Is Your Data Actionable? Learn How to Get the Most from Google Analytics Keyword Reports

Theo Bennett - August 6, 2014

Google Analytics Keywords reports provide great insights into how your keywords are performing (Not Provided is the exception).

That said, keywords are shown in aggregate across engines.  This makes it difficult to see opportunities to make tweaks in your SEM campaigns in the individual engines. This is because all keywords do not work exactly the same in each engine. That’s why you dive deeper into your keywords report and look at each source of traffic at a time or add a secondary dimension to compare, for example, Bing and Google.

Well why not look at the effectiveness of each keyword cross engine in one report – without drilling down– by simply using a pivot table?

In the upper right of the image above, we’ve selected the pivot view.  The arrow in the upper left shows that we selected to pivot by source and plot the per visit value metric. Now we can easily compare all engines!

With this pivot view in GA, it’s easy to see how visitors from different organic engines react to the site. From there, we can dig deeper to see if this is due to a lack of traffic from one engine or perhaps a problem that is alerted in Webmaster Tools. When used in the Paid Keywords report, this method can be used to adjust bids or identify paid search opportunities at a glance!

What ways do you use pivot tables in GA to make data actionable?