When discussing client reporting, there is no shortage of tools, software, and reports you can utilize to your advantage. As per BuiltWith, a website tracking the usage of the software on websites all over the Internet, 29.1 million websites are utilizing Google Analytics at present. Hence, more than 56% of websites are using Google Analytics across the globe. Google Analytics reporting has been a constant practice of marketers and website owners for around two decades, as nothing replaces Google Analytics 4 as the top priority for client reporting.
By crafting a customized Google Analytics report, you offer your client very intuitive reporting. This article explains what Google Analytics reports are and their other key elements.
What are Google Analytics Client Reports?
Google Analytics fetches and collects data from your applications and websites to build reports that offer insights into your business. You can utilize these reports to investigate data, monitor traffic and understand user behavior and their activities.
As soon as analytics start receiving data, the data is presented in the real-time report and later in your other reports. Certain data in your reports is collected from applications and websites after you set up Google Analytics, while more data needs some additional setup.
Key Sections of a Report
Metrics
To measure your Website’s performance, your primary focus should be on KPIs that are vital to reaching your website’s goal. When using Google Analytics or any other analytics tool, you will see dozens of reports showing various data. How do you know which KPIs are important for your website?
Let’s look at some of the most common KPIs and how they are used to measure your website’s progress toward various objectives.
A. Acquisition – Behavior – Conversion (ABC)
Google Analytics clusters data and reports based on ABC‘s:
- Acquisition
- Behavior and
- Conversions
B. Why are ABCs the most important metrics?
We described the importance of measuring KPIs that are vital in achieving your website’s SMART business objectives. Regardless of your website’s specific objectives, measuring the Acquisition–behavior–conversion (ABC) cycle will be crucial to reaching them, and here is why:
- Acquisition measures traffic to your website and tells you how your website acquires visitors.
- Behavior tells you how effective your website is at engaging visitors; it also points out what pages they view and the actions they take on the website
- Conversion tracks the effectiveness of your website in persuading website visitors to take a desirable action.
1. Acquisition Metrics
Without traffic, your website is deadweight in the digital space. Regardless of the level of effectiveness your website has, it cannot fulfill its mission if there aren’t any visitors. This is why you must track the following Acquisition KPIs:
- Sessions & Users
- %New Sessions
- New Sessions
2. Behavior Metrics
Behaviors are best thought of as a path toward a goal. Behavior KPIs inform you of users’ behaviors on your website. This insight is crucial to ensuring optimal user experience and improving it over time in order to maximize conversions. Following are a few basic behavior KPIs you should track:
- Bounce Rate
- Pages per Sessions
- Average Session Duration
3. Conversion Metrics
Once your Goals are set, Google Analytics will start recording data each time a Goal conversion happens. Note that Analytics will show conversions only from the moment you set up Goals tracking, not before.
Once data is received, you will see a number of Goals reports. Let’s look at some basic conversion KPIs you will see across Google Analytics reports.
- Goal Conversion Rate
- Goal Completions
- Goal Value
Dimensions
Dimensions are ways to view and segment qualitative data in Google Analytics, used with metrics. Dimensions are, by default, visible as rows in Google Analytics, and they can be seen as a set of characteristics of a group of visitors on your site.
Dimensions describe the data
They are the labels in the rows of your reports. Think of a dimension as describing the “what,” such as “What keyword did they use?” or “What city is the visitor from?” or “What pages were viewed?” Three examples: landing page, device type, and language.
Important dimensions to monitor
Understanding the bigger picture requires looking at data through a variety of lenses.
- User Type: This Dimension declares whether a particular user is new or returning and is especially useful for judging the success of advertising campaigns and site stickiness.
- Source: Tells where your traffic is coming from. Monitoring acquisition sources is crucial and can be further expanded on with the Source/Medium dimension.
- Geo Network: Understanding where users live can have a genuine impact on marketing and product development strategies.
Furthermore, Dimensions can be used to trace the route that customers use to move through the site. Understanding the path a customer takes to get to the product they want helps explain how easy the site is to navigate, which pages are most effective at converting users into paying customers, and which pages aren’t performing well enough to be worth keeping.
