5 Google Analytics Reports to Help Improve ROI

Sieving through heaps of reports and endless amounts of data is time-consuming and can sometimes even be ineffective. These five Google Analytics reports can help you quickly identify what’s working and what’s not helping you to improve your ROI.

Bouncing Keywords

Use the Traffic Sources report to look at the keywords that are leading to visits to your site. You need to look for keywords with high visitor numbers and high bounce rates. 

The average bounce rate for the website above is around 38% and the bounce rate for this particular keyword, which delivers a large number of site visits, has a bounce rate considerably higher (59.14%) than the site average. This would warrant some investigation.

High bouncing keywords mean your visitors are not getting what they want for one reason or another. Perhaps your keyword is not relevant to your landing page, perhaps your PPC ad is misleading or maybe you’re not price competitive on the particular product/service on offer. Find out what the issue is and then combat it. If you feel you can’t do anything to improve the situation then reduce spending on the keyword (if it’s a CPC one).

High-Value Keywords

Hopefully, you’re tracking sales and/or Goals in Google Analytics which will allow you to seek out the high converting, high-value keywords. Running another Traffic Sources report and looking at the keywords again will allow you to filter out keywords with above-average conversion rates and high per-visit values. Once you’ve found these keywords you can focus more efforts and/or budget on them.

Low Return Traffic Sources

Look at your traffic sources (Traffic Sources > Sources > All Traffic) to see if there are any underperformers. Look at the conversion rates for each traffic source and consider any costs associated with them. If you’re paying for ad placement on a particular site and it’s delivering visitors that don’t convert consider culling the campaign.

Bouncing Landing Pages

Looking at the Landing Pages report will show you which, if any, of your high volume landing pages need attention. Pages that have high visitor numbers and high bounce rates should be analysed. A landing page with a high bounce rate can mean many things from poor website content to poor keyword relevance. Either way, the landing page is not satisfying your visitors’ needs. Think about what they need and alter your landing page accordingly.

High-Value Traffic Sources

Using the Traffic Sources report again you will be able to identify which ‘sources’ deliver the top quality traffic to your website. If you are working hard on a link building strategy then this report can be really useful, you may find that a particular site you gained a link on is working out really well and you may consider ways to expand on this. This report will also help you see the value of your advertising campaigns too; perhaps one CPC network is proving more effective than another. You’re likely to want to focus more time and budget on the top performers.

If you run all five of these reports and make alterations accordingly to improve performance you’re very likely to see an improved ROI.