Creating Basic Reports in Google Analytics

Meredith: 0:24

We're ready.

Meredith's Husband: 0:25

You had a question.

Meredith: 0:26

I did.

Meredith's Husband: 0:27

About.

Meredith: 0:28

Google Analytics.

Meredith's Husband: 0:30

Okay, this blows me away a little bit. You have a question about Google Analytics.

Meredith: 0:34

I do. I can't remember how do we use it. What was my question? I can't remember, I don't know. You didn't tell me.

Meredith's Husband: 0:40

I wanted to wait and hear it for the first time doing this podcast.

Meredith: 0:45

Oh no, Didn't I? I just don't know how to use it.

Meredith's Husband: 0:48

Yeah, well, that's the thing.

Meredith: 0:54

That's the new Google analytics. I don't know how to use it either, and I thought that you were going to be able to tell how many leads came in from which source and you'd be able to track it.

Meredith's Husband: 1:02

but I, yeah, you can, but good luck figuring that out.

Meredith: 1:05

Yeah, I can't open it right now.

Meredith's Husband: 1:09

And we talk about. So when you open, well, first tell me what is it that you want to get from Google Linux, because you just relaunched your site, so you have an interest as to how it's working, what's working? What are the questions that you want to have answered?

Meredith: 1:22

Well, I want to know how many people are looking at my site, how many things they're looking at, how long.

Meredith's Husband: 1:32

How many? What do you mean? How many things like what I mean?

Meredith: 1:34

what pages are they looking at which? Pages are and how long are they spending on them? Which pages are they looking at most and where are they coming from? And, and I think that's it.

Meredith's Husband: 1:51

Okay, I mean, those are all good questions.

Meredith: 1:53

Yeah, Like how many people are looking at my page at my website? How did they get there? How long are they staying on each page? Ideally, it would be great. What are they looking at? Are they clicking any buttons? What holds their interest? What makes them leave? I did find that there are places to see how many are returning visitors.

Meredith's Husband: 2:18

Yeah, that's a good metric. It sounds like you basically want to figure out the engagement. How are people engaging with?

Meredith: 2:24

your website.

Meredith's Husband: 2:26

And where are they?

Meredith: 2:27

coming from Right. How are they getting there? How are they coming?

Meredith's Husband: 2:30

from Right. Well, how are they getting there?

Meredith: 2:31

Not. How are they getting there? You can see, OK, there's some in China and India, and you know, but I want to know.

Meredith's Husband: 2:38

How are they finding your site? How do they come from Google? Do they come from social media? Do they come from Facebook or Instagram? Do they come from?

Meredith: 2:45

other sources and do we, can we? How specific can we get Like when they say it comes from an email? What does that mean?

Meredith's Husband: 2:52

Well, if you want to track visitors to your site from emails so you have email marketing set up you would need to take another step and create tracking codes for those emails. What, yeah, that's kind of another step. If you have a paid email marketing campaign, you would do that.

Meredith: 3:13

I don't think most people are going For example, like Flowdesk.

Meredith's Husband: 3:17

Yeah, if you had a monthly newsletter, like, let's say you had a newsletter and you send out, you have an email marketing list, you have a monthly newsletter and every once in a while you send out like a seasonal special Right, and every once in a while you send out like a seasonal special.

Meredith's Husband: 3:27

Instead of just putting your website address in those emails, it would be your website address meredithsinnerphotographycom. Slash UTM and there's a tracking code so you can say well, this email was my monthly newsletter, this email was my spring discount, this email was the whatever spring discount, this email was the whatever. That's really only worthwhile if you're putting effort into your email marketing. I think. I think for most people they're not going to do that.

Meredith: 3:58

Okay, I'm not going to send anything, but you you just placed an ad on a website. I did.

Meredith's Husband: 4:07

A local website. The same idea.

Meredith: 4:10

No, it was an email. It was an email, an email, blast, blast blast Right.