Segmentation
Segmentation is one of the most effective tools at our disposal. The ability to slice and dice your Google Analytics data is the difference between mediocre, surface-level insights and meaningful, useful analysis.
Segmentation is essentially dividing a large amount of data (i.e., everything in Google Analytics) into smaller units that are easier to digest and analyze. Overall metrics and results are nice to know but don’t drive the business insights that lead to exponential growth.
More useful insights can be derived from applying segments to your Google Analytics data.
You have the option to segment on:
- Demographics: age, gender, and other demographic factors
- Technology: browser, screen resolution, mobile device, and other technological factors
- Behavior: # of sessions, transactions per user/visit/hit, all related to a particular behavior
- Traffic Sources: segment sessions or users on specific campaign parameters
If you apply these segments while browsing through your Google Analytics reports, you will get a lot more value out of your data.
Filters
In Google Analytics, Filters are used to include only a specific subset of traffic, exclude unwanted data, or search and replace certain pieces of information.
Filters help you to manage what kind of data flows through to your Google Analytics report. They give you the flexibility to modify the data that is being collected in each of your views (profiles). They eliminate dirt and debris until all you’re left with is gold or, in this case, more accurate results.
Why is filtering your data important?
With unfiltered or raw data, you won’t get an accurate view of how your site is performing. By using filters, you can see a more accurate picture of how well your site is functioning.
Types of Google Analytics Reports
Google Analytics reports are allocated in three categories. They are:
- Standard: These default or predefined standard reports are available in Google Analytics.
- Custom: A custom Google Analytics report is a report you created. You select the metrics and dimensions and select how they must be displayed.
- Saved: You can access and manage your Google Analytics saved reports under the customization in the saved reports section present in the left pane. Saved reports are only visible to users who created and saved them.
Standard Google Analytics Reports
Explore the power of Google Analytics via its five major reports, including real-time audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions. These reports offer extensive information regarding your users and their actions, assisting you in optimizing your marketing strategies and efforts and achieving your business objectives.
Realtime
Real-time is the first report in Google Analytics offering you live insights into your website analytics at the present moment. This is extremely helpful when you are launching or updating something new on your website or having a big live campaign to monitor the users on your website. Under this report, you can get an overview and acknowledge how many users are present on the website, as well as other additional information. Moreover, it offers a top active pages section, which allows you to see the pages that the users are currently viewing. By clicking on some reports, you can also acknowledge their traffic sources, locations, and more. Real-time reports consist of the following reports:
- Overview
- Location
- Traffic sources
- Content
- Events
- Conversions
Audience
The audience report provides you with insights about the users on your website. It offers an overview of how many users have visited your website under what time frame you set it, along with sessions, duration, and page views. Moreover, the active users of the report present multiple breakdowns of active users over different time origins. The User Explorer sub-report offers in-depth information about your visitors, such as interests, demographics, device usage, geography, and more, which is valuable for understanding your customer segments. Therefore, they are categorized into:
- Overview
- Active users
- Lifetime value
- Cohort analysis
- Audiences
- User explorer
- Demographics
- Interests
- Geo
- Behavior
- Technology
- Mobile
- Custom
- Benchmarking
- User flow
Acquisition
The acquisition report is important for digital marketers as it provides insights into the process through which you are gaining traffic to your website from multiple digital channels. These reports represent users and behavior across multiple channel groups, like organic, email, social, and more, to understand the way users connect and interact with your website on the basis of their channel. You also get to link certain digital tools like search consoles and Google ads to provide additional information about Google Analytics and connect it with your web analytics. Ensure that you invest time in this powerhouse marketing report to avail yourself of important insights to enhance your marketing efforts. This category consists of the following reports:
- Overview
- All traffic
- Adwords
- Search Console
- Social
- Campaigns
Behavior
The behavior report provides you with in-depth information about the behavior of the users on your website. After driving users to the website, you want to understand what they’re actually doing on your platform. These behavior reports inform you of the activity of your users on the website and about the opportunities to enhance the experience. You can analyze behavior flow through site speed reports, multiple pages, and more. These reports are following categorized into:
- Overview
- Behavior flow
- Site content
- Site speed
- Site search
- Events
- Publisher
- Experiments
- Conversions
Conversions
Conversions are where the money is generated. This report lets you see how your website fulfills your target focus. You can set up objectives such as email sign-up, purchase, or other actions you want users to perform. This report shows your conversion funnel performance, including e-commerce reporting and multi-channel funnels for multi-touch attribution. The conversion reports are further divided into:
- Goals
- E-commerce
- Multi-channel funnel
- Attribution
Google Analytics Client Reports
A. Website Performance Report
Why is the Website Performance Report important?
