Customized Goal Reports in Google Analytics for SMB Websites

Just like links, not all leads are created equal. Some leads are highly valuable to some companies while others are just secondary. Some leads convert easily into sales while some leads will remain as they are.

You need to determine which leads give you a better ROI of course. How do you do that? You need to understand your data / web metrics.

If you have successfully driven traffic to your website, it’s now time to gain knowledge of what percentage of those traffic give you conversions or which type of users give you a significant return on investment.

Enter Goal Funnels Stage Left

You can’t improve what you can’t measure. These customized reports are reflections of your online marketing efforts and will give you the right amount of data to help you decide which marketing efforts are worth investing more resources, which processes to drop, or which ones you can improve on.

1. Goals by Keywords – If you’re running organic SEO campaigns, you would want to see which keywords have driven you traffic which ultimately lead to your conversions.What to Monitor: You may want to take a look at Visits and Unique Visits in combination with your conversion goals. This will tell you which keyword to optimize more according to the volume of traffic and number of conversions the particular keywords has contributed your site.
2. Goals by Medium / Source – This is a no brainer. Identify which of your online marketing campaigns, be it email marketing, social media, PPC, SEO, online advertising, is giving you the best of your conversions.What to Monitor: Be flexible on what metrics you would want to analyze. You can have visits, page views, bounce rates all in one report. What I suggest is to track the navigational paths on each campaign / source. Try to understand which type of customer has the intention to purchase your product or which user is only looking to consume content and leave.
3. Goals by Top Content / Landing Pages – This report is quite tricky. You’ll have to decide whether to measure the most visited content on your page or which page does your visitors land frequently.

   What to Monitor: Bounce rate and Exit % will give you a good idea of how your visitors are treating your pages. If a landing page for example has a high rate of conversion but has a high bounce rate, you would want to improve the content and therefore retain a significant amount of traffic that will eventually give you more conversions in the end.

4. Goals by Country / Region – This I love looking at from day to day. If you’re an organization which targets a number of overseas regions, you should have this report…What to Monitor: You’ll have to go an extra mile here. Extend your metrics until to sales conversions. Reason that is you may want to evaluate which regions gives you a significant ROI and therefore focus your marketing efforts on such regions and improve on those which are trailing behind.
5. Combination Metrics – The good thing about Google Analytics’s custom reports is its versatility to give you which combination of metrics you want to analyze for better decision making. There are hundreds of combinations possible.
   a. Goals by Country / Region drilled down by Keywords
   b. Goals by Keywords drilled down by Landing Pages or Sources

You know your own business better than anyone else and you know what type of event on your website you’ll consider as a conversion. Therefore, it’s only you who can determine which metric is significant. It doesn’t mean that if it’s being measured, it matters vis-à-vis it doesn’t mean that it’s not being tracked, it’s less important.

Data which are not actionable are plain numbers on your monitor – so don’t waste your time. Concentrate on the data which can lead you to a corresponding action.

Customized Goal Reports in Google Analytics for SMB Websites is a post from: Small Business SEO Tips – SaktoSEO