Three Google Reports to Act On

Web Analytics is great, and Google Analytics is both free and great so that’s got to make it really great. From it, you can find out lots of information about the visitors to your web site. You can see how many have come from Crawley or Kathmandu. You can find out if they’re seeing your web site with Internet Explorer on Windows or Safari on an iPhone. You can get so lost in the numbers that huskies might need to be dispatched to dig you out of a deep Google Analytics data avalanche.

That’s the problem. There’s so much information in Google Analytics it’s easy to become overwhelmed and give up just looking at the headline numbers on the dashboard sometimes. Are the number of visits and page views increasing? Is your bounce rate and new visits holding steady? Perhaps one day you get an unexpected spike in visits. You want to know where they came from, so you dig through the information till you find out; a footballer with a nose bleed in a bar was the cause of the first inexplicable spike in visitors I ever had to explain.

Doing this you’re not really using the information to improve your web site. You’re just supporting the status quo and reacting to outside forces. Like the alleged fist that may or may not have met with the footballers nose, allegedly. What would be really useful would be some basic, repeatable, reports that can produce actionable information. That’s where the three reports I’m going to describe here come in. Three reports from Google Analytics to identify pages for review and improvement.

The Three Reports

The three reports we’re interested in are the Most Viewed Pages, Entry Pages and Exit Pages Reports. You can find these in Google Analytics by following the instructions below. Make a table for each with the top ten pages for each report. I’ve included examples for a fictional web site for each of the reports.

Most Viewed Pages

This report lists the 10 Most Viewed Pages ordered from most viewed to least.

In Google Analytics go to Content, then Top Content and order by Pageviews.

Page	Pageviews
Home Page	24,000
Contact Us	1,900
Stay in Touch	1,700
Our Products	1,600
Our Staff	1,500
About Us	1,400
Product Z	1,400
Past Projects	1,100
Past Project 1	1,100
Product X	900

Entry Pages

This time you want to look at the landing pages for your site. For this we want to see the Number of Entrances, Number of Bounces and Percentage Bounces for the top ten entrance pages on your site.

Go to Content then Top Landing Pages and order by Entrances.

Landing Page	Entrances	Bounces	% Bounces
Home Page	24,000	14,000	58
Stay in Touch	550	200	45
Press Release Last Week	300	200	66
Our Products	200	100	50
About Us	150	70	46
Staff Directory	110	80	73
Our Staff	110	100	90
Past Project 2	100	70	70
Press Release  Last Month	90	90	100
Press Release Two Months Ago	90	30	33

Exit Pages

The last report is the pages that most people leave the website from. For this we want to know the Exits, Pageviews and Percentage Exit.

Go to Content, then Top Exit Pages and order by Exits.

Exit Page	Pageviews	Exits	% Exit
Home Page	24,000	16,000	67
Contact Us	1,900	1,200	63
Stay in Touch	1,700	700	41
Our Products	1,600	600	38
Our Staff	1,500	500	33
About Us	1,400	400	29
Past Projects	1,100	250	22
Product X	900	250	28
Product Y	800	100	13
Product Z	1,400	50	4

Identify Pages of Interest

Now you’ve got three tables make yourself a fourth table that lists all the pages and why each page is of interest.

Page	Page Views	Entry	Exit
About Us	Yes	Yes	Yes
Contact Us	Yes		Yes
Home Page	Yes	Yes	Yes
Our Products	Yes	Yes	Yes
Our Staff	Yes	Yes	Yes
Past Project 1	Yes
Past Project 2		Yes
Past Projects	Yes		Yes
Press Release Last Week		Yes
Press Release Last Month		Yes
Press Release Two Months Ago		Yes
Product X	Yes		Yes
Product Y			Yes
Product Z	Yes		Yes
Staff Directory		Yes
Stay in Touch	Yes	Yes	Yes

So now you’ve cut a path through the impenetrable jungle of reports and you’ve got a simple table that tells you between ten and thirty pages to focus your attention on. You’ve also got some basic information about each of the pages.

What to do Next?

Taking a look at the example above, the most important page for review is the site’s home page. It gets a lot of visitors which is good, but the bounce rate seems very high. Maybe it needs a redesign or some search engine optimisation (SEO) work, so that people finding it are the ones who are looking for the site.

There are lots of bounces on the Our Staff and Staff directory pages. A quick look at some other statistics for those pages might show that a staff member has the same name as a celebrity and so visitors to those pages are looking for someone else.

The Contact Us page has a very high exit rate. For the Contact Us page that might not be a bad thing. Visitors who want to know how to get in touch with our fictional company found what they were looking for.

The Our Products page is getting quite a few page views so spending a bit of time making it better could pay dividends. Maybe some nice new pictures or a bit of work polishing the text would be a worthwhile investment of time.

What to do Later?

Now you’ve done this once what can you do later?

If you thought this was useful, you can quickly get the information to do this again if you set up three Custom Reports in Google Analytics (opens new window). Then after a few months you can review the impact of the changes and identify further pages for review.

If you’ve the time and a large web site, you might want to expand the number of pages you look at, or go on to look at the next ten most viewed pages, landing pages or exit pages.

If you’re feeling adventurous you could use Google Website Optimizer (opens new window) to test different variations on a page to see which is the most effective. I’ll come back to that another time.