Best top 5 actionable insights from Google Analytics

[Nightwing]

Buongiorno from 14 degrees C cloudy wetherby UK

With a whole gamut of books out there are written around the topic of "Actionable Web analytics" where you have to wade through chapters of how to suck eggs and how to get analytics part of your business culture (whatever! most clients who look after their websites are entry level Marketing Execs who pay the digital agencies to do the thinking for them) I'd like to cut to the chase and list out say a top 5 of actionable insights a client would actually give the time of day for so heres my top five, whats yours?

1. Landing page bounce - showing them the £5k landing page designed with no conversion thinking is turning off customers
2. Synching up PPC campaigns to analytics and showing them how much money they are waisting
3. Goal funnels - Showing them there 20 step shopping conversion funnel gets abandoned at step 3
4. Non brand keyword traffic (although a stack of this gets blocked by "not provided" Big groan...)
5. Event tracking on there 10 page carousel anner showing them no one clicks on banners 2 - 10

So under the strict label of "Actionable data only" from Google analytics whats your best insights you share with clients in the hope that they may actually give data reports the time of day!

Grazie tanto,
David

[chris.kent]

Interesting question.

Some metrics  that I have shown clients that they really respond to are:

The number of refferal sites/refferal keywords, and refferal traffic after a successful linkbuilding campaign. Especially if you can link it to sales.

Definitely CTR from SERPs

Geodata can inform a lot of decisions about purchasing advertising outside of a country wide campaign on AdWords.

The last one would agreeing with you on Goal Funnels.

[SEO5Team]

This insight might need some help from the client however showing them what keyword driven leads are actually generating sales (esp through PPC) is a huge data set. A lot of times the keywords driving the most # of leads for the lowest CPL are not the ones bringing in the sales.

[Nightwing]

We did have the best summer in eons mind! Ok regarding event tracking on carousels...
I write the code & the dev team puts it in place so i kind of 50% understand but if it helps here is an example of a site that has event tracking on carousel banners:
http://www.perspex.co.uk/ (the event tracking has been added to the read more link)

Hope this helps

[Dan-Lawrence]

ps - sorry forgot my temp: Shivering at 15 on the Isle Of Wight as a generally lovely summer comes to a depressing close

[RobertFisher]

Nightwing,

(Hang on while I convert this to something you will understand..... oh yeah, 33 C and slightly humid at about 90%. I am so glad it has cooled down here!)

First good question, second like Dan - tell me about the carousel event tracking!! Good one.

Dan gives one I love in the CTR comparison before and after meta / titles, etc.

Another is to insure that GA and GWMT are linked and to show search queries. I never cease to be amazed by the gold in this data. When I show it to clients they light up.

Best

[Dan-Lawrence]

ps - how do you set up event tracking for different frames of a carousel ? im going to use that on a client straight away, thanks for that

[Dan-Lawrence]

Good list id go with most of those but i would certainly add CTR from search, demonstrating improvements after implementing meta descriptions and titles you have spent hours crafting & tuning to perfection.

As compared to clients probably non existent meta descriptions before you got involved where google was just sucking first bit of copy it came across which was probably totally irrelevant and devoid of a CTA, as well as boring default titles i.e. 'Welcome to brand X website' compared to your new version:   'Brand X gonna rock your world'