7 essential Google Analytics reports every marketer must know

You may be using Google Analytics, but are you using it to its full potential? Contributor Khalid Saleh lays out 7 key reports with which every marketer should be familiar.

For marketers, there are few skills more important than a deep understanding of Google Analytics and its conversion measurement capabilities.

After all, this is the tool that tells you whether your efforts are actually translating into results.

Unfortunately, mastering Google Analytics can be challenging, even for experienced marketers. There is far too much data and too few easy-to-follow dashboards to sort it out.

To help you out, I’ve put together a list of seven custom and standard reports you can use right away to get better insight into your marketing performance.

1. Mobile Performance Report

You know this already: Ours is a mobile-first world. The total number of mobile users now exceeds the total number of desktop users…

… and mobile e-commerce is nearly 30 percent of all e-commerce in the US.

In fact, mobile is so important now that Google even penalizes websites that are not mobile-friendly.

For marketers, knowing how their sites perform on smaller screens is vital to staying alive in the SERPs and winning over customers.

The mobile performance report shows you how well your site (not app) is optimized for mobile and where you need to make improvements.

You can even segment the report further to see which mobile devices/browsers customers are using to access your site. This will tell you if your site is performing poorly on some devices.

Accessing this report is easy: Just go to Audience -> Mobile -> Overview.

This will show you how your site does on different platforms:

You can add more dimensions here as you see fit. Take careful note of bounce rate, time on site and page views to see whether your user experience is failing on one or more mobile channels.

2. Traffic Acquisition Report

Want to know if people are actually clicking on your ads? That guest post you published earlier — is it generating any traffic to your website? How about your SEO strategy? Is it actually working?

The traffic acquisition report will tell you all this and more. For many marketers, this will be their first step in the reporting process.

This is a standard report, so you can find it by going to Acquisition -> Overview.

This will give you a quick breakdown of your traffic sources.

Of particular insight here is the “Referrals” tab (Acquisition -> Overview -> All Traffic -> Referrals). This will tell you which external sites are driving traffic to your site.

Clicking on a referring website will show you the exact pages visitors used to enter your site.

3. Content Efficiency Report

Do you generate a lot of content on your website and find that tracking it is getting a little overwhelming?

Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 and a Digital Marketing Evangelist at Google, created this report to solve this exact problem.

This report tracks entrances, page views, bounces and goal completions to help you answer questions like:

• Which content is engaging your audience the most?
• What type of content (images, videos, GIFs, infographics, reviews) performs best with your readers?
• Which content converts readers into customers?
• Which content is shared most by your users?
• Here’s a quick overview from Avinash himself:

You can get a more detailed explanation of the report here. To grab a copy for yourself, check this link (you’ll need to log into Google Analytics first).

4. Keyword Analysis Report

Getting organic traffic from Google is great. Unfortunately, ever since Google started encrypting search data in 2012, your organic traffic keyword report has mostly shown this:

However, you can still gain a ton of insight about your visitors by tracking the performance of unencrypted keywords.

This report created by eConsultancy analyzes the most popular (and available) incoming keywords to your site. It shows visitor metrics, conversion rates, goal completions and page load time for each keyword.

Use this data to figure out what keywords are working best for you, how many of them are actually contributing to your goals and what keywords you need to optimize for in the future.

5. New vs. Returning Visitors

Getting a user to come to your site for the first time is great. Getting them to visit again is even better. After all, it is the returning visitors who usually end up becoming readers, followers and customers.

This standard report in Google Analytics will tell you what percentage of your users are coming back to your site.

You can find it by going to Audience -> Behavior -> New vs. Returning in your Analytics account.

Usually, the metrics for new and returning visitors are quite different. Returning visitors tend to stick around longer and have lower bounce rates.

6. Landing Pages Report

Your users will enter your site from all sorts of pages. Some will type in your home page URL directly, some will find a page through search engines, and some others will click on a link shared on your Twitter feed.

This report will tell you which pages visitors are landing on when they first enter your site. Based on data from this report, you can figure out how users are interacting with your site.

For example, if the report shows that some pages have a substantially higher bounce rate than others, you can take steps to make high bounce rate pages more engaging.

Find the report – Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing Pages.

7. Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate Report

“Bounce Rate” is the percentage of visitors who don’t take any action and leave from the same page they landed on.

“Exit Rate” measures the percentage of your visitors who browse more than one page on your site before leaving.

This report compares the bounce rate vs. exit rate for different pages on your site.

