Google Analytics can be intimidating and often times used for the most monotonous tasks. Don’t get me wrong, even the simplest data can be insightful and allow for great optimizations within any account. However, are you leveraging Google Analytics to its fullest potential? Are you diving deep enough into the data to find hidden treasures?
Below are a few steps that will allow you to take Google Analytics one-step further. These simple, yet effective steps will allow you to unlock information and key insights that have fallen by the wayside in this fast-paced world of PPC.
Secondary Dimensions
When looking at any given report or view in analytics, the option to add a secondary dimension is available. Often times a quick glance happens and it’s back to the interface to pull the report. Don’t limit yourself to only viewing the data in Analytics, but rather take the data and throw it into a pivot table, which will allow you to condense the data into a readable format.
First, take a minute to figure out what you really want to know. Let’s say you want to look at product performance by device, first you need to go to the Product Performance report in Google Analytics. In Analytics go to Conversions > Ecommerce > Product Performance, as shown below.
Next add in your secondary dimension, or the additional filter you would like to see. In this case I am going to choose device, however, the following can be extremely beneficial as well:
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Day of Week
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Hour of Day
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Region
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City
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Affinity Category
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Browser
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Age
Once you have selected your secondary dimension, ensure the date range is accurate for your reporting purposes and download the report.
Side Note: Don’t forget to show all rows, or else your report will contain only the top 10 rows.
Pivot
After downloading the report, create a pivot table of the data, which will allow you to shift through the data and get to bed at a reasonable time! If you want to brush up on your pivot table skills, here is a great article that will walk you through the steps in creating a seamless pivot table.
After getting your pivot table set-up, there are countless ways to segment the data. The first you see here is a top-level view of performance data that shows performance by device. This shows us that the majority of revenue is generated from desktop devices.
The next table you will see is by product and device. Here you will see how individual products perform on each device and which device is most likely going to bring in the more revenue.
Explore
The above example is just one route that can be taken. Below are additional routes to get you thinking about your next Analytics pivot table.
| Analytics Report | Secondary Dimension | Explanation |
| Convs. > eCommerce > Product Performance | Device | Shows product performance by device |
| Convs. > Multi – Channel Funnels > Assisted Conv. | Campaign | Shows which campaigns assisted revenue can be attributed to. |
| Acquisition > Adwords >
Hour of Day |
Device | Shows device performance broken out by hour of day. |
| Audience > Technology > Browser & OS | City | Shows browser performance by city. |
Final Thoughts
There will never be a shortage of data that can be pulled when it comes to PPC. Where clicks are happening, there will always be endless ways to segment data. Rather than pulling the same reports over and over that tell the same story, switch it up and really dive into Google Analytics.
