Every view in Google Analytics comes with a default "My Dashboard". Learn how to customise your dashboards and widgets for the best account overview. Dashboards contain one or more widgets (up to 12 per dashboard) that give you an overview of the KPI’s that you care about most. Create your dashboard To create a dashboard, navigate to your view, then: Go to reporting tab. Click dashboards. Select + new dashboard. In the create dashboard pop-up select blank canvas (no widgets) or starter dashboard (default set of widgets). You can also import dashboard configurations from the solutions gallery, where is most likely that someone thought about some of the KPI’s you are interested and already build a dashboard. Give your dashboard a title, then click create dashboard. Add widgets to your dashboard A dashboard can have up to 12 instances of the following kinds of widgets <piece of information>: Metric—displays a simple numeric representation of a single selected metric. Timeline—displays a graph of the selected metric over time. You can compare this to a secondary metric. Geomap—displays a map of the selected region, with the specified metric plotted on the map. Hover over the map to see the actual metric values. Table—displays up to 2 metrics describing the selected dimension, laid out in a tabular format. Pie—displays a pie chart of the selected metric grouped by a dimension. Mouse over a slice to see the specific metric values. Bar—displays a bar chart of the selected metric grouped by up to 2 dimensions. Mouse over a slice to see the specific metric values. Difference between standard vs. real-time widgets Some of the available widgets can display their data in real-time. These widgets update the metrics automatically (standard widgets, by comparison, update when you load or refresh the dashboard). Real-time widgets can display only the active users or pageviews metrics, depending on the widget. The following widget types are available as real-time widgets: Counter—displays a count of the active users on your site. You can optionally group these users by a selected dimension. Timeline—displays a timeline graph of pageviews on your site for the past 30 to 60 minutes. Geomap—displays a map showing where your active users are coming from. Table—plots a table of your active users against up to 3 selected dimensions. How to add a widget to a dashboard: Create a new dashboard and select blank canvas, or click + add widget on an existing dashboard to open the widget editor. Select the type of widget. Configure the widget’s dimensions, metrics and other options. These vary depending on the type of widget. Scroll or use the search box to locate the specific metric or dimension you want. You can limit the data shown by the widget by clicking add a filter. Filters let you include or exclude data in the specified dimension that match your filter criteria. You can add multiple rows to your filter definition. All conditions must be met for the filter to work. Report and dashboard filters are not the same as view filters. View filters permanently change your data, while report and dashboard filters only limit the data displayed in the report or dashboard. Dashboard filters are specific to the dashboard in which you define them. You can link the widget to a report or a URL. Doing so makes the widget title a link, taking you to the specified report or web page. To link to a report, begin typing a report name. Google Analytics will autocomplete your entry, trying to match it to an existing report. Alternatively, you can copy and paste the report’s URL into this field. Enter a widget title or accept the suggested title. Click save. Add a linked report directly to your dashboard Another way to link a report to your dashboard is to add it directly from the Google Analytics reporting tool. Locate or create the report you want to see in your dashboard. Click add to dashboard below the report title. Select an existing dashboard, or create a new one by clicking new dashboard. Select the check boxes for the dashboard widgets you want to include (e.g., table, pie chart, timeline). You can add up to 2 widgets per report to your dashboard. You can change the widget titles using the click to edit links. Click add to dashboard. Your new linked report widget opens on the dashboard you selected. Use the widget title link to open the underlying report. Linked report limitations Linked reports can’t have metric filters or secondary dimensions. If you try to add a report with a metric filter or secondary dimension, you will see a warning icon. Hover over the icon to see the warning message. You can still add the report, but it will not include the filter or secondary dimension. You can only embed the data view of a report in your dashboard. If you try to add a report that uses another view of the table (e.g., percentage, performance, comparison or pivot), you will see a warning icon. Mouse over the icon to see the warning message. You can still add the report, but it will display only the data view. Linked reports display only the first two metric columns from your reports. If your report contains more than two metrics, additional metrics will not be displayed in the dashboard. Edit a widget To modify an existing widget, mouse over the widget title, then click the edit (pencil) icon. To delete an individual widget, mouse over the widget title, then click the close (X) icon. Clone a widget You can create an exact copy of a widget using the clone widget link. This is