Key Reports in Google Universal Analytics (UA)

When you have more information about how successful your marketing initiatives are, you will have a better understanding of how to modify and improve them. The dashboard for Google Universal Analytics (UA) provides you with an overview of the data and reports that are most critical for your campaigns. Clients, managers, and other individuals who are not analysts can easily understand the most important patterns thanks to the clear “snapshot” of performance that this tool gives.

Take note that the previous version of Google Analytics was improved with the introduction of Universal Analytics. In 2023, it will be succeeded by GA4, in turn being succeeded by GA4. You may learn more by reading our comprehensive guide to GA4, which is available here.

UA reports are able to provide you with an overview of the performance of your campaign in numerous critical categories, including the following:

• Visitors: Who exactly is checking out your website?

• Acquisition: How are consumers discovering your website in the first place?

• Behavior: What kinds of things are people doing when they visit your website?

• Conversions: What steps are users taking to accomplish the goals that have been established.

• Events: What kinds of out-of-the-ordinary activities are users performing on your website?

Take note: You shouldn’t put all of your reporting data faith in UA alone. You can also gain a plethora of knowledge from a variety of other sources!

According to UA: Audience

The first main reporting area in Universal Analytics is devoted to providing information regarding the different kinds of users who check out your website. You are able to gain access to information regarding the audience’s overview in order to determine top-line statistics and information regarding audience behavior. This information may include GEO locations and lifetime value.

Report on the Demographics

You will be able to view demographics information, such as the ages and genders of your site’s users, with the help of this report. Learning more about the demographics of the individuals who visit your website can be quite beneficial to your business.

Detailed Report of Interests

Using the Interests Report, you will have the ability to delve a little deeper into the motivations of your site visitors. You are able to view information regarding user interests by using this report. You can have a better understanding of the browsing tendencies of your visitors by looking at affinity categories, in-market segments, and other interest categories.

Geo Report

You may use the Geo Report to view both the language spoken by your website visitors as well as their location. This is crucial information to have at all times because it allows you to better serve your customers. Utilize these details to improve the targeting of your media efforts and to assist you in locating clusters of high-value clients in various geographic areas.

Report on the Behavior of the Audience

You will be able to view information regarding the users’ behaviors when you use the Audience Behavior Report. You may, for instance, utilize this report to uncover information on new users as opposed to returning users, the frequency of user visits, engagement levels, session quality, and the chance of a conversion.

A Report on Technology

This report supplies information regarding the web browsers, networks, and operating systems that your audience makes use of. This report is helpful for addressing compatibility issues with specific browsers and can be found here.

Mobile Report

You will be able to view traffic and conversion data from mobile as well as desktop users, as well as the devices that are being utilized, by using the Mobile Report. This is especially critical for comprehending how consumers look for information, navigate your website, make purchases, or convert on various devices when using your website.

Report on Devices Crossed

The Cross Device Report is designed to show you how mobile, desktop, and tablet devices overlap in their roles as drivers of traffic and activity on your website. This is necessary given that individual trips might begin and end on a variety of devices.

In the cross-device area, the four most important reports are as follows:

• The Device Overlap metric reveals the number of users who browse your website from more than one device at a time.

• The Device Paths feature illustrates the typical paths that people follow while navigating their devices.

• The Cross Device Channels report identifies the channels that are responsible for driving traffic and conversions on several devices.

• Acquisition Device displays the total number of new users categorized by the type of device used.

Report on Comparative Performance

The Benchmarking Report is helpful for conducting competitive analysis since it provides you with aggregate statistics for other websites in the same category as your own website across channels, locations, and devices. This information may be viewed by you.

According to UA: Acquisitions

Using a number of sub-reports that are organized according to the type of traffic, the Acquisition Tab gives you the ability to determine the origins of the visitors who come to your website. This can assist you in determining which channels are the most successful, as well as which are not doing as well as you had anticipated they would.

Complete Report on All Traffic

Using this report, you will be able to uncover data regarding visitor traffic, conversion rates, and engagement for a variety of predefined channel types, also referred to as default groups or channels. These include the items listed below.

• Direct Traffic: “Direct Traffic” refers to the situation in which the user manually inputs the website’s URL into the browser in order to access the website in question.

• Organic Search: The term “Organic Search” refers to visits from SEO sources that do not originate from sponsored search results.

• Social: The term “social” refers to traffic that originates from social channels such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. This is defined by Universal Analytics.