The Google Analytics Website Performance report gives you a holistic view of your goal data. It gives you insights into how well you are converting your users while identifying where a user is more likely to complete a goal. It helps you identify which goals are performed and which are not in a single place.
What does the Website Performance Report show?
The Overview report gives you the big picture in terms of what’s happening on your website at any given moment. You’ll see how many visitors are currently on your website, what pages they are spending time on, the top overall traffic sources, your top social traffic sources, and the country in which your active users reside.
Generating a Website Performance Report can be made a lot easier with ReportGarden
If you really want to succeed, you’ll need to review and refine your website performance regularly. Reportgarden for Google Analytics Client Reports: With just a simple drag and drop of the overview widgets, you automate your work and also bubble up important insights about your campaign. You can try the tool for free! It helps you view your entire Website Performance Report with detailed analysis. This includes KPIs with trend indicators to help you assess site performance.
B. Sessions Report
Why is the Sessions Report important?
The concept of a session in Google Analytics is important to understand because many features, reports, and metrics depend on how Analytics calculates sessions. The Sessions report in Google Analytics is crucial as it helps in understanding the session data.
What does the Sessions Report show?
Sessions report helps you gauge if individuals are truly interacting with your website. Since a session times out, “passive” visitors won’t distort data. For example, visitors who keep your website open in a separate tab and continue browsing elsewhere won’t be counted past the 30-minute session marker.
Generating a Sessions Report can be made a lot easier with ReportGarden
A session is a group of hits recorded for a user in a given time period. The same user can generate one or more sessions from any medium or can leave midway through the session. In such situations, it can become a tedious job to track and analyze all the session data. ReportGarden’s Sessions report makes your work easy with an organized breakdown of your session information based on the following :
- Visitor Sessions
- Session Duration
- Organic Sessions
- Sessions from Mediums
Dimension: Time
Dimension: Time
C. Traffic Sources Report
Why is the Traffic Sources Report important?
Knowing where a site’s traffic is coming from and whether the source fluctuates from month to month is important for decision-makers. The Traffic Sources report helps you visualize which traffic sources are generating the most traffic. Within this report, you can see the detailed breakdown of how many visits your site received from each source in the selected time period.
What does the Traffic Sources Report show?
The Traffic Sources report will tell you the places from which your website traffic originates. It includes sources like “Google,” “Bing,” “direct,” and “Yahoo”.
Generating a Traffic Sources Report can be made a lot easier with ReportGarden
The best way to track your success as a website is by comparing your traffic over time. The most important thing is to pay attention to the relevant source of traffic. ReportGarden highlights the important sources of traffic that are coming to your site with a few simple clicks. This will help you constantly adjust your strategies to increase your numbers in terms of absolute numbers and conversions.
Dimension: Source
Dimension: Source
D. Traffic Medium Report
Why is the Traffic Medium Report important?
The Traffic Medium Report is the most valuable in Google Analytics. It helps you determine where the bulk of your traffic is coming from and if/how valuable that traffic can be to the business.
What does the Traffic Medium Report show?
You can use the Medium report to see what percentage each major traffic source makes up for your website. This helps in identifying the major players before analyzing them in more depth through other reports.
Not only does this report compare all of your marketing channels in one view, but it condenses them to the highest level so you can see them in one place.
Generating a Traffic Medium Report can be made a lot easier with ReportGarden
ReportGarden’s Medium Report is very important to understanding the overall picture of how people are getting to your website or the traffic your website is getting. With this report, ReportGarden helps you to analyze how that traffic is valuable to your business by segregating them in terms of
- Direct
- Organic
- Referral
- Paid
- None
Dimension: Medium
Dimension: Medium
E. User Browsers Report
Why is the Browsers Report important?