convenient when you want to use one widget as a base for another. Add segments to your dashboard In the Google Analytics reports, you can add segments to your dashboard, allowing you to compare and contrast metrics generated by different session or user groupings. To edit an existing segment, click the segment label at the top of your dashboard. To add a segment, click the empty + add segment label. You can learn more about segments. Share your dashboard with other users Dashboards are private to you until you share them. If you develop a dashboard that you think is useful to other users in your account, or to other Google Analytics users in general, you have several options for sharing it. You can also send a snapshot of your dashboard data via email or generate a PDF file you can distribute however you please. Share dashboards with the current view Once you have your private dashboard working the way you like, you can create a copy of it to share with other users. When you do this, anyone with access to this view can see the dashboard’s data and add to or edit any widgets contained in the dashboard. There’s no way to make dashboards read-only; however, changes to the shared dashboard won’t affect your private version of that dashboard. You must have edit permission to share dashboards and data with the current view. If you have only read-only permission, you can still share your private dashboard by sending it as a template link or by adding it to the solutions gallery. See below for more information. To share a dashboard with the current view: View the dashboard you want to share. Click share > share object A copy of the current dashboard will now be available to all other users in that view, located in the shared dashboards section of the reports panel. Note: to unshare the dashboard you must delete it. Share dashboard templates with other views and accounts The share > share template link option generates a URL you can copy and send to other users, embed in a document or host on a website. When you share a dashboard via a template, you share only the settings for the dashboard - you do not share any data. You can send the link to anyone with a Google Analytics account, and that person can then import the settings. Learn more about sharing customizations via templates. Share dashboards in the solutions gallery The solutions gallery lets you share and import custom reporting tools and assets, like dashboards and segments, into your Google Analytics accounts. When you share a dashboard using the share > share in solutions gallery, only the dashboard’s configuration is shared. Your personal information and Google Analytics data stay private in your account. Learn more about the solutions gallery. Send dashboards via email If you need to distribute a snapshot of your dashboard data to people who might not have access to your Google Analytics account, the share > email option is for you. You can send them a customised email with an attached PDF file showing your dashboard to any valid email account. Scheduling dashboard emails Dashboard emails can be sent as “one-offs”, or you can schedule them on a recurring basis. Use the frequency controls to select the timing of the email. By default, recurring emails will be sent for 6 months. The advanced options let you adjust this from 1 month to 1 year. After this period expires, you’ll need to set up the recurring email schedule again. Tip: If there are any previously scheduled emails, you’ll see a link allowing you to add to an existing email. This lets you send out multiple dashboards or reports using the same distribution and timing. Manage all your scheduled emails by navigating to admin > views > select your view > personal tools & assets > scheduled emails. Export dashboards to PDF The export > PDF option saves a copy of your current dashboard exactly as it appears on screen to a PDF file. You can then embed or distribute this exported view in other documents as needed. Get Social! Follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to keep up-to-date with Google Analytics.   Further reading: Vital Google Analytics custom reports and dashboards for ecommerce Attributing goals and conversions to marketing channels Tips to optimise your ecommerce landing pages

We're very used to having to explain what the difference is between total and unique events in Google Analytics. Like many other puzzling metrics, this has consistently been a head-scratcher for more people than we can count. Whilst you may have been in this situation like we have, you might not know that this was often due to a problem in the metric! But thanks to the released update, this is now fixed for both internal and clients’ reporting. You can read more about this update in Google's blog post: Improving Google Analytics Events with Unique Events. So what was the issue? The issue was that the unique events metric wasn’t correctly taking into account all event dimensions when calculating your numbers for the reporting. This caused many discrepancies, which probably created those numerous confusing situations around what the number stood for. The unique events metric was always meant to show you the unique count of individual interactions (or events) within a single session. So if someone downloads the same PDF 3 times during 1 session, then that counts as 1 unique event. Instead, it has been counting how many unique numbers of times a specific combination of values is seen in the report per each row. This example by Google