Get More Insight Out of Google Analytics Acquisition Reports

Google Analytics is a great way to understand your website traffic, usage and behavior. But, you may be not utilizing Analytics to its full potential. Here are some tips to start using today—no advanced analytics training required—thanks to your favorite Certified Google Partner, AcrobatAnt.

Acquisition Reports > Source/Medium

Most analytics users are familiar with the source/medium acquisition report. This is a great way to easily see which website or marketing tactics drove the most users to your website. Even if you see which sources/mediums drove the most users, this doesn’t necessarily mean that this tactic drove the best traffic. Traffic should be high quality, meaning that users who visit your website engage with the content or complete an action. One good indicator of quality is the bounce rate.

The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Keep in mind, if your website is only a single page, you will want to skip bounce rate analysis and focus on other quality indicators, like “time on site.”

To easily compare bounce rate while viewing source/medium data, click on the comparison tool icon.

Then, select the metric “bounce rate” in the search field to the left of the icons.

This will compare bounce rate for each source/medium combination to the site average. In the example below, we see that the YouTube traffic is bouncing at a much higher rate than the site average.

Campaign-specific URLs

To get the most out of reporting, help Google categorize your traffic and provide yourself additional campaign reporting metrics by creating custom campaign URLs. Google Analytics automatically captures key attributes from your links: source, medium and campaign. By telling Google this information, it ensures accurate reporting for each link click. And, it will help you see performance variations between campaigns or even creative versions within campaigns.

Medium: The mechanism that delivered users to your site. Some examples of mediums include organic (unpaid search), cpc (cost-per-click), referral and email.

Source: This provides more information about the medium. For example, if the medium is referral, the source will be the URL that referred the traffic. If the source is organic, the source will be the search engine.

Campaign: Campaign (and campaign content fields) in the custom URL are a great way to facilitate campaign-specific reporting in Analytics. Campaign may be “spring_sale” or another indicator of the campaign running. The campaign content portion of the URL allows for identification of various creative versions, messages, etc.

Get started using campaign URLs today by using Google’s free campaign URL builder. Note: Analytics is case sensitive, so we suggest using all lowercase text to avoid multiple lines of reporting due to capitalization variations. Once your URL is generated, use it as the destination URL in Facebook campaigns, email CTAs, AdWords campaigns and any other digital tactics where you can control the link for user click-through.

If your business needs help ensuring your website is correctly setup with Google Analytics or for a third-party review of your analytics account to identify patterns or opportunities to improve website performance, contact us today.

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