Getting a full picture of your website’s performance includes analyzing what browsers people are using. Browsers Report helps you understand where people are coming from (paid search, organic search, etc.) and the distribution of channels by the browser.
What does the Browsers Report show?
Within this report, you can look not only at overall traffic volume but also at engagement and conversion performance. Continue to monitor the Browsers report to see what changes over time. When you notice dramatic changes or differences, you’ll know to dig further and find potential reasons for performance shifts.
Generating a Browsers Report can be made a lot easier with ReportGarden
Browser Performance report acts as a guide in deciding the right browser for your website. ReportGarden fetches you the performance analysis of various browsers with a single click. Based on the data breakdowns from ReportGarden, you can bid more heavily on visitors from those browsers who are performing better in your campaigns. These granular data investigations provide key findings to share with your clients when explaining results from their digital marketing campaigns.
Dimension: Browsers
Dimension: Browsers
F. Mobile Overview and Devices Report
Why is the Mobile Overview and Devices Report important?
This report provides a breakdown of your total site traffic by device type(desktop vs. mobile vs. tablet) used over a defined period. The top advantage of analyzing this report is that we can identify the possible issues in the responsiveness of the website. You may not know how the website is appearing on different devices. With this report, you can see all the device categories that contributed visits to your website.
What do the Mobile Overview and Device Report show?
The Mobile Overview and Devices report allows you to see the types of devices visitors have used to access your website. As the number of mobile internet users is increasing rapidly, it is very beneficial to analyze the device details.
Desktop: Includes the details of desktops, notebooks, and laptops visitors have used.
Mobile: Covers the details of visits that have used smartphones.
Tablets: This includes the details of tablet devices such as iPads, Galaxy tabs, etc.
The ‘Devices Report’ shows you the details of specific devices which the visitors have used.
Usage example:
When modifying the website to a new design or when adding new functionality to the website, you need to make sure that the new version is compatible with all the devices from which the website is currently getting traffic. By checking this report, you can minimize the number of bugs that may affect the website functionality in particular devices.
You can also see how differently/similarly users across various devices are converting – maybe you’ll glean insights into how differently people are converting on various devices and can more easily delve into why.
Generating a Mobile Overview and Devices Report can be made a lot easier with ReportGarden
This report from ReportGarden helps you compare performance differences between visitors using desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. With these insights, you can pay close attention to how well each type of traffic converts into accomplishing your site’s goals.
Dimension: Device
Dimension: Device
G. Geo-Performance Report
Why is the Geo-Performance Report important?
Understanding your customers — including their preferences and opinions — is an important part of marketing. One helpful indicator of customer behavior is location because where one lives can have a profound effect on what one buys and how one shops.
What does the Geo-Performance Report show?
Geo-Performance Report presents very detailed location-specific demographic information about site visitors. This creates opportunities for marketers to understand customers better and, perhaps, make improvements to site content, merchandising, and advertising. Even social media marketing efforts may be improved with location data.
Generating a Geo-Performance Report can be made a lot easier with ReportGarden
ReportGarden’s Geo-Performance Report tells you which locations your active users are from. You can also filter your data by country or city to see the geographic origins of your traffic. If you use Country, you can see the geographic origins of your traffic. With these granular data investigations, you can decide where it is more prudent to invest your advertising dollars.
Dimension: Country
Dimension: Country
H. Campaign Performance Report
Why is the Campaign Performance Report important?
In Google Analytics, “Campaigns” are typically marketing events you have initiated, such as email campaigns, banner ads, Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, etc. Understanding how these campaigns are successful or unsuccessful is critical. Understanding bounce rates, visits, behavior flow, and conversions are just a few of the things you need to know to make sure your future campaigns are a success.
What does the Campaign Performance Report show?
Campaign reports are useful for measuring campaigns against your business objectives. This will help you compare and contrast campaigns to look for areas of improvement for future campaigns.
