Analytics Expert

Contextual Help Resources

You can get information about any report you’re looking at by clicking one of the Help Resources. About this Report offers a brief description of the report. Conversion University provides insight into how you might use and interpret the data. Common Questions links to Help Center articles that are related to the report.

Create Context for Your Data

When analyzing your traffic, avoid focusing on just a single metric. This pageviews result by itself isn’t actionable because you don’t know what the number really means. But, when you look at pageviews in the context of other metrics, you start to get clearer picture. For example, look at the bounce rate. Half of the time that people entered the site through this page, they left the site without looking at any other pages. This page is very important. By comparing the pageviews to the site average, we can see that this page accounts for over 28% of all the pageviews. How has the performance of this page changed over time? This page is receiving 20% fewer visits than it did last week and people are spending 10% less time on it. And last week, the bounce rate was only 24% — now it’s double that number. So, putting data into context can help us ask the right questions and decide on a course of action. Let’s look at another example.

Creating Context with Visualization

Here we are looking at the Content by Title report. We’re using the Compare to Site Average visualization to see which pages have significantly higher bounce rates than the site average. The bounce rate for the first title is nearly 20% higher than the site average. The red bar shows that it’s performing worse than the site average.

Looking for Trends

Analyzing trends is another useful way to bring context into your analysis. The graph on the slide shows us that pageviews peaked in May. Did visits increase or did each visitor look at more pages?

Investigating Changes in Trends

Using the Graph Mode to compare Visits and Pageviews, we see that Visits and Pageviews have increased proportionally.

Data Driven Decision Making

Now let’s identify which traffic sources led to the increase in traffic and revenue. We do this by looking at the All Traffic Sources report and clicking on the Ecommerce tab. Comparing two days of traffic, we find that — although several sources sent an increasing number of visitors to the site — only Google organic and Google referral had a significant impact on revenue. Therefore, we know that although other campaigns increased overall traffic, they did not bring in purchasers. This kind of information can help you decide where to focus your promotion and site content resources.

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