This weekend I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the fantastic Think Visibility conference. Massive thanks to Dom and his amazing team for organising such a fun event.I’m grateful that I work in an industry that is very friendly and social, meaning that events like this are a great place to meet people who you’ve been talking to on social networks and share ideas.
My talk was about Advanced Analytics, namely, finding the right numbers, finding them faster and then finding some even more useful insights. Here’s what I covered:
Slides
Custom Reports
Reporting is never a one size fits all, so make it easy to analyse the important factors for your site by creating a Custom Report.
Here’s the link to the one I created which looks at Visits, Unique Visitors, Bounces, Exit Rate and Goal Conversions for organic keywords and landing pages:
You can edit this to suit your conversions and metrics and share it with mulitple profiles.
I emphasised the need for context and recommend thinking about the three A’s to make sure the numbers are actually appropriate: authority, accuracy and argument.
Keyword Visit and Rank Data
I also explained how to create a spreadsheet with your rank and visit data, which is very useful for identifying keywords that are not performing as you expected and any that are over performing.
You might want to use this kind of information to reassess your keyword targeting on a regular basis, although I would recommend comparing it to other metrics before making decisions, you can add these in to this spreadsheet easily enough.
Save Time with Google Analytics APIs
Here I talked about my experiences building an API export in to a monthly reporting spreadsheet for 60 clients, saving over 15 hours a month. All without learning to code!
I’d encourage you to give it a go, or alternatively, use some of the tools I discussed.
If you’re not sure where to start, use Excellent Analytics for simple data import into Excel, the amazing SEO Tools for Excel for data grabbing and on page analysis, SEO Gadget’s AdWords API Excel Plugin for keyword research and then start reading up on making your own:
- Excellent Analytics: https://excellentanalytics.com/ and Tom Critchlow explains: https://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-export-google-analytics-data-to-excel-via-the-api
- SEO Tools for Excel: https://nielsbosma.se/projects/seotools/functions/ and https://seogadget.co.uk/amazing-seo-tools-for-excel/
- Next Analytics: https://www.nextanalytics.com/
- Automate Analytics, GA Data Grabber Tool: https://www.gadatagrabbertool.com/
- SEOGadget’s AdWords API Excel Plugin: https://seogadget.co.uk/google-adwords-plugin-excel/
- Google Analytics API Introduction: https://analytics.blogspot.com/2009/08/analytics-data-in-excel-through-our-api.html
- Getting started yourself: https://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/v3/gdataGettingStarted.html
- GA API Dimensions and Metrics Library: https://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/dimsmets/dimsmets.html
Not Provided Data
I included a brief overview of two good ways to see what kind of traffic is now being reported as (not provided).
Firstly, I recommend using an Advanced Segment with includes keyword exactly matching (not provided) and compare it to excluding keyword exactly matching (not provided).
Secondly, look at the Landing Page report for the visits from (not provided) and you will be able to see what pages attract (not provided) visits.
You can also think about (not provided) traffic as being a custom variable given to you on a plate from Google – it easily segments users who browse the internet while logged in to Google properties. Use the Advanced Segments above to see how these visitors compare to those not logged in to Google properties.
Multi Touch Attribution
Sounds like a complicated term but simply refers to people seeing your site or brand through different methods before converting. Information on this is reported in the Multi Channel Funnels section, under Conversions in Google Analytics.
You will enjoy the insights gained from Top Conversion Paths as well as seeing how much impact different factors have had on your conversions but as I said above, one thing does not suit all. I would always recommend that you should create custom channel groupings to group aspects that mean something to your website.
I showed an example of grouping brand terms, but more exciting than that, grouping search traffic by query length to see what types of phrases assist in conversions.
My other ideas for custom groupings that you may find beneficial are:
- Longtail vs. Generic
- Categories of keywords
- Core target keywords
- AdWords or email campaigns
- Organic, affiliate, paid traffic
- Types of social traffic
- Split paid traffic by search and display ads
- Click from keywords in position 1, 2, 3 etc
- Clicks from keywords on page 1, page 2 etc
I hope you have fun with these groupings, please post any other ideas or useful groupings you have in the comments below. I do think that this is the most important area of Multi Channel Funnels and should always be used to give you the best analysis for your site.
You can also find below the front cover slide we made for the event. Who wouldn’t want a bottle of SEO Panther?
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Thanks for the comments Sharon and Carly, I’m pleased you enjoyed my talk, shout if you get stuck trying any of the areas yourself.
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A great presentation Anna, and some really good takeaways for me, someone who has been using only about 20% of analytics to capacity. I’m really excited to get stuck in with this, especially pulling in data to an excel sheet via API… that’s gonna be a time saver!
Thanks again!
This was spot on thanks Anna! Confirmed that I don’t use GA to my advantage most of the time. I’ll have another look at your slides and get stuck in soon.
What do you think?
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