Google Analytics-Reporting

Sunday, October 5, 2008

GA offers about 80 ready-made reporting templates in all. For easy
access a “dashboard” offers three predefined profiles with rele-
vant reports under each profile. The categories are executive, mar-
keter and webmaster. Under the All Reports heading, all reports
are available under two categories : Marketing Optimisation and
Content Optimisation.
The emphasis at GA is pictorial representation, since compre-
hension is easier this way. Rather than make users wade through
a table of figures, they are presented with charts and bar graphs
so that the information is easily digestible. Every report comes
with a small description regarding what it is about, which makes
the need of “experts” redundant. As already mentioned there are
over 80 reports waiting to be hunched over. It is indeed statistician
wonderland. Besides the 80 reports, “Advanced Visitor
Segmentation” allows viewing visitors across 18 parameters, such
as nationality, browser, and operating system. Data can be export-
ed to other formats like CSV which can be used in other applica-
tions like MS Excel, or XML or Tab Separated Value.
Certain reports are organised in such a way that arriving at
conclusions is easy. For example the problem any ecommerce site
faces is the behaviour of visitors who commence the process of
buying an item and then exit midway. GA has a feature called
Funnel Visualisation wherein users can track all pages of an
online shopping cart. It is much easier to identify which step is a
bottleneck when the report is structured in the form of a funnel
with the first part of the shopping process at the top and the com-
pleted sales page at the bottom. The flow of trafficwill immediately reveal
which step is the hurdle. In another nifty tool,called Site Overlay, a
page on the site is super- imposed with the gath- ered data about the
clicks on each link on the page. This makes it much easier to identify
performing links, and figuring out reasons behind it. GA presents geo-
graphical data in the simplest way possible—on an atlas. This makes
it easy to see the visitors’ physical location, and use that informa-
tion to better target those locations giving the most sales. Google
calls this “Geotargeting.”