Meredith's Husband: 4:18

So if you do that and you don't do some sort of tracking, that is adding a little bit of tracking code to the end of that address. So meredithsinnercom, slash Park, slope Parents email, it will come through and it will probably say there's no, it probably won't have any information. It might say email, it might just say other, but there are like the highest level you look at in terms of where people come from. It's going to be what they call the default channel.

Meredith: 4:50

Default channel.

Meredith's Husband: 4:51

And that's going to be either organic. That includes Google search engine, it includes other search engines. Although there's not much coming from other search engines, there's going to be paid traffic, which would be what?

Meredith: 5:04

is that, Ask Jeeves.

Meredith's Husband: 5:06

Ask Jeeves. I don't know, it might still be around, I have no idea. Yahoo, bing, probably mostly Bing and Yahoo, or you know what? Probably DuckDuckGo.

Meredith's Husband: 5:16

That's another things like that You're going to have. So that's organic. You're going to have paid search. What's that? It's going to be like AdWords, like you're running ads on Google Okay. Or you're running ads on a search engine paid search Okay. Organic is free search, paid search is running ads Google AdWords, bing ads, yahoo ads, whatever else is out there. It's really going to be only it's basically Google ads Okay, it's paid search.

Meredith's Husband: 5:40

Then there's going to be another one, called direct, and that's probably going to be a pretty big category for most people, because that's going to be people coming directly to your site, either from a bookmark. It could be a link in an email, it could be something you just know of your site. Maybe they just type in the address directly. That also could be if somebody comes to your site through, say, facebook. They find you on Facebook, yeah, and then they visit your site and then they come back later and then they just go straight to your site. That's going to be direct traffic found you via Facebook. So that becomes a little bit complicated now in I think they call it attribution.

Meredith: 6:22

You sure I shouldn't open my paid? Yeah, yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 6:26

Because it's not a friendly interface anymore.

Meredith: 6:29

No kidding, but that's why I was thinking, if I can say what is this? What is this?

Meredith's Husband: 6:35

See, that sort of stuff used to be like really easy to find in Google Analytics. It was super helpful, it was really flexible, it was really easy to use.

Meredith: 6:43

And then I signed up for it.

Meredith's Husband: 6:45

Yeah, when you signed up, they threw all that out the window, and so let's make this really difficult. No, google G4, Google Google, the new G4, google Analytics is very difficult to use. I find it very difficult to use. Everybody, I know we all find it very difficult to use, very non-intuitive, and what you have to do in order to get a simple-looking report like that is you have to create it yourself. The information is all there, but it's just not presented in like I would call it a user-friendly way.

Meredith: 7:21

It's very difficult. How would you create it yourself?

Meredith's Husband: 7:24

So when you log into Google Analytics and I was thinking of doing a blog on this about how to create custom reports that are actually useful, and I wanted to talk to you about it because I want to know what you wanted to figure out and from what you're saying, yeah, you can create a report that will do that, that you can just go and click on. It just has the most useful information.

Meredith: 7:43

That would be tremendous.

Meredith's Husband: 7:45

Yeah, so look for that link below. I will create a blog and some sort of tutorial on how to do that.

Meredith: 7:52

Thank you, husband.

Meredith's Husband: 7:53

And it can tell you, yeah, where your traffic is coming from, how I don't want to say how long they spend on your site. I actually don't like that metric. Because Because people go through pages at different speeds. They read at different speeds. True, like I'm a very, very slow reader.

Meredith: 8:10

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 8:12

Some people open a tab and then, if they get distracted, or go to the bathroom.

Meredith: 8:15

I was just going to say that's what I do.

Meredith's Husband: 8:17

Like at any given time, I have I don't know how many tabs open on my computer. Oh don't ask me. So it can really. What do they call it when you? It can really skew. Disconstrued it can skew your data in terms of you're probably looking at the amount of time spent on site.

Meredith: 8:37

Right.

