Web Analytics Tips: Using Custom Segments
January 20, 2011
Google Analytics offers a lot of helpful information, but sometimes you want to answer a specific question that it doesn’t have a preset section for. This is where the Custom Reporting feature can help. Many people never use this feature, but once you get the knack of it, your custom reports can help you get the most helpful information about your website traffic. The Google Help center has a great video to get you started with the basic how-to of putting a custom report together.
That covers how to create a report, but doesn’t talk much about how to create a useful one. Having so many options can be overwhelming at first, but after a little bit of trial, you’ll find you can answer almost any question. For example, let’s say you want to know what traffic sources the visitors who complete transactions on your site are coming from. You can set up a custom report with “Source” as the dimension (the green sections). You can then set the blue metrics boxes to show which traffic source had the most transactions, the highest revenue, the highest per visit value, or a number of other metrics.
The Dimensions section also offers 5 options in the “drill down” menu. You can use this in a number of ways as well. For instance, you could see which transactions came from which source, as well as what products were purchased. That would look like this:
Creating a custom report is also very useful when you are pulling together information from different aspects of Google Analytics. Customizing reports that show only the relevant information you need makes your reports easier to read and interpret. It can sometimes take a few tries to figure out how to put together a custom report to answer the right questions. Remember you can always preview your reports before you save and make quick changes if necessary. It can be worth taking the time to create a report that shows you exactly the marketing analytics information you need, and it can save you a lot of time later to have it all already assembled in one place.
You can read more about 3 great examples of useful custom reports from one of my favorite web analytics blogs. I use the first two of these, and I love the way they combine the most relevant information so that it’s easy to see what changes I need to take action on. You can read about these examples here.
