While this report is fun to look at, it is probably the least valuable. Here are some ways to use it:
See how much traffic comes from a new blog post or social
Know, immediately, if a sale or a one-day event is generating views or conversions.
Make sure the tracking URLs and custom events you set up work as they should
These are useful, but as you can imagine, the other reports have a much bigger impact.
Google Analytics Audience Report
The GA Audience Report gives you a high-level overview of the property you're currently viewing. Checking this report once a day gives you an idea of how you're trending overall.
Below “Overview,” you’ll see “Audiences,” as well as expandable menus for “Demographics,” “Interests,” “Geo,” “Behavior,” “Technology,” “Mobile,” “Multi-Device,” “Custom,” and “Benchmarks.”
Explore each section to find out what they can say about your visitors.
Each section describes an audience.
Active Users
Whoever named this report belongs to the same group as the person who named the guinea pigs: "active users" doesn't refer to users who are currently on your site, that's the real-time report.
The Active Users report shows the number of users who visited your website in the last day (1-day active users), week (7-day active users), two weeks (14-day active users), and four weeks (28-day active users).
What is the value of this report?
If you have more users on one day than the rest of the time, you're struggling with retention. That is, people aren't coming back to your site or app; you need to find out why.
I would also recommend looking at this report with multiple segments – for example, you might find that users in a certain age group have much better retention than average.
Customer lifetime
First things first: Need a refresher on customer lifetime and how to calculate it? We’ve got you covered .
The Customer Lifetime report gives you insight into how valuable users are to your business. You can see the customer lifetime of, for example, users you generated from email marketing versus those you acquired from organic search. With this information, you decide which channel to invest more in.
Some notes: Customer lifetime is capped at 90 days. However, the acquisition date range, which is adjustable, reflects all users acquired in that time period.
Let’s say you’re interested in viewing transactions for users acquired in the week before Black Friday. You’d adjust the date range to that week specifically. Then, you’ll see the average transactions per user for that cohort over the next 90 days.
Because HubSpot is a SaaS company, not an eCommerce company, it looks at goal completions per user, page views per user, and sessions per user per acquisition channel.
If my team completed a marketing campaign, I will analyze the same metrics by Acquisition Campaign.
But if you're in e-commerce and need to view transaction and revenue data, you'll need to set up e-commerce tracking .
(By the way, here's how to track revenue in HubSpot .)
Cohort analysis
Some people have gone so far as to say that cohort analysis is “ the most powerful report in GA . ”
So how does it work? This report groups users by one characteristic: “Acquisition Date” is the only “Cohort Type” you can use. By the way, the acquisition date is the day a user first visited your website.
You have several options from there.
First, select your cohort size : day, week, or month.
Next, find your metric or whatever you want to explore for this cohort. This can be further broken down into Per User, Retention, and Total.
Per user means the total count of that metric divided by the cohort size. So if you say Transactions per user, for example, you'll see the average number of transactions per user for that cohort.
Retention is simple: user retention, or the number of users who returned that day, week, or month (determined by the cohort size you selected) divided by the total number of users in that cohort.
Total – The total number of sessions, transactions, etc. that occurred for that cohort size.
Choose your date range. GA allows you to view up to three months of data.
Now let's dive into reading the report, because it's not obvious.
The left column shows the cohort type you selected (acquisition date, by default), broken down by cohort size (day, week, or month).
The first row shows totals for all users in that cohort. Each row below represents activity for that day, week, or month (in this example, we're looking at the month).
The row outlined in light blue reflects the chosen cohort size. Remember that the data only goes back a maximum of three months.
The row outlined in yellow shows the values for the selected metric (in this case, Goal Completions per User). In the eternal words of Calvin Harris: baby, this is what you came for.
Look at the first row. This shows that the average goal attainment for the country b2b b2c email list entire cohort in the first month after they were acquired was 1.09. The average goal attainment for the entire cohort in the second month after they were acquired dropped to 0.09. In the final month, it was 0.02.
Now look at the next three rows. It looks like the average goal completion, per user, in the first month after your acquisition increased slightly from December to January and again from January to February.
This is pretty standard behavior. Imagine instead that this report tells us that the average goal completion rate per user from February 1 to February 28, 2019 (the last row) was 4.07. Boom! That's almost four times higher than December and January.
We would definitely like to investigate further. And to do so, all we need to do is right-click on the cohort we are interested in.
Make sure to click on the column if you're looking to analyze the entire day, week, or month. Click on a cell to analyze only users who, for example, completed a goal three days after they were acquired on February 27, 2019.
When you right click, this box will appear:
Give this cohort a descriptive name. Change the views to "Any View" if you need to use this segment property-wide (which I generally recommend), then click "Create."
Done, you can now compare this cohort to any other segment in any report you require.
Google Analytics Acquisition Reports
The Acquisition report breaks down your traffic by source: organic, direct, referral, email, social, paid search, display, affiliate, and (Other). ( GA uses the (Other) category when it doesn't know how to categorize a subset of traffic.)
From All Traffic, you can click on Channels.