is very helpful in getting to grips with what this means. In the example at the top where you can see all three values for various event fields, you get the same count for both new and old unique events metric - each gets 3. In the second example, we exclude one dimension and get a different result. Now, because one set of values is hidden (event label) then the calculation takes into account only what is seen in the report. But the new metric, accurately now, knows that there is a third set of data, which is taken into account in its calculation. What’s the fix? Current unique events metric has been renamed to ‘Unique Dimension Combinations’ (UDC) - a bit of a mouthful - to reflect that it was counting the uniques of dimension combinations, not individual interactions! You’ll still be able to use it as a metric if you need to compare old versus new data or are doing any analysis on the legacy data that it is attached to. The calculation for the unique events metric will now take into account all event dimensions when calculating the number. Due to this change, all event fields are now also required to contain a value - any blanks will get a (not set) value. In your standard Google Analytics reports, you’ll see the new unique events metric with the label ‘NEW’ attached to it. That’s when you know you’ve got the fixed metric in your reports. The new unique events metric will apply to the data as far back as May 2016. BUT, the fix won’t be applied automatically to your custom reports. If you have any custom reports that reference the old unique events metric, the naming will be updated to UDC. Google has provided a neat method to update your custom reports too. So you get a choice whether you want to keep using the deprecated old metric or switch to the updated unique events metric. When making the choice, bear in mind that UDC may eventually be removed so you might want to jump on the fixed uniques metric straight away. Whilst not the most exciting update on its own, this is important for the accuracy of reporting. All of our clients use events tracking so any updates to improving the accuracy of events reporting and analysis are a welcome change. Have any questions about this update? Get in touch with one of our experts! Further reading: What is Google Analytics? Overview for beginners Common reasons for tracking events How to set up event tracking in Google Tag Manager Images: courtesy of Google

Learn how to set up site search (internal search) with and without query parameters and see how users search your site. Find what your customers are researching for on your website and improve your website content. The site search reports provide data on the type of content people are looking for on your site. Having site search data is like reading the minds of a subset of your audience. You can easily see what they’re looking for, the words and terminology they are using and how quickly they found what they were looking for (or if they did at all). Site search must be set up for each reporting view in which you want to see user search activity. To set up site search for a view: sign into your analytics account, navigate to a view in which you want to set up site search then click view settings and under site search settings, set site search tracking ON. In the query parameter field, enter the word or words that designate an internal query parameter, such as "term,search,query". Sometimes the word is just a letter, such as "s" or "q". Enter up to five parameters, separated by commas. The simplest way to know what your query parameter is is to go to your site and perform a search for something, anything! On the following page, take a look at the URL – do you see your keyword? If your keyword appears at the end of a URL following a question mark, like this: http://www.yourwebsite.com/?s=your+keyword, this means that your website is using query parameters. If your keyword appears in the middle of the URL, with no query parameters, like this: http://www.yourwebsite.com/search/your-keyword/ then this means you need to use the Page Paths. How to identify search query parameters for Site Search with Queries If you’ve identified that your search keywords show up in the query parameter portion of the site, you’re in luck! This is the easiest way to set up Site Search. When you're searching on your website, you might see the URL like this: http://www.yourwebsite.com/?s=your+keyword, or in this example blog.littledata.io?s=internal+search. The query parameter is the bit between ? and =, which is 's' in this example. So you must use the query parameter ‘s’ when setting up the internal search in Google Analytics settings. Now to set this up in Google Analytics, follow these steps: Select whether or not you want analytics to strip the query parameter from your URL. This only strips the parameters you've provided, not any other parameters in the same URL. Select whether or not you use categories, such as drop-down menus to refine a site search. If you select 'no', you are finished. Click save changes. If you select 'yes': In the category parameter field, enter the letters that designate an internal query category such as 'cat, qc,'. Select whether or not you want analytics to strip the category parameters from your URL. Note that this only strips the parameters you provided, not any other parameters in the same URL. This has the same functionality as excluding the URL query parameters in your main view: if you strip the category parameters from your