• Email: If you mark your email links as belonging to newsletters or other email sources, Universal Analytics will be able to classify this traffic as email.

• Affiliates: The term “affiliates” refers to visitors coming to your website from other websites with which you have made a business arrangement to increase product sales.

• Referral traffic: “referral” traffic comes from other websites that link to content that is hosted on your website.

• Other: Traffic that has a dimension that Universal Analytics is unable to describe is classified as “Other” traffic. This includes traffic that has been incorrectly labelled as email, social, or PPC traffic, as well as new traffic sources.

• Paid Search: The term “Paid Search” refers to traffic that comes from pay-per-click advertisements such as those seen on Google Ads, Bing Ads, and so on.

• Display: The term “Display” refers to traffic that originates from premium or Google Display Networks as well as banner display sources.

Reports from the Source and Medium

Digital marketers can consult the Source/Medium Report in order to conduct an in-depth investigation into the subtleties of the various channels.

The Source variable tells us where the traffic is coming from, and the Medium variable specifies the kind of traffic that is being sent.

• Some of the sources are Google, Bing, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as Direct.

• CPC, organic, display, social, and referral traffic are some of the available mediums.

Referrals Report

The Referrals Report provides a list of’referring’ sites, which are websites that include links that go back to your own. You may find the high-value connections for SEO and for boosting quality traffic or conversions by using the Referrals Report. This report is available to you.

Social Report

You will have the ability to view information regarding the sources of social media activity, social media conversions, and social plugins when you access the Social Report.

Campaigns Report

Use the Campaigns Report in Universal Analytics if you want to measure traffic from sources other than Google. This enables you to report within Analytics on a variety of other digital marketing campaigns, such as email newsletters and banner adverts.

Report from the Search Console

Marketers can use the Search Console Report to gain insight into their organic search results and the effectiveness of their SEO activities. You will be able to access information regarding the performance of SEO in Analytics by using this report.

According to UA: Behavior

The Audience Reporting tab will show you who is visiting your website, while the Acquisition Reporting tab will show you how they found your website. Both of these tabs are located under the Reporting section. Now, let’s take a look at the actions that your visitors performed once they arrived at your website. Using the Behavior Reporting page, you will be able to gain insight into the material that was viewed by the user as well as how they navigated the website.

Report on the Flow of Behavior

The Behavior Flow Report provides an overview of the paths that users take while navigating a website, beginning with a landing page and continuing on to the users’ initial, second, and third encounters with the website, respectively. By conducting an analysis of the Behavior Flow Report, marketers should be able to improve the user journey and optimize the content of their websites, both of which should encourage users to make more conversions while they are on the sites.

Report on the Content of the Site

You could wish to investigate the different pages that make up your website in order to determine how visitors interacted with each individual page. You are able to view reports on how you can improve your site’s content in order to get better results from users by using the Site Content Report.

Every Page Has a Report

Within the Site Content report is another report called the All Pages Report. It provides a collection of page metrics that are associated with each page’s name. With the help of this analysis, you’ll be able to determine which pages generate the most engagement and which pages could use some work.

Report on the Site’s Speed

Through the Site Speed Report, you will have access to information regarding the speed of the site. This data is especially helpful given the fact that many website visitors may abandon a website if it takes an excessive amount of time to load. Because of this, it is essential to be aware of the amount of time it takes for each of your pages to load and to evaluate whether or not this results in a negative experience for the end user.

Sub-reports on Site Loading Time

You can acquire more specific information by using the Site Speed sub-report, which includes the following:

• The Page Timings sub-report provides information regarding the number of page views as well as the typical load times for each of the pages that make up a website.

• The Speed Suggestions sub-report gives you the ability to view recommendations for increasing the page load speed of your site’s individual pages.

• You have the ability to view the average user timings on a site by utilizing the User Timings sub-report.

Report on the Site Search

You are given the ability to view the search keywords that users entered into the Site Search Report. You can use this information to broaden your keyword pool or to obtain insight into what your website visitors are especially looking for, which can then inform modifications to your site as well as the development of brand-new products.

According to UA: Conversions

You will be able to report on the valuable activities that people take on your website by making use of the Conversions reporting area. Utilizing this reporting area will allow you to determine whether or not you are meeting, exceeding, or falling short of your KPIs.

The following are the categories into which the most important reports in this subject fall:

• Goals

• E-commerce

• Multi-Channel Funnels

Reports on goals

Now, let’s take a look at the reporting section for the goals. You will be able to better comprehend various goal-conversion rates over a specified period of time with the assistance of the Goals reporting area. As a result of this, you will be better able to understand trends and learn how to maximize performance.