Meredith's Husband: 8:38

Is the metric you're looking at?

Meredith: 8:39

Or page.

Meredith's Husband: 8:40

Unless you have thousands and thousands of visitors, that number can be skewed by one person having a tab open for an hour Right and while they go and do something else. So unless you have a really big number of people, I don't like using that metric. I much prefer the number of pages per visit. So that will tell you how many pages did they visit. Was it just one, was it two, was it three, et cetera.

Meredith: 9:05

And do they say which ones they were?

Meredith's Husband: 9:07

You can drill down and get that sort of information. I think it's called, like the user flow and they actually have a map of how, but it's also it's honestly it's not very useful because no two people are alike.

Meredith: 9:22

Yeah, but if you gather sufficient data, you can say oh, a majority of people.

Meredith's Husband: 9:29

Again, if you can gather sufficient, if you have thousands and thousands of visitors, yes, then those things start to make sense. Otherwise, you're looking at a really small sample.

Meredith: 9:43

And if you're drawing conclusions from that really small sample, it can be misleading and you can start thinking things are true.

Meredith's Husband: 9:46

So I tend to stick away from like the user flow from the time on site and I look at the metrics like the number of users, the number of actual people, the number of sessions, the number of actual people, the number of sessions.

Meredith: 10:00

Wait, what are sessions?

Meredith's Husband: 10:01

Sessions are like I'm a person If I come and visit your site, that's one user. If I come and visit your site today and then I come back and visit your site again tomorrow and the day after, that's three different sessions, but only one user.

Meredith: 10:16

Oh, oh, oh okay.

Meredith's Husband: 10:17

So there's a difference there. That's weird. To call it a session, oh, oh, oh, okay. So there's a difference there, that's weird to call it a session. Well, it's a session, if somebody see coming from the organic. It's a visit. It used to be called visit.

Meredith: 10:27

It actually used to be called visit and now it's a session. Let's just make it really confusing.

Meredith's Husband: 10:32

Yeah.

Meredith: 10:33

Thanks.

Meredith's Husband: 10:34

But the number of users, the number of sessions. I like to look at now the engagement rate.

Meredith: 10:41

What does that?

Meredith's Husband: 10:41

mean it used to be the bounce rate. A bounce would be if I come to your website and I just look at one page for five seconds and I leave.

Meredith: 10:48

I'm out of here.

Meredith's Husband: 10:49

That's a bounce Social media has really. How do I say this?

Meredith: 10:56

Shortened our attention span.

Meredith's Husband: 10:57

Social media uses engagement as more of a metric, and so Google, I think, started going along well. Let's use engagement rather. They're the inverse of each other. If you have an 80% bounce rate, you have a 22%. It means you have a 20% engagement rate. They're the exact opposites of each other. So Google just started using the inverse technology to go along with what Facebook and all these other.

Meredith: 11:22

I see, is it just also kind of just sticking to a positive, like what is the standard, kind of yes, so you don't feel horrible like they ate everything, right?

Meredith's Husband: 11:32

Yeah, a little bit. Yes, A little bit. Okay, and it is useful to know, wait, what percentage of people coming to my site are engaged. It's even more useful to know what percentage of people coming to my site from Google are engaged versus the people coming from Facebook. Where am I getting the best engagement?

Meredith: 11:51

And there's usually a difference between I don't know where you can find that.

Meredith's Husband: 11:56

Yeah, that's in Google Analytics too, and that's what I would.

Meredith: 11:59

I'd be interested in that.

Meredith's Husband: 12:01

And good luck finding it unless you build a custom report.

Meredith: 12:04

Okay good, Because I didn't see anything like that.

Meredith's Husband: 12:07

No, you have to know beforehand exactly what you are looking for and then create a report and put those metrics in.

Meredith: 12:16

Is that what your blog is going to contain? That?

Meredith's Husband: 12:18

is what? Yeah, I'm going to probably do at least one custom report and it's going to give, like what I'm talking about right now, what?

