Google Analytics – Executive Overview – Marketing Summary

Google Analytics – Executive Overview – Marketing Summary

The Marketing Summary report is a quick and easy Top Five report. It displays the Top 5 Sources, the Top 5 Keywords and the Top 5 Campaigns.

Top 5 Sources represent the top 5 referrals (who sent traffic to your website).

Top 5 Keywords represents those keyword phrases which users entered into a search engine to find your website.

Top 5 Campaigns displays which campaigns produce the most traffic. A campaign is define either as organic (search engine traffic), referral (a link to your site from some other source), direct (URL typed into browser), or there is an actual name of an Adwords Campaign. A fifth type of exists: not set. If this pops up on the report, there are links out there pointing to your site that have some sort of campaign variable in them that Analytics can’t identify. Using services like Yahoo Search Marketing and the like would produce a “not set” category within Analytics. Consult Analytics Help for information on letting Analytics identify non-Google based campaigns.

Each of these three sections shows the number of visits and the number of conversions for the given time frame. Additionally, two different time frames can be set in order to do comparisons. If these time frames are set, a little red or green arrow will display next to each number. These arrows indicate whether the visitor/conversion rate has increased or decreased compared to the previous time frame.

I appreciate the work Analytics has done to display items easily and simply. However, what if I want to see more than the top 5? Analytics does not seem to display ALL the data in a lot of its reports. It often lumps items into an “other” category. There is no visibility into what makes up that “other” category. Plus there doesn’t exist a complete keyword list. I want to see ALL the keywords that where used to find my site and which search engine was used to perform that search. Buried in the list of reports is a semi-complete Referring Source report and a Campaign Conversion report. However, these do not provide what I would consider full and complete visibilty.

The important stats to watch on this report are the increase/descrease red and green arrows. Ideally, comparing month to previous month, these arrows should always display green. However, take into consideration the seasonality of a website. Retail websites will see a decidedly sharp decrease moving from December to January. This is to be expected.

The Marketer View Marketing Summary report is the same as this one.

UPDATE:
Be sure to read three problems with Google Analytics.