Detailed Goals and Objectives Report

You can obtain information about goal overviews by using the Goals Overview Report that is found under the Conversions tab.

Goal URLs Report

Using the Goal URLs Report, you will be able to check very quickly to see if all of your goals are tracking the URLs that you anticipate them following.

Funnel Visualization Report

During the process of goal construction, you should configure the Funnel Visualization Report. It offers details on the several stages that make up the conversion process. You can, for instance, monitor the flow of customers as they progress through the various stages of the buying process, such as picking a product, adding it to the shopping cart, entering their name and address, entering their payment information, and completing the purchase. If there is a drop-off at any point in the user experience, you may study why it happened and then try to fix it so that more people convert.

Report on the Flow of Goals

The Goal Flow Report outlines the path that your website’s traffic took as it progressed through various stages of a conversion funnel. It makes it possible for marketers to view the source, media, page, or other dimension that leads up to the goals that were specified in Universal Analytics.

E-commerce Report

You are able to view e-commerce overview information, shopping behavior, checkout behavior, product performance, sales performance, and product list performance by using the E-commerce Report in Universal Analytics. In order to link the transactions on your website to Universal Analytics, the E-commerce Report requires a certain amount of specialized coding. On the other hand, e-commerce monitoring may be implemented on many retail platforms without the requirement for coding knowledge.

Multi-Channel Funnels Report

Utilizing the Multi-Channel Funnels Report will assist you in gaining a better understanding of the intricate nature of a digital marketing conversion or purchase journey that spans multiple channels. It gives a value to every channel that was involved in the achievement of a goal or the completion of a transaction.

The Report on Assisted Conversion

You may gain a better understanding of the assisted value of channels and campaigns with the assistance of the Assisted Conversion Report. This report also provides insight into how different channels perform at each end of the conversion funnel, from awareness to completed conversion.

Report on the Top Conversion Paths

We are able to use the Top Conversion Paths Report that is contained inside the Multi-Channel Funnels Report in order to obtain a very helpful representation of the common routes that customers take on their way to making a purchase. This report offers a more thorough understanding of the most common paths that consumers take on their way to converting. You will then be able to visually identify your opening and aiding channels, in addition to your closing channels, and share this information with others.

Time-lag Report

You can get a better idea of how long it takes for a customer to make a decision to buy something or sign up for a service with the help of time-lag reporting, which displays the amount of time that has passed since a customer’s first visit to your website and the day on which they make a conversion.

UA Reports: Events

Event monitoring is a tool that digital marketers can use to keep tabs on the non-typical actions that visitors to their websites perform, such as clicking a button or pushing the play button on a video. Because neither of these activities results in the creation of a “thank-you page,” it is impossible to monitor them using the conventional approaches to goal configuration.

Despite this, it is necessary to find another way to keep track of these happenings because of their significance. This methodology is referred to as Event Tracking, and the implementation of it calls for additional set-up or code.

Note: Although events are accessible in Universal Analytics, setting them up may be challenging for non-technical marketers or those who have a limited understanding of technologies such as Google Tag Manager. Because of this, a significant amount of crucial data on interactions with pages was not immediately reported in Universal Analytics. This issue is going to be addressed by GA4.

Events Report

The Events Report keeps a record of the ways in which people engage with the different aspects of your website. Any Google Analytics events that you configure either in the code of your website or using Google Tag Manager will be tracked automatically by this report.

The provision of useful insights into the ways in which users interact with your website and the content they find there is one of the advantages of event monitoring. It reveals, for instance, whether the user is clicking through to emails or other sites, downloading brochures, manuals, or PDFs, viewing or partially viewing films, and a great deal more. These insights have the potential to inform the wording and appearance of your website, as well as your CTAs and wider content initiatives.

The overview section of the study

Through the Overview sub-report, you will have the ability to obtain an overview of the website’s happenings. This report provides a consolidated overview of all the information pertaining to the various event kinds and values that have been programmed into your website. There will be no data displayed here if your website does not have any events programmed into it.

Top Events sub-report

After everything has been recorded through the website code or through the use of Google Tag Manager, you will be able to examine Top Events to see the events that occur on your website the most frequently.

As your company gets ready for GA4, you need to make sure that you have a solid understanding of all of these crucial UA reports in the meantime. During our GA4 Team Talk, you will be able to obtain additional information regarding the distinctions between UA and GA4.