Meredith: 12:25

I think are the most important metrics. That's so nice of you, thank you.

Meredith's Husband: 12:29

And also the other really good thing to use Google Analytics, for Google Analytics is the only place you can get this is the conversions, the conversion information, the conversion rate which we talked about.

Meredith: 12:40

And that's when people say I'm interested what?

Meredith's Husband: 12:45

Yes, the people who contacted you. Where did they come? Is your conversion rate from Google? Is it 1%? Is your conversion rate from Facebook? Is that lower or higher than your visitors from Google or your? It's helpful to know that sort of information.

Meredith: 13:02

Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 13:03

Yes. So I will say this there are some kind of general guidelines that I think you should. It might be helpful to know anyway, before you even go and look at Google Analytics. You're going to notice that probably your conversion rate from social media almost always is going to be smaller than your conversion rate from other sources.

Meredith: 13:23

Okay.

Meredith's Husband: 13:24

It just, it's just very typical, unless you have a really great call to action from your social media content.

Meredith: 13:30

I do not.

Meredith's Husband: 13:32

If you're running paid ads. Your conversion rate for those should be higher than anything else, Because you can be very highly targeted. You know exactly why people are coming to your site. You know the wording.

Meredith: 13:47

Oh, you can heavily target.

Meredith's Husband: 13:48

Yes, you can or you can be heavily targeted.

Meredith's Husband: 13:53

You can. You know exactly what they clicked on. You know exactly the words that they were reading before they clicked. You control where they go, so you can be very specific in what you're doing. When people come to your site through organic, just from Google, you don't really know why they're coming, so don't expect a really high conversion rate. They could be coming for any number of reasons, but your conversion rates from organic are going to tend to be higher than social media, going to tend to be higher than social media. Your conversion rates from direct traffic are usually going to be roughly the same or even higher than organic traffic, because those are people who are coming directly to your site.

Meredith: 14:32

They already know about you. They know right yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 14:34

Or they've bookmarked your site, or they're clicking on your link in an email, etc.

Meredith: 14:39

Or someone said hey, check this out.

Meredith's Husband: 14:40

Yes, and you want to pay attention to and I'll put this in the report how people are coming into the site. Are they coming in through the homepage or through? A blog page, so your bounce rate.

Meredith: 14:54

How do you know that?

Meredith's Husband: 14:55

That's there. That's one of the metrics.

Meredith: 14:57

Okay.

Meredith's Husband: 14:57

When people come to your site through a blog page, typically that's going to have a pretty high bounce rate. Through a blog page, typically that's going to have a pretty high bounce rate. When people find a blog, they very often they're going to get. They want to, they have a very specific question, they're going to go read your blog and then they're going to leave.

Meredith: 15:11

Right.

Meredith's Husband: 15:11

That's so. So if you see your blogs have a higher bounce rate than like your homepage, that's normal. Okay, if you in fact have a blog page and it has, like maybe, a high conversion rate that's fantastic, like that's awesome, but that's not common okay no, that's great. That's great.

Meredith's Husband: 15:33

I look forward uh, let me know when you've got the blog done, shit, I gotta write a blog, you and me both, my friend and the reason I'm gonna do a blog now and I haven't done one before is because Google came out, the new G4 came out, and they kept changing things, and I actually did a blog about how to create and track conversions and then they changed it, and so they've changed it a handful of times. I'm like, well, I'm not going to write another blog and tell people how to do this if they're just going to change it again. But it seems like it's more solid now. Google Analytics the newest version anyway has been out for a solid year plus.

Meredith: 16:06

Okay, it's time to write a blog about it.

Meredith's Husband: 16:08

Yeah, and they haven't changed it.

Meredith: 16:11

Cut to.

Meredith's Husband: 16:13

Yeah right, Famous last words Right.

Meredith: 16:15

Well, I look forward to the blog. Thank you.