site search view, you don't have to exclude them again from your main view. Click apply How to set search terms for Page Path Search Terms (No Queries) Another common behaviour of site search is to have the terms appear within the page path instead of a query. Like this: http://www.yourwebsite.com/search/your-keyword/ To track this type of site search, an advanced filter should be used for views that will be using these reports. First, navigate to filters > new filter under your view. (Note: when adding a filter, you must have EDIT rights on the property level!) After choosing the filter name, select ‘custom’ and ‘advanced’ in the filter’s settings. Choose ‘request URI’ for field A since we are getting the information from the URI, or page path. Your site’s page path goes in the text box, so for this example, it would look like this: search/(.*). When we do this, we are telling Google Analytics to look at this page path and extract the characters from within the parentheses. The dot and asterisk are regular expressions representing any character and any number of characters - so we are storing anything after the slash. Field B will be blank since we are only concerned with extracting from the page path and nowhere else. The next field, ‘output yo’, is the one we are interested in. Now that we have stored the keyword from the URI, we need to output it to the correct dimension. In the drop-down menu, select ‘search term’ and type ‘$A1’ into the input box. This tells Google Analytics to grab the user-defined value from field A and output it as a search term. For the checkbox options below, only ‘field A required’ and ‘override output field’ need to be selected. See site search data To see the site search reports: sign into your analytics account, navigate to your desired account, property, and view, then select the reporting tab and under behaviour go to site search. Your report must look like this: Take into consideration that the report will be populated with data from the moment you activate the internal search or add the filter. It is not retroactive and may need 24h to you see the queries in your report. If you'd like to know more about how to set up internal searches in Google Analytics, get in touch with one of our experts! Further reading: Attributing goals and conversions to marketing channels 9 tips for marketers using Google Analytics Image credit: Image courtesy of hub.3dissue.net

Littledata’s web app gives you simple and actionable insights into your website's performance. Our app scours through hundreds of Google Analytics metrics and trends, in order to give you summarised reports, alerts on significant changes, custom reports and benchmarks against competitor sites.       This guide will give you the ins-and-outs of how we generate those important reports that help you make decisions in driving your business. Here’s a glimpse of what’s below: Free core reporting for unlimited users How to authorise access to your Google Analytics data Picking the right Google Analytics view for reporting Our range of reporting features, including custom reports and industry benchmarks How to check significant changes and page trends Long-term tracking and reporting You’ve signed up - what are the benefits? So you’ve now signed up and you’re ready to get started… but what are the benefits of signing up? Well… You’re getting automated reporting, meaning our web app looks through all of your Google Analytics reports to find significant changes. There are over 100 of them, so it will save you a lot of time not having to look through these manually. We split these findings across 5 different sections so you know quickly what you can find under each. We help you keep your data clean by looking for spam referrals. This has been a common problem for a while and a fix can be complex to set up. So we’ve created a feature that does it automatically for you (or you just need to approve it when you see it). If you get new spam referrals, we’ll spot these and let you know again. We’re also benchmarking your site against other websites, so you know where you have a competitive advantage and where you don’t. On top of all these goodies, there’s no installation needed so you get access to our web app right away! We recently updated a few important aspects of our app and you can read all about them in our blog post: New in Littledata: an improved navigation, trend detection algorithm, and more. Accessing your Google Analytics data As a Google Analytics user, you will already be sending data to Google every time someone interacts with your website or app. Google Analytics provides an API, where our app can query this underlying data and provide you with summary reports. During the signup, you would have seen an authorisation window, asking for permission to view your Google Analytics data. This means you granted us READ access. Be assured, that we will not be able to change any data or settings in your Google Analytics. Your data is viewed only by the algorithms in the web app. You pick which Google Analytics view to report on Once you’ve authorised the access, you will select the Google Analytics view that you want to set up reporting for. Some companies will have multiple views set up for a particular website. They might have subtly different data – for example, one excludes traffic from company offices or focuses on the blog traffic only – so pick the most appropriate one. If you’ve made a mistake in choosing your view or want to set up another one, don’t