A Guide To Creating A Massive Impact With Basic Reporting

Google Analytics provides the opportunity to create sophisticated advanced segments and fancy custom reports in such a way it all perfectly fits your needs. Although I really love all these self-made reports, Google Analytics also contains around 80 or more standard reports. Not every report is evenly interesting, but I would like to point out a few basic Google Analytics reports with which you can make a huge difference, with only some minor changes.

A few of the companies I work for never looked at these reports or didn’t think they were interesting enough to look at. To make the reports more interesting for them, I created an Excel sheet in which I analyze which revenue potential they are currently missing. So which Google Analytics reports am I talking about? Here they are:

Java Support

The first report I want to cover is the Java Support report which can be found within the Visitors > Technology part of the new interface of Google Analytics. This report shows what percentage of your visits had Java Support and what percentage of your visits didn’t.

The following figure shows that 88.92% of the visits in this particular case had Java Support and 11.08% of the visits didn’t had Java Support. This is not something to get excited about, but it gets more interesting when you dive deeper into the data and select the ecommerce conversion rate for the two groups of visits.

What you can see in the second figure is that the e-commerce conversion rate for visits with Java Support is 1.48% and without Java Support, this is only 0.24%. This is a huge difference!

You may now have the attention of your manager or client, but to convince them even further, we are going to calculate what your manager or client is currently missing in revenue dollars due to the fact that visits without Java Support convert that badly.

The information I use for this case included the following stats from the selected time period:

What we are going to do is to calculate what the maximum extra revenue potential could be when visits without Java Support convert as well as visits with Java Support. We can serve a different landing page to people without Java Support for example, or we can adapt the page in such a way it works fine for visits without Java Support.

We will calculate this with the following equation:

(current number of visits * conversion ratio visits with java support * average order value) – (current number of conversions * average order value) = extra revenue potential

(779,521 * 1.48% * $600) – (10,484 * $600) = $6,922,146.48 – $6,290,400.00 = $631,746.48

This means an extra $631,746.48 in potential revenue when we can adapt the website in such a way that visits without Java Support convert as well as visits with Java Support. It is just a basic report and a basic analysis, but his should be a number your manager or client has to listen to and take action upon.

Browser Report

We can do the same trick for the browser report.

In the following example, I checked the largest four browsers with a significant amount of traffic. To get these browsers in one nice overview, I selected the advanced filter option (highlighted in the figure below) and for this case I filtered on all browsers with more than 20.000 visits in the selected time period.

The result is the following figure, which shows the e-commerce conversion rates for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. All browsers are responsible for at least 10% of the total visits and do represent a significant amount of traffic.

When we use the same formula as we did for the Java Support report, we will get the following equation:

(current number of visits * conversion rate of the highest converting browser * average order value) – (current number of conversions * average order value) = extra potential revenue

(779,521 * 1.41% * $600) – (10,484 * $600) = $6,594,747.66 – $6,290,400.00 = $304,347.66

This means an extra $304,347.66 in potential extra revenue when we can adapt the website in such a way that all browsers are converting as well as the highest converting browser.

Of course, this example does not take into account that some browsers tend to be used by totally different audiences with different needs and wants. It might therefore be unrealistic to get the full extra revenue potential, but such an analysis shows the potential value some organizations are currently missing.

Besides focusing on creating a better checkout process, these reports show it is also very interesting to check whether your website shows great differences between browsers or visits with or without Java Support.

You can do the same for screen resolution, etc, and you can use the same type of analyzing I just did for Java Support and Browsers. Please let me know if you are already optimizing your website based on these reports /analysis or if you have tips of how you are using these reports to convince your manager or client.