You can find it by going to Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages:

Next, select “Bounce Rate” and “% Exit” in the Explorer tab.

This will give you a visual comparison between bounce and exit rate for all your pages. You can drill down further to get this data for each page.

Use this report to find pages with low engagement and detect UX problems on your site. For example, if visitors are exiting a three-page article after reading only the first two pages, there’s probably something that is causing them to leave on the second page (too many ads, bad copy, a distracting link in the sidebar and so on).

Over to you

Google Analytics is an essential analytics tool for any marketer, but making the most of it can be challenging. By using a mixture of pre-created custom reports and standard reports, you can gain valuable insight into your users.

Google Analytics’ Solutions Gallery is particularly useful for someone new to analytics. Here, you can import expert-created reports into your Analytics account to build powerful dashboards quickly. You can also use these reports as guides to help you understand this incredible tool better.

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Source Page - http://searchengineland.com/

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Yandex updates their version of PageRank named Thematic Index of Citation (TIC)

The Russian search engine, Yandex, has updated their TIC scores, and webmasters took notice.

Yandex announced in Russian that they have updated their calculations and metrics they use for their thematic index of citations (TIC). The blog post is in Russian, but using Google Translate, Yandex wrote there were some “serious changes” made to that algorithm to “clean reference signal mechanisms.” They said they “excluded many outdated figures” “from the calculation algorithm.”

TIC is Yandex’s version of Google PageRank. Yandex’s help document on TIC describes it as:

Thematic Citation Index (TIC) determines the “credibility” of internet resources based on a qualitative assessment of links to other sites. The greater the quality the more “weight” the link is said to have. This indicator is calculated by a specially developed algorithm. The similarity in content between the source and the site to which it links, plays an important part in this equation. The number of links to a specific site also influences the TIC value, but the TIC is not ultimately defined by the quantity of links, but the total of their weights.
The Russian Search Tips blog explained, “TIC is an equivalent of Google PageRank, but unlike PageRank, TIC still gets regular updates and gives quite replicable indication about website’s authority.” That means that although Google killed Toolbar PageRank, Yandex still shows their scores to webmasters.

Russian webmasters have noticed their scores changed yesterday. The Russian Search Tips blog added, “The main changes in the TIC calculation formula concern inbound link-based signals, which is in line with the latest changes in Yandex search algorithm.”

Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia. With about 60 percent market share in that country, it is the fourth-largest search engine worldwide.

Source Page :- http://searchengineland.com/

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How to Choose the Best SEO Company in India?

The growing importance of the ecommerce sector is a matter of good hope. It has provided the source of employment and businesses to millions of the people in the country. It has been playing the unbelievable part in the growth and development of the different fields. It has played a remarkable role and is constantly growing at a noteworthy speed.

The online business also involves the different activities to be performed actively to market and promote the different products and services the company deals into. Similarly as the physical activities, are required in the offline businesses, in the same way it applies to the online trades.

The need and the requirement of the Digital Marketing Companies in India are increasing day by day due to the growing importance. The importance and the role are limitless. It should be implemented in the best and effective manner for the better than best results. It involves the various result oriented activities that lead to the desires results.

The varied online promotional activities are divided into off page and on page submission including directory, link building, SMO Social media marketing, SEM Search engine marketing, article, blogs, press releases, brand description, web contents, marketing contents, guest posting, micro blogs, and others. Each one of them has its own precious importance and can be used in the best manner to gain the required businesses in the estimated time limit.

Over the time due to the growing unlimited importance, the many companies offering the various internet based services increased. You will find a good number of the SMO Companies in India rendering the wide variety of networking platform related activities on the very popular portal like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, and others.

The challenging search for the best SEO Company in India is an unending process. It is certainly hard to decide the best from the rest. It needs good experience to make the right decision as many times the haste leads to the great disappointments. There are many of the imperative and practical factors that can be kept in mind while going for the hunting of the suitable service provider in and around you.

You can make your choice from the hundreds of the agencies engaged in the wide range of the very demanding and valued services on the varied terms. The choice of the good Digital Marketing Company will surely help you increase your customer reach, profit, business area, and product or service awareness on large scale.

After a great amount of the search, I came cross Markup Designs a company located in the metro Delhi. I consulted it and discussed all my requirements. The rates, services, dealings, cooperation, support, and the transparency offered by them was incredible. I received the complete assistance, real time reports, required business growth, promotional results as per the agreed contract terms.

Source Page :- http://www.articlesbase.com/destinations-articles/how-to-choose-the-best-seo-company-in-india-7445316.html

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