During an Inbound Marketing strategy it is essential to carry out an analysis and reports to evaluate how our Action Plan is developing. A strategy serves as a map or list of objectives that we want to achieve to improve the positioning of our company -among many other benefits. Reporting on our strategies allows us to check the profitability of our strategy, we can discover relevant data that allow us to extract notes to outline our action plan.
A report provides us with information such as KPIs, conversion rates, return on investment rates, measures of the success of our campaigns, engagement capacity, insights, response rate, etc.
There are many tools that help us to create these reports, one of them being Google Analytics, which offers its own report generator to analyse from a single site.
A free and effective tool
Google Analytics provides complete information, allowing you to improve the understanding of your website and application users to better understand the performance of your marketing practices, content and products, as well as personalised recommendations that only Google can provide.
Google Analytics allows you to access information unique to Google and make the most of your data using its machine learning technology. Make data-driven decisions to improve your results. Analytics works with Google's advertising and publisher products, so you can use statistics to improve your results.
Just as segments make it easy to create complex filters that you can apply at any time, custom reports provide us with information that we spread across several standard Google Analytics reports, or even without such filtering in any of them. This allows us to spend less time analysing accounts: it saves clicks, it saves us mental effort and it prevents us from wandering aimlessly without really knowing what we're looking for. With this tool we can monitor our strategy and streamline the administrative process for our marketing team.
As if that wasn't enough, custom reports allow you to communicate and report more effectively with your customers. Google Analytics allows you to create reports for various information needs, form reports with the most important data, export them to PDF and send them. You can choose the type of report you want to create, it can be as a monthly, weekly or annual report.
how does the Google Report work?
To rate a website, you must first create a Google Analytics account. You then add a small piece of JavaScript tracking code to each page of your website. When a user visits a web page, the tracking code collects anonymous information about how the user interacts with the web page.
The Google Store measurement code may show how many users visit the eyewear page and how many users visit other home product pages. It may also indicate how many users have made purchases, determining whether they reach the purchase confirmation page.
The tracking code will also collect browser information, such as language settings, browser type (such as Chrome or Safari), the device and operating system the browser uses. It may even obtain "traffic sources". That source that brings users to the site could be a search engine, an ad they click on, or an email marketing campaign. Data processing and reporting.
When the measurement code collects data, it aggregates it and sends it to Google Analytics to be processed into reports. When Google Analytics processes data, it is collected and organised according to certain criteria, such as whether the user's device is a mobile device or a computer, or the browser used. However, there are also configuration options that allow you to customise the processing of this data. Once the data has been processed by Analytics, it is stored in a database that cannot be modified and will eventually be displayed as a report in Google Analytics. Read on in our blog article, about databases and their benefits, to continue our company audit.
Create a custom report
- The first step is to log in to Google Analytics.
- Go to view: click on Administrator and use the ACCOUNT | PROPERTY | VIEW menus to select or search for the account, property and view you want.
- Open Reports.
- Click Customisation > Custom Reports > + New Custom Report.
- Give it a Title
- Click + add report tab (each report consists of at least one tab, but allows you to add more)
- Select a report type: Google Analytics offers multiple report formats. Choose the one that best suits your needs: explorer, single table, visit chart by location or conversion funnel. You must select a new report type for each new tab
- Explorer: the standard Analytics report, including a line chart and data table with dynamic elements such as a search and sort option and secondary dimensions.
- Single table- a static table that allows data to be sorted and displayed in rows.
- Visits by location graph: this is a map of the world where regions and countries with the highest volume of traffic and interactions are shown in darker colours.
- Conversion funnel: this is a self-defined conversion funnel.
- Define dimensions and metrics. The options for each report type may vary, as each type displays data differently.
- Click + Add Filter to limit the report to specific dimensions. This allows you to restrict the data that appears in the report. For example, if you create a report with the Browser Version dimension, you can create the Include filter on the Browser dimension and filter by exact match to see only specific browsers. By applying the filter, you would see only the data from the specific browser, so you can compare the performance of each version of this browser after excluding data from other browsers.
- Select where this report should appear, use the drop-down menu to select specific views or select All views associated with this account to have the report appear in all views to which you have access.
- Click Save, when you have your report generated you can study the cases to draw your own conclusions.
With the reports you can analyse individually, one by one, all your strategies put in place. The objective is to find a SWOT analysis, to evaluate where we should invest more time and achieve better objectives. With an audit of the situation of the marketing campaigns of our business, we will find out if we are doing a good job, as well as optimising all our resources and benefits.