worry, you can always do it by clicking on the existing view in the top-right corner and selecting the option ‘set up another site’ from the drop-down menu! During the initial signup, we ask for an email where you want to get your alerts. This is because a lot of people don’t necessarily use the same email address to access Google Analytics and check their emails. Don’t worry… we’re not going to spam you, we just want to make sure you don’t miss any of your reports! When you get to the reports list, you might see something like this: Now, don’t be sad if you’re not seeing anything quite yet - we’re still checking and will only let you know when there’s something interesting to check. Just be sure to check back or wait for an email alert from your talented expert! Google Analytics Audit The first thing that we are going to analyse is your setup, in order to see what is working on your website and what is not working properly. There are more than 10 Google Analytics checks that we are verifying. The audit is almost instant and it will give you an idea about what is happening throughout your website. For each correct check, there will be provided a brief description and the dates when it was verified, whereas for the wrong checks there will be a guide on how to fix that issue and also the dates when it was found as faulty setup. Some of the checks include aspects about demographics tracking, excluding spammers, checkout steps, visitors' anonymity, campaign tagging on social and email, exclusion of company traffic, if conversion goals are set up and many other. If you ever have doubts regarding what to do or where to check, you can book a free 30 minutes consultation with our experts. They will offer guidance to set up your account in order to have accurate reporting. Dashboard If you are tired of getting complicated graphs and endless tables, our dashboard will be exactly what you need. This feature will present a clear picture of your online business performance through graphs and stats reporting the most important metrics for your website. Don't forget to set the metrics that best apply to your business from the settings page (see below more details). One of the advantages of the smart dashboard is the ability to compare the current day/week/month with a previous date range. This feature will allow you to contrast the metrics that matter to you in order to target adds or marketing campaigns in periods that generate profit for you. Custom reports Our consultants can create for you easy-to-understand custom reports that reflect the traffic or transactions from your website. The numbers are transformed into tables, pie-charts and graphs that can be interpreted by anyone in your team.   We created some general custom reports - conversion rate by channel or by device, changes in landing page value, product category revenue and purchases by blog post. You can choose one of those custom reports or have us create something entirely new for you. Either way, we review every new custom report by hand to ensure proper setup and accurate data. Free users get one basic custom report with setup by our team of experts. Pro users can take advantage of all custom report templates and even work with our consultants to create something new. Accuracy guaranteed – link to prices. Benchmarks Here, you’ll find the performance of your web analytics compared with aggregated data from other companies. You will be able to compare your web performance, conversion rate, bounce rates and more to a benchmark, which is created by analysing more than 3000 other websites. The data is gathered anonymously from Google Analytics to give you insight into how your digital product or online marketing is performing. For example, you can find out how you compare (whether above or below median) to other websites and adjust your campaigns in order to generate growth. Alerts    This report shows you trends in your data and includes in-app alerts. It will highlight significant changes, giving you details into what they mean and what to investigate. You can always customise the notifications that we will send via email from the settings section. Get the most out of your reporting - adjust your settings We’ve got a few important sections in your settings that we’d like to highlight, to make sure your reporting runs smoothly! First, adjust your revenue settings based on your website’s income generation. This will allow you to receive accurate alerts about how changes in your traffic affected your income. This will be done automatically if you have an enhanced ecommerce setup in your Google Analytics account. Second, you have your metrics and your segments, where you can select which reports you want to see based on the standard, predefined metrics or segments in Google Analytics. This will help you define your goals and see the relevant reports necessary to increase performance. Lastly, you notifications settings, where you can set up  email alert frequency or recipients. In this way to can always be informed and also be able to share with your team the important alerts regarding changes in your website. You always have the option of adjusting this at any time. But, we recommend you get this setup, as this will allow you to get the most relevant reports for your company. You can find this section by pressing the settings icon in the top-right corner of your screen, and then clicking report preferences. Every day we look for significant changes and trending pages There are over 