Website Analysis | The 4 Basic Reports

Summary: In this article about website analysis, I'm giving away a FREE Google Sheets template that automatically spits out a 5-year overview of your website's performance metrics, along with a guide on the four most basic web reports every academic marketer should examine every month.

Shortcut: Want to skip the article and go straight to building an automated report? Scroll down to the "Free Google Sheets Template" section of the article, where step-by-step instructions and a video tutorial await!

As academic marketers, we should be analyzing website performance on a reasonably regular basis. With free tools like Google Analytics available to everyone, access to data is relatively easy. However, poring over the volumes of information and trying to put a report together every month can be an absolute PITA. To help alleviate that Pain of Infinite and Tedious Analysis, I've developed four basic web reports anyone can easily interpret and use to plan for the road ahead and set tangible objectives. These include:

• Web Traffic report
• Web Engagement report
• Web Channels report
• Web Referrals report

In addition, I'm also providing a handy dandy Google Sheets template that will automagically create these four reports with your very own data! However, there is a bit of a catch. These reports will only work with Google's Universal Analytics tracking ID, which will be sunset in July 2023. Although I haven't attempted to create an adapted version of this report using the new GA4 Properties from Google Analytics (note: I plan to in about 12 months), this is an excellent opportunity for those still using the old tracking codes to do a historical review of their web performance with their team before moving on to new measurement approaches.

Now keep in mind that these reports are far from exhaustive, and I stress the word "basic" when referring to them. There are other essential types of analysis, including attribution models, SEO analysis, page speed tests, competitive intelligence and many more. What I'm offering here is a simple starting point for folks who need a scheduled report that saves them from having to log in to Google Analytics and search for data every month. Read on to learn about each web report, and I'll provide a brief description of how to get the data populated into a nice and neat spreadsheet at the end.

Web Traffic Report

Of the reports included, the most fundamental is the traffic report. It's the starting point that tells you how many people visited your site this past month. The information includes three basic metrics:

• Sessions: A session is the entirety of a visit where someone came to surf your website to interact with several pages. The end of a session happens when someone exits your website or when there is a significant period of inactivity on a web page. I'll often refer to sessions as a visit.
• Users: A user is a unique visitor that has been to your website. They may have been to your website several times, but they are only counted once if Google can track them. I often interchange the words user and visitor.
• Pageviews: A pageview is counted every time a page is loaded anew, even if it's reloaded within the same session. So naturally, the number of pageviews is larger than the number of sessions in any given month.

I consider traffic metrics so basic because they don't offer much other than a means to look at growth trends. On their own, they don't tell you how your visitors are engaged with your site. They also don't tell you where people are coming from. Nevertheless, it is vital to ensure that traffic to your site continues to increase or that you can at least sustain a steady level of traffic over time.

The most common question by those just starting with analytics is whether there is a magic number of sessions, users, and pageviews. That is more of a contextual issue that needs to be determined by the number of students attending your university, the size of your target market, and your overall growth objectives. I foresee writing an article specific to setting targets in the higher education industry in the future. For now, the 5-year review you get from the template I provide should be a good starting point to determine where you've been and where you might want to be headed. I usually set traffic targets for my team as they're an excellent universal indicator of the success of our marketing efforts and campaigns. They also encourage us to develop strategies to achieve our objectives.

Web Engagement Report

The web engagement report offers a bit more insight into how your users interact with your website. Metrics included in this section are:

• Pages per session: The average number of pages a visitor peruses during a visit to your website.
• Average visit duration: The average time visitors spend on your site when they stop by to check things out.
• Bounce rate: The number of times someone visited just one page on your website and "bounced," divided by all visits people paid to your website.
• New vs returning visitors: The split between new and returning visitors to your site in a given period.

The web engagement report is a good way of determining if you're keeping your users on your website and if you have them coming back for more. Ideally, your website offers helpful and engaging content, meaning visitors remain engaged. Some may argue that I'm "assuming" that's why people stay on the site longer or visit more pages. It could be that my visitors are taking more time on my site because it's hard to find what they're looking for. However, I assure you that if your user experience is frustrating or boring, it won't be long before your visitors stop surfing your website altogether. Both your engagement and traffic numbers will suffer as a result. That's why it's so important to regularly check in on your engagement to be sure your users are actively interacting with your website.

Web Channels Report

The web channels report helps you understand where your traffic is coming from. There are several traffic sources, and these include:

• Organic search: The number of visitors that found you via a search engine.
• Referral: The number of visitors that visited via a link from another website.
• Direct: The number of visitors that came to you directly by putting your web address in the address bar (could also be a favourite link they saved in their browser).
• Email: The number of visitors that landed on your site after clicking a link in an email.
• Social: The number of visitors coming from a link on a social network.
• Paid search: The number of visitors you attracted to your site with a paid ad in a search engine.
• Display: The number of visitors who clicked your display advertisements to see your offer.
• Affiliates: The number of visitors affiliates sent to your website.
• Other advertising: Visitors that came in from advertising other than search or display (e.g. video)
• Other: Google didn't recognize the traffic source.

Of the reports I'm providing, this is probably the most important one to share and analyze with your team. This is the report that you can act upon by adapting the level of effort you put into each channel. When specific channels aren't contributing much to your overall traffic, it's good to discuss how you could activate these channels to bring more visitors to your website. If you have a regular planning meeting, it's good to review each channel to see how well they performed in the prior period and how you plan to activate them in the period to come.

