5 custom reports for Google Analytics and how they help
Custom reports in Google Analytics can give you some great data for beating your boss over the head with. Does he think that you only have one chance to convert your visitors before they head to a competitor? Does he think that brand keywords are the best thing since sliced bread and generics are only there to bump up your PPC spend? Does he assume that all your visitors are from the same place? Well this is your chance to set him right…! Oh, and they also give you some great insights for improving what you do, in general. Without the boss-bashing.
Below is a screenshot of some of my custom reports:
I’ll now explain why I’ve created 5 of them and how you might find them useful.
N.B. Unfortunately, our wonderful casino back-end is built in Flash, meaning tracking through to a depositing player is most difficult. In fact, we didn’t even create an HTML ‘registration successful’ page, so a ‘registration start’ is the first metric that we can actually track. (I know, just shoot me now.)
Start Registration – Sources then Number of Prior Visits
This report tells me how many times a visitor has been to my site before starting the registration process, and allows me to drill down by traffic source. This is useful, as it allows you to see which traffic sources are the most successful at pre-selling visitors on what you have to offer. If one affiliate converts visitors at twice the velocity of another, you can delve into the website of Affiliate One and use his tactics to improve your own copy and conversion process.
Start Registration – Keyword
I’d imagine that this report will be a favourite amongst the search aficionados. This will allow you to view your conversions by the keyword through which the visitor entered your site. Now, I’ve never gotten round to applying multi-touch tracking to my Google Analytics like the boys at Distilled have, so I can only see the *last* keyword used by a visitor. Nevertheless, if said visitor returns via a direct visit, GA will continue to store the *first* keyword he used to find you.
I’m guessing the benefit here is obvious: you can see which keywords are helping you to convert most customers.
If you have one keyword which has multiple conversions from a fairly low traffic level, perhaps you can gleam further information on why it’s so successful. Does it have a kick-ass landing page that you can replicate? Is it a niche part of your offering that you could be promoting more heavily? Once you’ve identified why it’s working so well, try diverting a bit more of your PPC budget to it and see if you can’t sustain the conversion rate whilst boosting traffic.
Reg Start by Number of Prior Visits & Reg Start by No. of Page Views
If your boss is convinced you have a one-off chance of conversion, perhaps this report will give you the data you need to persuade him otherwise. These reports will tell you how engaged a user has to be before starting the registration process by assessing how many times they have visited your site before and how many pages they have viewed. These reports can help upper-management understand that thin, affiliate-like sites with little content have a smaller chance of converting visitors than web properties with a little more substance to them. For example, just under 50% of all our converted visitors have browsed our site 5 or more times before starting the registration process; 36% have been back 11 or more times. We need content to engage these visitors, and I’d imagine you do too.
Reg Start by City
This report helped us a lot when it came to interpreting our traffic to our Spanish-language site – it tells us where our converting players are physically located.
In a nutshell, our Spanish site has always had a much poorer conversion rate than our other European sites. Using this report, we identified that only a minority of our traffic was actually coming from Spain; the majority was based in Latin America. This was the reason for our poor conversion rate and is understandable given the facts that the main currency of our Spanish site is Euros and Latin America does not have very high levels of credit card adoption. Therefore we knew that we could discount these visitors in our traffic analysis and not stress about them negatively skewing our figures. Better than this though, it allowed us to identify a sideline revenue stream where we can redirect this traffic to a South American-based site that can actually monetise the visitors.
Thinking of other benefits for this report, if you advertised heavily in local regions, this may be a way to measure if this advertising spend is bearing fruit.
Start Reg – Hour of Day then Number of Prior Visits
If your business is like ours in that you advertise on TV, this report can help you to analyse if the TV presence is having an effect on online signups. Here we can see when visitors are signing up throughout the day.
We advertise heavily on TV after midnight, so we expect that a high percentage of our conversions will happen at this time. But an interesting insight we’ve gleamed is that even visitors that we believe are watching our TV shows before being directed to our site have visited us at least once in the past. This further helps us get away from a one night stand mindset (not a dirty link, I promise 
) and focus on providing repeat value for our TV viewers and website visitors.
Another benefit of this report is that it allows us to optimise when we should be most active in our PPC campaigns, but I’m guessing you new that already… .
That’s all for now. Any comments or suggestions? Let me know, below.
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