100 Google Analytics reports and our clever algorithm scans through all of them, finding the most interesting changes to highlight. We recently improved that algorithm, and luckily for you, you can read all about how we made the detection of significant trends in your traffic easier to see. It’s been live since August, giving you fewer distractions and more significant alerts tailored to your company’s goals. Every morning (around 4am local time) our app fetches your traffic data from the previous period – broken down into relevant segments, like mobile traffic from organic search – and compares it against a pattern from the previous day, week, or month depending on the type of report. This isn’t just signalling whether a metric has changed – web traffic is unpredictable and changes every day (scientists call this ‘noise’). We are looking for how likely a specific value was out of line with the recent pattern. We are selective about the reports you see in the interface so we’ve set up the algorithm to find changes in trends in which we are 95% sure of the importance of the change. But to adjust which changes you actually get alerted to, you can change the significance to be much more limiting, like 98% or 99%, so that you get email alerts only in those cases We also use smiley faces to help you see quickly which changes are good or bad. If you’re particularly interested in “bad” things happening in your traffic to address potential issues, then you should look out for red sad faces to help you pinpoint these reports on the list. We email the most significant changes to you Every day – but only if you have significant changes – we generate a summary email, with the highest priority reports you should look at. An example change might be that 'the bounce rate from natural search traffic is down by 8% yesterday’ or 'the worst performing mobile device resulted in 59 fewer engaged visits'. If you usually get a consistent bounce rate for natural / organic search traffic, and one day that changes, then you should investigate why. Need to change your email settings? You can always adjust the frequency or add more colleagues so they can stay on top of the changes. If the reports you get are not the ones you need, based on your goals, remember you can always adjust your settings! Every Sunday or first of the month, we look for changes Every week (Sunday) or month (first of the month) we look for long-term trends – which are only visible when comparing the last week with the previous week. You should get more alerts on a Sunday. If you have a site with under 10,000 visits a month, you are likely to see more changes week-by-week then day-by-day. Already signed up? Login and check the setup of your reports. Need help with the process or have any questions? We’re always available to help, whether you need help with existing reports, need help finding the best reports for your company, are interested in the reports we’re currently working on and/or want us to provide feedback. Feel free to contact one of our experts or ask them in the web app. We hope you enjoy the web app and all of the wonderful reports and insights included! Happy analysing! This blog post was last updated in June 2017.  Further reading: New in Littledata: an improved navigation, trend detection algorithm, and more Making the detection of significant trends in your traffic easier to see 9 tips for marketers using Google Analytics

We’ve got some exciting news! We’ve launched some great updates on our web app, which will make your lives a little easier. Find out how the navigation has improved and new in-app messaging will help you find out more, get a glimpse into our trend detection algorithm and new reports on mobile devices! Our mission is to make the way you gain access to important analytics, an all-around easier process and we know we’re heading in the right direction with these updates. We already give you actionable and easier to understand insights of your Google Analytics and now we’ve made the experience more friendly based on your invaluable feedback! Find your reports quicker We’ve improved the navigation of the web app, giving you one new category, and two updated categories on the left-hand side of your profile, which are now simpler to find and easier to understand. There are currently three categories: Dashboard, Benchmark, and Reports, which will be visible to you depending on your Littledata package. Instead of having them in separate locations, we brought them together into one navigation panel so that you can find specific reports and findings quickly based on your current questions or company needs. Under the reports category, we have changed types of reports into tags. Now you can select one or multiple tags, and decide how you prefer to view the different types of insights you get. For example, if you want to view your trends reports with tips you’re getting, then all you need to do is select those two. The benchmark category brings together all the benchmark metrics available for your site, and to see more detail click on the individual benchmark you’re interested in. You can still see the category you are being benchmarked against just above your benchmarks. If your current category is ‘all websites’ then you should make this more specific by updating the category in the settings. The Dashboard is the latest addition to these categories, which we added to be able to provide a flexible and customised solution that is perfect for reporting needs that go