The Key Reports

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Dashboards

Before we begin with reports, I’d like to draw your attention to the Google Analytics demo account, which you can use to get familiar with the report data and start to practice. When you sign up or log in to Google Analytics, simply click on the link analytics.google.com/analytics/web/demoAccount to add the demo account to your GA account list.

The first area we’ll cover are dashboards. Transforming a complex report containing lots of data into an easy-to-read performance ‘snapshot’ is a very useful way of showing key trends to clients, managers, and other non-analysts. You can do this effectively in Google Analytics using the dashboard feature.

The Google Analytics dashboard is a collection of widgets that give you an overview of the most important metrics and reports for your campaigns. A benefit of dashboards is that you can share them with key stakeholders to give them a top-line view of visitor and conversion information. There are some predefined dashboards, which use your existing goal or ecommerce configurations to create stylish information displays. You can explore these dashboard templates in the Analytics Gallery within the dashboard section of Google Analytics.

Google Analytics tabs

Dashboards provide you with a bird’s-eye overview of campaign performance. But when you want to deep-dive into specific areas of website behavior, there are four main reporting areas in Google Analytics you can use to gain insights:

• The Audience tab: Who is coming to your website?
• The Acquisition tab: How are users getting to your website?
• The Behavior tab – What are users doing on your website?
• The Conversion tab – What actions are users taking to complete set goals?

Next, you’ll look at each reporting area in detail.