Google Analytics Custom Reporting

While Google Analytics (GA) is a tool meant for recording and reporting statistical data as it relates to the visitors of just about any website, it proves particularly useful and insightful for blog curators.  As blogging is becoming more and more accepted as a form of journalism, and as a means for generating income, the implementation of a tool such as this can only serve to enhance the offering of such outlets.  And while this very adept software suite allows for the drill-down of myriad reports, some are of greater interest and use than others.

For starters, Google’s enhancement of its audience demographic makeup reporting is uniquely useful in understanding who visitors are, where they come from, and ascribing a level of loyalty over time.  The information collected within this report includes geographic location, language spoken, overall engagement, and the hardware and software combinations visitors use while viewing a website. 

Over time, that hardware has changed dramatically.  An experience that was at once caged within the confines of a personal computer has since been unleashed in the form of mobile web browsing.  Within the Audience category of GA, one finds the extremely useful Mobile report data subset which expands upon how many users have used a mobile device to visit a website, and the specific devices they used to do so.  This report, slim though it may be, provides a wealth of insight into the direction a website’s design should take.  In particular, this information provides the modern marketer or web designer with a deeper understanding of how visitors are engaging with their content, and proves useful with regard to highlighting the drawbacks and stumbling blocks that current web formatting may place in front of potential consumers.

For example, while the chart below from GA provides the standard fare of information related to monthly visits including important statistics like total visits, pages viewed per visit, and the website’s bounce rate, it also includes the total number of visitors browsing via a mobile device, as well as those that weren’t.  When digging deeper into the data, it can be seen that there are some slight contrasts in how these visitors interact with the site itself.  Namely the fact that visitors using a mobile device, which includes tablets, view on average less pages per visit, spend less time on the site per visit, and generally account for a higher bounce rate.

 

So how can this information be extrapolated out even further to guide design decisions?  For an answer to that question, the analytics professional must first understand GA’s Custom Reporting tab.  As part of this incredibly useful analytics packages, users can fine-tune the information they wish to receive and can visualize it in a number of different ways.  Sticking with the idea of understanding mobile users, a custom report can easily be created using one or many primary data points with secondary data points used to provide a greater level of detail.  In the picture below, using information from a different website than the one above, we that far and away, products from Apple, Inc. account for the majority of mobile visitors to the website.  These include the company’s flagship tablet (iPad), third and fourth generation iPhones, and their fifth generation iPhone in spots one, two, and three, respectively.  As the company’s devices further account for 40 percent of the top ten devices used to browse this website, it would be wise to make the viewing experience a pleasant one for those visitors.

Despite the uptick in web traffic as a byproduct of the proliferation of these devices, one simply cannot ignore the still-dominant desktop web browsing experience.  Through Custom Reporting, GA also provides unique insight into the software capabilities of the modern personal computer.  Most notably is the browser that visitors are using when perusing a website’s content.  How such information can be leveraged for the good of the marketer and designer is once again directly related to design decisions and understanding which browsers can handle various chunks of code.  While most web browsers ostensibly meet minimum requirements for rendering web data, requirements put in place by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the fact remains that some have trouble handling basic HTML and CSS formatting, as well as added effects for user engagement through advanced programming languages like JavaScript.  In the image below, it can be deduced that the majority of this particular website’s visitors will see the site rendered exactly as the developer has programmed it.  The majority of the visitors are using up-to-date browsers including Internet Explorer 8 and 9, as well as the latest version of Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari – three of which currently properly parse code from the as of yet released standards of HTML5 and CSS3.

And finally, understanding traffic sources to and from a website is vitally important to its long-term health and popularity.  Through GA’s Traffic Sources category, one can complete a very successful drill-down of information that relates to inbound traffic from not only search engines and paid advertising, but also other websites listed as referrals.  While web traffic that originates organically via searches through organizations like Google, Yahoo, and Bing seems to be the primary goal of many web developers, one cannot ignore this inbound referral traffic for two reasons.  First, the traffic may be coming from an outlet that is providing a positive view of the organization.  In such a case, logic would dictate that assigning someone the task of curating the community that crops up around this outlet could further reinforce the positive image of the company and allow them to grow their visitor base.  Conversely, the message within the referral traffic might be negative in nature.  An example would be a customer having had a bad example with a company and airing their grievances within online forums where someone might listen.  With this example, it also makes sense to have a company representative watch over the outlet for changing tides in customer sentiment and respond as necessary to quell the fears of any future customers.

 

All totaled, Google Analytics provides information that ranges from generic, to extremely in-depth.  Understanding its usefulness requires an open mind and a willingness to retrieve and interpret visitor information in a number of different ways.