beyond standard Google Analytics reports. See below for more detail. Get our custom dashboard This is a new feature, available to clients who are also receiving consulting services on top of our Pro package. Please contact one of our lovely experts if you’d like to know more about these features, and how they can give you the results you strive for. The dashboard category is completely customisable, which we develop through consulting services by going over what your goals and needs are, and then creating these reports for simple and actionable insights of your data. These reports are completely flexible and allow you to see metrics that are difficult to view in Google Analytics, which include: Calculations, such as performance changes in percentages and conversion rates Combined metrics and dimensions from different reports Custom visualisations of trends based on how you prefer to see the data. Want to include a pie or bar chart? Not a problem. A custom schedule for dashboard data refresh. If your reporting requires weekly, quarterly or annual updates, we’ll set it up for you. Customised reports based on your formatting preferences, so if you'd like to include your brand colours, it's a possibility! Our smarter algorithm When we started Littledata, we developed a trend detection algorithm to find significant changes in your data and send you alerts, reducing the time spent wading through data in Google Analytics. But as times change and data gets busier, we needed a better way to serve your reporting needs. So recently we collaborated with mathematicians to improve the algorithm, which is now sensitive enough to pick up small changes in low traffic website, but also specific enough to ignore the random noise of daily traffic. Want to hear more about this intriguing story? Find out more in our blog post: Making the detection of significant trends in your traffic easier to see! Are mobile devices losing you customers? Analytics from mobile devices is extremely important. Through our web app, you will find out how many transaction or users you lost due to poor experience on mobile devices. According to Dave Chaffey at Smart Insights, 80% of internet users own a smartphone. A growing number of people are searching through their phones and as a result, we’ve incorporated mobile devices reports. They will spot and highlight potential issues around responsiveness, layout or bugs. Finding out which devices are the worst will allow you to optimise your website and campaigns to capture all of these individuals. Your personalised communication We completely agree with Intercom’s belief that “customers today want to communicate with the people behind the business, not with a faceless brand”! This is why we’ve integrated their messenger into our web app so that you can chat with us directly and quickly. There’s a great deal of custom features available, including formatting, delivery, and most importantly the different ways to respond. You can choose your own way to chat and react, with images, audio, emojis, video, and more. If you want to know more about the expert you’re talking to, you can view their profile within the app. Our customer experience is key in our business model and we hope this function delivers that. If you have any questions regarding any of the new features, please contact us, or use the in-app messenger!   Image credit: Image courtesy of Smart Insights and Intercom

Standard reports are useful to an extent. Custom reports and dashboards, on the other hand, allow you to compile metrics that give you much more useful insights of how your online shop is performing. Monitoring and reviewing the right data is essential for deciding which tactics or initiatives you should try, or marketing platforms to focus on, to help you sell more. If you are very familiar with how Google Analytics (GA) works, then you would set up some custom reports and dashboards to quickly access your key metrics. But if you are not as knowledgeable about the quirks and inner workings of GA then you should take advantage of the many custom reports and dashboards available for import. We can also help you build custom dashboards. There is a huge number of reports available in Google Analytics Solutions Gallery; used, created and shared by experts. They’re all done from scratch and designed to maximise your use of Google Analytics, but the huge amount of solutions from dashboards and channel groupings to segments and custom reports do require some time to find what’s right for your needs. From our experience setting up ecommerce tracking and reports for companies like MADE.com, British Red Cross Training, Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, these reports and dashboards are valuable when analysing purchase data. Don't lose sight of your conversion rate Keep an eye on your ecommerce conversion rate across five different tabs covering channels, keyword, mobile devices, cities and campaigns. Focussed on high traffic sources, each section shows where it's not up to scratch and needs your attention and tweaking. Get ecommerce conversion rate performance custom report. Find duplicate transactions Duplicate transactions can greatly skew your numbers and affect your reporting, making you doubt the accuracy of your data. Duplicate order data is sent to Google Analytics typically because the page containing such information has been loaded twice. This can happen when the page is refreshed or loaded again. To find whether your data contains duplicate