Week #13 Optimizing Yourself and Your Company

There are four Google analytic's reports that I would setup.  Anymore and I think it would be overwhelming and too time consuming.  Fortunately, they can be setup as weekly automated reports.  You can set this up to send you an email for each report every week to keep track of how your campaign is going.  Set it up for a month, 6 months, or a year, to get an accurate look.

I would first setup an acquisition report to find out where my traffic is coming from, be it organic, social, direct, or referral.  You’ll get a great pie chart that will segment all 4 of these patterns and you will be able to see which areas are growing the fastest and which are lagging behind.  You can use these numbers to access which channels are your strongest and which need work.

Secondly, I would setup an acquisition channels report.  This is a more detailed report than the acquisition report.  The channels report will give you more detailed information on each user.  Here you can see about the types of users that you are getting and if there are any demographic flaws in your targeting.  For example, if you notice that your social traffic channel tends to generate a much higher bounce rate than the others, you can take a look at the types of links you post and consider whether it has an effect on the person’s interest once he/she arrives at his/her intended destination.

Thirdly, I would setup a report on Behavior-all pages.  This report is useful for measuring the relative worth of each of your pages.  For each page, you’ll be able to view the number of total page views, the unique page views, the length of time a user spends on each page, the number of domain entrances, and the percentage of people who exited the site after viewing the page.  For example, if your blog is ranking low in terms of page views, you may want to make some changes to make it a more prominent feature of your site.

Lastly, a goals overview report.  However, before you can take advantage of this report, you will need to setup some goals.  You can setup goal’s for almost any conversion action on your site; whether it’s for making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a “contact us” form.  Once you've setup all of your goals, you can use this report to get a snapshot of how well each is performing.  If you assign a dollar amount to each of your theoretical conversion of your goal sets, you can even get a hypothetical estimate of how much revenue your campaign is generating, allowing you to estimate your ROI.