By using this report, you can see how much revenue each campaign has produced in a set period, as well as the general performance of the traffic. This makes it very easy to analyze performance from just one place. This helps you understand which campaigns have been successful and which have underperformed and need to be modified. You can see the variation in performance, such as how one campaign has a much better conversion rate than the others. This can help you analyze which of your campaigns have worked, helping you to put more time and energy into maximizing those campaigns while minimizing the time and energy you put towards ineffective campaigns.
Generating a Campaign Performance Report can be made a lot easier with ReportGarden
Without knowing the performance of a particular campaign, you are potentially wasting time and budget. Campaign performance report helps you to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaign. ReportGarden helps you to achieve that by presenting a detailed analysis of the best-performing and underperforming campaigns based on the quantitative (visits, new users) and qualitative (bounce rate, pages/session, average. session duration, conversions) metrics. With these data breakdowns, you can make on-the-fly optimizations to your campaign and achieve better overall results.
Dimension: Campaign
Dimension: Campaign
I. Landing Pages Performance Report
Why is the Landing Pages Report important?
One of the main reports that you should track when you first build a website is “Landing Pages.” The Landing Page report is a great way to understand how users are finding your website. Paying attention to visitor metrics on landing pages will help you understand whether the content of your pages matches what the visitor is looking for.
What does the Landing Pages Report show?
This report will show you exactly which of your web pages your visitors come to first. Additionally, this report can clear up how each landing page performs individually, allowing you to see where your greatest strengths may lie.
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 on optimizing.
Generating a Landing page report can be made a lot easier with ReportGarden
If you do not know the performance of your landing pages, you may not reach a consensus and take corrective actions. ReportGarden helps you analyze data from underperforming landing pages or even top-performing landing pages with a few simple mouse clicks to determine where exactly the secret sauce lies. With this data, you can fine-tune landing pages to meet very specific needs and monitor performance very easily.
Dimension: Landing Pages
J. Search Terms Report
Why is the Search Terms Report important?
A search terms report is crucial as it shows you not only the keywords that you’re bidding on but also the actual queries that are driving traffic to your site.
What does the Search Terms Report show?
This report provides detailed information on your website’s top-performing search queries. There are many uses for this report. Some examples include:
- How many pages it took for people to find what they wanted
- How many visitors gave up and left the website
- Which keywords did not have good enough results, so users had to refine their terms
- How persistent visitors were with their query, by how many pages of results they looked through
- Most common queries
- Which areas of the site people choose to search for over navigating through a menu for
- Which queries lead to users being engaged with the website
- Queries that have good conversion rates
Generating a Search Terms Report can be made a lot easier with ReportGarden
ReportGarden helps mine your search query data with a clear strategy, efficient techniques, and process, which will ultimately translate into improved campaign profitability. It provides detailed information on your top-performing search queries. From there, you can find new high-potential keywords and add them to your account. Also, identify poorly converting keywords in your account to either delete them or lower your bids.
Dimension: Search Queries
In order to access these Custom Analytics Reports available in ReportGarden, you need to sign in with ReportGarden and create your account. Also, link your AdWords account to this account.
Google Analytics Reports can help you keep focused and have a better understanding of what is actually happening on your website. Getting the right data from your website could mean the difference between success and failure.
Learn more about how you can automate your Analytics Client Reporting!
Explore the Best of Client Reporting With ReportGarden
Google Analytics reports offer a lot to its users. It promotes smart work and not hard work to make sure you get all the crucial information relevant to your business or organization. Explore the multiple options and also do not avoid the lesser popular reports by Google Analytics. Increase and optimize traffic by implementing the power of understanding the journey of your customers and their valuable insights and behavior.
For even well-structured, visualized, clear, intuitive and valuable reports, access the ReportGarden reporting tool and impress your clients with the most decent and attractive reports, along with offering valuable insights for better decision-making.
FAQs
Q1. Mention the purpose of the Google Analytics report.
Google Analytics is used to gather data from your applications and websites and build reports that provide insights into your business. These reports can be used to investigate data, monitor traffic, and understand your users' behavior.
Q2. How many reports are present in Google Analytics?
Each Google Analytics property can include up to 150 customer reports.
Q3. Where is the data of google analytics stored?
Google Analytics utilizes regional data centers to ensure your mobile application and website User measurements are forwarded to Google Analytics as securely as possible.
