#BrightonSEO Quickfire Analytics – 7 Freebies in 7 Minutes

by Anna Lewis on 14th September 2012

As this post goes live, I am talking at BrightonSEO. It’s the end of the day, there have been many fantastic talks so far, the sun is setting over a beautiful horizon, the people of Brighton are moving from work to bar… I’m getting off topic!

This post covers everything I talked about and probably has more detail than the talk itself. I’ve even included links to 11 custom reports or dashboards that you can use yourself. Yes, I really am that kind (sometimes)!
Here are the slides:

The concept was quickfire analytics – 7 helpful reports in 7 minutes. This is because I’m a massive fan of web analytics and want everyone to be able to get something out of it, even if you haven’t got the resources, time or knowledge.

So here are all the areas I covered with links to the reports that I’ve prepared. To use the reports and dashboards just sign in to Google analytics, click the relevant link and then choose which profile to add it to. You can use the links as many times as you like and customise them for each profile you add them to.

If you’re not familiar with using custom reports and dashboards please check out this post.

Where there is a dashboard and a report make sure you add both to the profile of choice if you want the dashboard to link through to the report from the widget headings.

SEO Dashboard

As this is for BrightonSEO, it’s only right to start with the SEO reports!

Click here to get the SEO Dashboard!

The dashboard shows us lots of information about how organic search is performing for the website. Including, total organic visits, total non-brand organic visits, a graph of the organic visits and then statistics for keywords and landing pages showing their visits, bounce rates and conversions. This should help you get an overview of what is performing best, check for unexpected results and understand your SEO traffic better.

SEO Report

Click here for the SEO Report!

This report is broken in to four sections, two of which have two tabs worth of data:

You have tabs for an overview, then details for keywords and landing pages – including on page interaction and conversion data and then a whole tab for Ecommerce data. If you click through on the keyword data you are taken through to the landing pages reached by that keyword and vice versa for landing pages – click the URL to see the keywords. To see both alongside each other click Secondary Dimension and choose either Keyword or Landing Page.

All of this can be customised to suit your client.

PPC Dashboard

My lovely PPC Dashboard

This dashboard got full before revenue and goal completion data could be incorporated! I find it useful to see the share of cost that the campaigns have as a pie and the line graphs highlight when anything happens (increases / decreases). The tables at the bottom show data by keyword so you can quickly see how the performance of the top keywords is doing.

PPC Report

Lots of PPC data in one place, including on page interaction and conversion data:

A PPC Custom Report just for you!

Brand Awareness

Here we have two dashboards, one for brand engagement and one for brand monitoring. Don’t forget to edit each widget to have your brand name in the filter where required:

• Brand Monitoring
• Brand Engagement 

Social Dashboard

This does what it says and reports on social activity coming in and happening on your website. For more explanation of the social reporting functionality in Google Analytics check out these two posts:

• Social Reports Explained at SMX
• Social Reports Explored (lots of screenshots and explanations)

And here are links to two reports and the Dashboard:

• Social Interactions by Day of the Week
• Social Visitor Loyalty
• Social Media Dashboard

Tech Dashboard

This is for anyone wanting to understand the technology used by visitors to your website. It helps you identify problems and understand what to optimise for:

Get your geek on with this techy dashboard

Hostname Report

This is one of the features I use a lot in analytics but I have found that not many people know about it. This report shows you all the domains that have fed data to your Google Analytics Account. It’s really useful for seeing how much traffic sub domains have or identifying any sites copying your complete site.

You can also set up advanced segments for specific Hostnames to help you see data for specific domains in standard reports.

Email Marketing

My top tip for monitoring your email campaigns is to ensure that all links are tracked. A lot of email marketing services will have campaign tracking options, but if you’re struggling to get those to work or you’re building your email yourself you will want to use Google’s Campaign Tracking URL Builder:

Here’s where I’ve written an explanation of tracking email campaigns.

Affiliate Link Tracking

Google Analytics is slightly limited when it comes to measuring your affiliate success as it can’t access your conversion data – unless you’re using AdSense. One way to measure your success in Google Analytics for any affiliate service is to track how many clicks each link gets. The best way to do this is to use Event Tracking.

Here’s a brief guide to Event Tracking.

If your site is built in WordPress I highly recommend Yoast’s (Joost de Valk’s) Google Analytics for WordPress plugin as this enables the Event Tracking to be added to all external links just by ticking one box.

Short Cuts

A very new feature in Google Analytics is the Short Cut functionality. Navigate to any report, add any custom segments you like, choose which graph you want and save it as a shortcut so that you never have to do the repetitive navigation again!

Our very own Sam Noble explains it with screen shots over on State of Search.

Ta-Da!

So there you have it, lots and lots of freebies to help you get the most out of Analytics without using too much of your time! Please leave a comment if you have any feedback, ideas, suggestions or questions, or even if you just want to say hi!

Your Free Whitepaper