3 Valuable Reports in Google Analytics

Tony Fazzini - April 20, 2016

Setting up Google Analytics is an important step in learning more about your website and how users interact with your content. While many companies set up the reporting, it often goes under-utilized or ignored which defeats the purposes of gathering all of this useful data. So what reports are valuable in Google Analytics? Following are three recommended reports that are great starting points.

Mobile Report

Mobile reports are helpful in defining what devices are preferred when visiting your website. This information can improve the focus for a marketing strategy, where to allocate resources and money to improve user experience, and how the different types of devices work together. This mobile report can be a great starting point and give valuable insight towards user behavior.

Medium Report

The Medium Report is arguably the most valuable report in Google Analytics and can help you determine, at a quick glance, where the bulk of your traffic is coming from and if/how valuable that traffic can be to the business. Not only does this report compare all of your marketing channels in one view, it condenses them to the highest level so you can see them in one place (typically no more than 10 lines of data). If there is an outlying stat or something that needs to be reviewed further, simply click on that medium and continue through the report to learn more details of what may have happened.

Landing Page Report

The Landing Page report is a great way to understand how users are finding your website. Additionally, this report can clear up how each landing page performs individually, allowing you to see where your greatest strengths may lie. When reviewing this report, it’s important to look at each landing page as an individual and not compare them directly to other pages, but rather to the average. Each page has its own specific purpose and goal and, therefore, perform differently based on what the user may be searching for. For example, users that come in through the homepage may navigate through more pages than users who land on a product/service page. This is a natural progression and the reason homepages cover broad topics that speak to the entire business. Understanding this report can help businesses learn more about pages that convert at a higher rate compared to pages that may have very low engagement, etc. As you learn more about each page, it will show you the areas that need the most focus and where the most time should be spent in optimizing.