As a rule of thumb, I generally encourage any marketing team to focus their efforts so that their highest performing channel is organic search. A good SEO strategy is paramount for any website to succeed. Although, this doesn't mean that the other channels aren't important. In some cases, I've even witnessed successful growth with well-planned strategies in other channels. The key is to ensure you plan appropriately and execute real actions in your chosen channel to achieve success.

Web Referral Report

The web referral report takes a closer look at who is referring traffic to your website. You get a list of "referring domains" or websites that have links that point back to your website, otherwise known as "backlinks."

I take the time to delve deeper into the referral channel because I would say it is the second most crucial channel after organic search. Although I won't get into the details, referrals from other websites of authority are also critical to SEO. The more backlinks you have coming to your pages from trusted websites indicates to Google that you're a trusted source that others rely on. This then has a positive impact on something called your "domain authority," which is a key factor that determines the likelihood of your website ranking in search engines.

A good referral strategy is also fundamental to achieving success on the web. Although I plan to write an article on increasing referral traffic in higher education, that will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, here's an excellent piece to help you understand more of what's involved.

FREE Google Sheets Template

Ok, now for a little report building magic! For you visual learners, I've provided a tutorial video to help you get everything up and running. For those who prefer to read through, skip below to find all the step-by-step instructions.

Step 1 - Google Analytics Account

To populate the spreadsheet with data, I'm assuming you already have a Google Analytics account up and running. If you have yet to create a Google Analytics account for your website, I'm afraid you'll need to get that done before you can set up this report. Here is a good place to get started. For those who already have Google Analytics, let's move on to the next step.

Step 2 - Download and Copy of the Google Sheets Report

First, start by clicking this link to access the Google Sheets report. It will open a report with dummy data that I've put together for everyone. The cells aren't all populated, but it will give you the gist of what is going on. After you open it, you will have to save a copy to your own Google Drive by going to the File menu and clicking "Make a copy." The file I provide is view only, and I don't want anyone making any changes to it or involuntarily sharing their data with everyone, so I'll get you to save a copy for your purposes in your own private Google account.

Step 3 - Install the Google Analytics Add-On to Google Sheets

Before you can use the report, you will have to install the Google Analytics Add-on. If you go to the "Extensions" menu and choose "Add-ons" then "Get Add-ons," you'll be able to search and install the Google Analytics extension in Sheets. Once installed, you'll see it in the Extensions menu.

Step 4 - Connect Your View ID and Run Reports

Next, open your Google Analytics account and choose the property with which you want to build your report. You will see the views you have created in the property, and below each view, there is an ID number. Copy the ID of the view you would like to build a report with.

After copying the view ID, go back to the Google Sheets document and select the "Report Configuration" tab at the bottom of the sheet (Note: you may have to use the arrows to scroll over to the correct tab). You will now replace the current view ID with your view ID in each column on this sheet.

After inputting your ID, go back to the Extensions menu in Google Sheets, go to the Google Analytics drop-down, and click Run reports.

Step 5 - Customize Your Web Reports

Finally, return to the MONTHLY REPORTS tab at the bottom of the Google Sheets window, where your automagically populated reports will be waiting for you! Just be sure not to alter any of the other sheets included in this document, as they are used to populate the reports. The only two places you should modify any information are in the "Report Configuration" tab to enter a view ID and select the years you want to report on and the MONTHLY REPORTS tab to reorder the position of your metrics. Messing around with other cells could lead to errors, so avoid that as best as possible.

I've left some space at the top of the sheet that contains a section where you can paste your logo if you want to use this sheet for your faculty or department. I've also included a simple growth legend to help you quickly identify if the given month performed better or worse compared to the same month last year. I use a 5% tolerance to identify a significant change in numbers. Any increase or decrease of 5% or higher is considered important and should be examined. I consider anything between plus or minus 5% relatively stable compared to the prior year. If you want to change these tolerances, you will have to go through the conditional formatting in the cells to adjust.

If you would like to change the order of any metrics, you can easily do so by changing the names in the cells where the metrics are identified. So, for example, If you wanted the "Organic Search" channel in cell A67 to show up second to the "Referral" channel which is in cell A75, all you have to do is replace the word Organic Search with the word Referral in cell A67, and vice versa in cell A75, and voila!

Also, I've set up the document to show the years 2017 to 2021, as I am currently running an analysis of the last five years for my purposes. However, if you would like to change it with 2018 to 2022 data, that's an easy fix. First, start by going to the "Report Configuration" tab and change the data in the "Start Date" row for the "Traffic," "Channels," and "Devices" columns. Don't worry about the "End Date" row, as I have a formula that updates those automatically. Then, return to the MONTHLY REPORTS section and update all the rows in column A with the corresponding years of 2018 through 2022, respectively. Finally, go back to the Extensions menu and run the reports again.

Finally, although I've made it relatively easy to automate this report, this template will require a little bit of manual input from you once a year. Please remember to update the start and end date in column G of the Report Configuration tab at the beginning of the year. I couldn't figure out how to develop a formula to automatically update those cells. If you have any ideas, please let me know, and I will update them.

Conclusion

There's no question that website analysis is an essential component of every academic marketer's toolkit. However, it can be daunting to rifle through the stats every month to try and put a report together for our teams. Hopefully, the report template I've provided here helps reduce some of that monthly burden.

Although I've only really scratched the surface on using these reports effectively, I certainly plan to discuss some approaches to using these numbers in later articles. For now, I'm wondering if an easy second step would be to add a sheet to this template that produces graphs from the data? Feel free to let me know what you think in the comments below, and I'll see if I can find the time to whip up a more visual representation of these numbers in a bonus tab in the Google Sheets document.