Why You Should Use a Google Analytics Report Template
Having a good GA report template prevents you from having to spend too much of your time on your Google Analytics account sifting through tons of data. Instead, you get all your KPIs for the month wrapped up in a clean and easy-to-understand package that you can analyze and send to your clients with your own thoughts included. A tool like this is critical and can be a game changer.
You can also have client reports created with the click of the button. Clients love when they can clearly understand what's going on in a report instead of trying to understand a Google Analytics dashboard. It helps you prove the ROI of the work you're doing.
6 Things Included In Our Google Analytics Report
1. Monthly Summary
The monthly write-up section is perhaps one of the most important sections of the entire report template since it gives you a space to talk shop with your clients. This section comes in the form of an open text field where you can write whatever you feel is appropriate for your clients to know about the past month’s data and analytics. Since clients most often don’t know how to interpret data from Google Analytics, you’ll need to do it for them here.
To start, discuss your wins for the month here. Did you crush it on conversions this month? Maybe you doubled the overall number of web sessions from the previous month. Celebrate those successes here and correlate them to your marketing efforts in areas like ad campaigns and social media management. You should also likely discuss losses in the monthly write-up section. What didn’t go according to plan this month and—perhaps most importantly—why did they go wrong and what are you going to do to fix it?
Finally, use the section to describe the changes you’ve made to the site and what you hope the future effects of those changes will be. Talking future strategy is always an important thing to do with your clients, as it directly affects the way you and your client think about next steps.
2. All Channels
This section displays all of the important metrics for site-wide traffic, including the number of web sessions and how they break down between different traffic sources, like paid and organic search from search engines, emails and social networks.
You’ll also get to see how each channel is performing when it comes to web traffic, along with individual KPIs like bounce rates, goal completions and average session duration. This information gives you a sense of the website’s general pulse and overall performance.
Use this data in conjunction with other pieces of your marketing strategy like SEO, ad campaigns and PPC campaigns to decide what your next steps should be in coming months. If conversions are low, but traffic is high, you might have a problem with your offers or CTAs. And if one channel isn’t bringing in enough SEO traffic or associated conversions, you can take the appropriate steps to fix the problem and improve the stats.
3. Goals (Conversions)
One of the most important metrics for you to track, and one that your clients likely want to know about the most, is the number of conversions completed on your client’s site. You and your client decide on what these goals are in Google Analytics, and they can be anything from a purchase to a free trial sign up.
The Goals section of the performance report first displays the total number of conversions completed in the form of a line graph. You’ll even get to see how this number breaks down between the different types of goals you and your client have set. Additionally, the report tells you how much each conversion is worth and what the overall conversion rate is based on the total number of visitors to the site.
This information can tell you and your client how well things like your ad campaigns and calls to action (CTAs) are working, but it can also inform you on the efficiency of your client’s website. If you aren’t getting a high number of goal conversions, take a look at the website to see if you can identify any problems with things like landing pages or e-commerce functionality.
4. Landing Pages
Landing pages are the first points of contact a potential customer will experience when going to your client’s website through an ad campaign, social media account or paid search results. It’s important to understand how well each of your landing pages is performing when it comes to overall traffic, conversions and bounce rate. A good user experience on landing pages can lead to more conversions.
The data and metrics found on this page help you directly identify any potential problems with the landing pages on your client’s website like page load times and navigational issues. If there’s a certain landing page that isn’t getting conversions or traffic, you can use that data as the starting point to a conversation with your client about how you can adjust those pages in order to optimize overall performance.
If you're also doing PPC for your clients, you may want to create a PPC report template instead!
5. Location/geo
If you want to know more about the geographic location of site visitors, the Geo section of the Google Analytics report is the place to do it. This section of the report gives you deeper insights into your client’s customer base so you can see if you’re reaching the right people with your digital marketing efforts. To start, you’ll get all the same metrics you see in the All Channels section of the report, but in the context of geographic location.
The Geo page lists all of the countries from which customers are visiting the site, along with a breakdown of individual page metrics per country. The data tells you if you’re targeting the right demographic or not so you can improve overall campaign performance.
6. Devices
Like the other sections in the Google Analytics report template, the Devices section shows you specific web traffic information as it relates to the types of devices potential customers are using to browse (tablets vs. mobile vs. desktop). As you analyze this information, pay close attention to how each of the different devices perform when it comes to conversions and bounce rates.
If these two metrics are underperforming for a certain device type but doing well with the other devices, than you may have a problem with how the website is configured to display on those devices. For example, if no one is converting on mobile devices but they are converting on desktops, then it’s likely that you need to update and improve the mobile version of the website.
