are using it to drive product decisions, user experience decisions, and business decisions.”

- Jeremy Wacksman, VP Marketing at Zillow

Zillow is the home and real estate marketplace that helps people share vital information about home values, rentals, mortgages and a lot more. Zillow was founded in 2005 and now has over 110 million U.S. homes in its living database. (That name? A combination of “zillions of data points” and the pillows where happy homeowners rest their heads.)

Recently we sat down with Jeremy Wacksman, Zillow’s VP of Marketing, to learn how they’ve been using Google Analytics Premium to help them grow at such an amazing pace. Here’s what he told us:

This comment stands out: “As an Internet company that has reinvented itself as a mobile-first business, analytics across devices is a big challenge for us.”  

A lot of companies are reinventing themselves for mobile today, and we’ve been working hard to make sure Google Analytics Premium can help them measure all those new cross-device journeys. The goal, as always, is to help businesses gather meaningful data, easily discover insights that they can act upon to improve results and boost the bottom line.

Learn more about Google Analytics Premium here.

Posted by Adam Singer, Google Analytics Advocate

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