While going through different reprots in Google Analytics, analyzing what is and isnt working can be difficult if you have thousands of keywords, referring sites and pages in your reports cluttering everything up. You want to be able to efficiently look through them to find something useful. To do this use the Advanced Filter under that report table.

Here a few uses I have found work great…

1. Top Landing Pages sorted by bounce rate

Content > Top Landing Pages

When you pull this report and sort by bounce rate you get a bunch of pages that only have one entrance that keep you from seeing the landing pages that matter. Create a filter with Entrances Greater than 100 or whatever number suits your site. Now the good and the bad are revealed and you can pick which pages need the most immediate help. Go to this post on analyzing top landing pages for the next step to finding insights.

2. Non-Paid Keywords sorted by conversion rate

Traffic Sources > Keywords. Show: non-paid. Ecommerce Tab

When looking at Non-paid keywords, create a filter for keywords with a conversion rate of better than 10%. There is something about these keywords that align perfectly with your site. You might consider including these words in your PPC campaigns or look at including them in meta tags, include them more often in the content of applicable pages or create altogether new pages that focus on these keywrods, all of which will help SEO.

3. Referring Sites sorted by per visit value

Traffic Sources > Referring Sites. Ecommerce Tab

Similar to sorting keywords, when you’re looking at referring sites you want to analyze only the ones that have any significance instead of all those random ones that have only one visit, so filter visits by a number that’s higher than the average and voilà, you can now see just those referring sites that convert the best. (To be able to see the full referring URL in the user defined report go here.)

This is one of the first things I look at when I analyze any website. Under Content in the left column click on Top Landing Pages. These are the most frequently landed on pages that your visitors see when they first come to your website. These are your “head” pages, which means that small improvements to these pages can quickly yield high ROI. In the furthest right column in the report is the bounce rate for each of these pages. % Bounce Rate means the % of visitors that came to your site and then left instantly, or in other words, that landing page was not compelling enough for them to read more than that one page. Bounce rate is a great metric to measure the quality of the traffic you are acquiring. It helps you hone in on where and how your website is failing your visitors.

So now you can see what is failing, in one more step you can get an idea of why it is failing: Click on one of those poor performing pages (I put little cash signs next to my contenders) with a high bounce rate to analyze it on it’s own. Then click on the drop down that says Content Detail on it and select Entrance Keywords. Do the keywords people use to get to this page align with the content of the page? Looking at their keywords you can get a sense of what their intent was and why it doesn’t match up with what the page is delivering. Now you have something to work with and fix. Now make the changes to that page so that it better matches what your visitors want. Bounce rate will go down, and positive outcomes will increase.