transactions, add our custom report to the view you want to check. Get a custom report to check for duplicate transactions. If you have more than 1 transaction in any row (or per an individual transaction ID), that means you have duplicate transactions stored in your data. It’s worth checking the report on a regular basis, eg monthly, to make sure that there are no duplicates or they’re kept to the minimum. Lunametrics blog has a number of suggestions for how to fix duplicate transactions. Overview of ecommerce performance This overview dashboard brings important top level metrics into one place, so you don’t have to go searching for them in multiple reports. You will quickly see which of your campaigns, channels, and sources are bringing in the most revenue, whilst comparing conversion rates across each. Get ecommerce overview dashboard. How is your store content performing See how your customers are engaging with your site, content and product (or page, depending on the setup) categories. You'll get information on what they search for, and which categories and landing pages bring in the most revenue. Get ecommerce content performance dashboard.   Looking for improving your ecommerce tracking and reporting? Get in touch with our qualified experts.   Further reading: Take your ecommerce website to the next level Attributing goals and conversions to marketing channels Tips to optimise your ecommerce landing pages Image credit: Image courtesy of Juralmin at Pixabay

Many of the popular email providers make it easy to automatically tag up links in your emails to allow Google Analytics to track them under the 'Email' channel. Without this, the traffic from email links will be dispersed under 'Direct' and 'Referral' channels, and you won't be able to see which emails really drive engagement or sales. Here are the links to set up some common email services: MailChimp Campaign Monitor ActiveCampaign Benchmark Email ConstantContact iContact Emma MadMimi GetResponse Mail Jet If your email provider is not in the list, or you send emails from your own platform, you'll need to manually paste in tagged up email links. Still need some help? Contact us and we'll be happy to answer any questions!

Only by using Google Analytics ecommerce tracking, can you match real sales data with website usage (including traffic source/medium). This sales analysis is required to understand the performance of your website landing pages and return-on-investment from marketing campaigns. The ecommerce reports allow you to analyse purchase activity on your site or app. You can see which products were bought, average order value, ecommerce conversion rate, time to purchase, discount vouchers used and checkout process funnels. Ecommerce tracking is useful not just for online shops but for all kinds of websites including event booking, courses / education, travel / hotels and so on. To see ecommerce data in Google Analytics, you need to: Enable ecommerce in Google Analytics Add the code to your site/app to collect ecommerce data. To complete this task, you'll need to be comfortable editing HTML and coding in JavaScript, or have help from an experienced web developer. Read how to Set up Ecommerce Tracking with Google Tag Manager. Based on this data, you can develop an understanding of: Which products sell well, and by inference, which products are best suited for your customer base. The revenue per transaction, and the number of products per transaction. For example, if the number of products per transaction is lower than you'd like, you might benefit from offering better quantity discounts, or offering free shipping if customers meet a minimum dollar amount. How long (in time and in the number of sessions) it takes customers to make the decision to purchase. If your sales cycle is stable or fluctuates predictably based on product or season, you can use this information (in conjunction with overall sales forecasts) to make reliable predictions about revenue. If customers routinely make numerous visits before they purchase, you might think about a site design that leads more easily to your purchase pages, or options that let users compare your products and prices to your competitors'. The difference between goals and ecommerce. A goal is only measured once in a visit. Think about it similar to pageviews vs. unique pageviews - once the goal has been 'triggered' to a visit, it can't be triggered again. On the other hand, there are no limitations on the number of transactions being measured during one session. Ecommerce is more powerful in that it allows you to analyse additional metrics.  For example, you can see how many visits occurred before the visitor decided to purchase. Many visitors on my site come back more than 7 times before they finally decide to purchase. Wow, interesting figures! Here is a list of the available metrics for ecommerce: If you have marketing campaigns and have no ecommerce tracking you are more likely struggling to calculate the return on your investment (ROI).  With both goals and ecommerce tracking, you will now have a full understanding of your customer journey and your customer life value (CLV). Analytics goals vs. ecommerce transactions, which to choose? Both of them!  If you have read my post carefully, you will understand that both of them have their strengths and limitations. We strongly advise to implement and configure goals and ecommerce. Need help configuring goals and/or ecommerce on Google Analytics? Get in touch with our experts!