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How to download & automate reports in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is extremely powerful, and can produce very detailed and comprehensive reports. Often times you need to include a chart, graph or general report of the data in a customized report for your client or company. For example, I pull together (with Excel & Word) various statistics into a weekly web report, compare performance to the previous week, and send it to an entire Marketing team.

Well, Google Analytics allows you not only to obtain the data/analytics you need, but also to download them in a transmittable or processable format.

Google Analytics - Visitors Overview

The Visitors Overview is the first tab/link/option in Google Analytics. It is a very basic report; most of the data within it is presented on the Dashboard. There are, however, three additional metrics to the Dashboard: Absolute Unique Visitors, and the Technical Profile which provides a short Browsers list, as well as the top five connection speeds.

Text vs. HTML emails

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

I've heard many people ask whether they should design their emails in text or HTML. The answer is: both. HTML messages will almost always outperform the text-based counterparts, but you should always include a text alternative as well. All decent emailing applications will allow you to send a multipart email, which displays the HTML version whenever possible, but will render the text version if the email client calls for it (such as on a mobile device). Oh, and one quick text tip: use hard returns (the enter key) to create line breaks, making your paragraphs no wider than 4". If you leave the text-wrap up the email client, you'll get very wide paragraphs that are very hard to read.

How to give someone else access to view your Google Analytics reports

Recently someone asked me to take a look at their Google Analytics account. I gave them my Gmail address to obtain access, but it wasn't immediately obvious just how to grant me report viewing access (or administrative access for that matter). There are actually 2 ways to provide someone with access.

Email Design Consideration - The Preview Pane

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

The preview pane is that portion of your email client that allows you to see what the contents of an email are, without opening it. Surveys have found that nearly 70% of business users use preview pane, the majority of which use the bottom view option.

The Google Analytics dashboard - explained

So now that I've taken you through the process of signing up for and installing Google Analytics, it's time to dive into the reporting interface! Once you've given your account at least 24 hours to collect some data, simply click on the "View Reports" link, which will take you to the dashboard. By default, these are the key performance indications (KPIs) that are displayed on the dashboard:

• Visits
• Site Usage
• Visitors Overview
• Map Overlay
• Traffic Sources Overview
• Content Overview
• Goals Overview

You can arrange the metrics any way you wish. Simply move your mouse pointer over the heading of the box, the cursor will become an arrow. You can then click and drag it to any position you wish. This is useful if certain metrics are more important to you. For example, if you're most interested in your goal performance, you'll want to drag that box to the top to see how it's performing first!

The dashboard, while basic, still can provide great insight into the performance of key areas of your website. I'll go through them one at a time.

Email Design Consideration - Blocked Images

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

One of the biggest concerns for email designers is blocked images. All modern email clients block images by default for security reasons, and that can seriously distort your design. If you're unconvinced about how serious this is, consider the following email:

Email design

Excerpted from ConvUrgency.com's Smart Email Marketing Guide

As you're well aware, web design nowadays is very fancy. Sadly, due to client and security constraints, email design is not. While new websites are going for a 'Web 2.0' look and feel, emails are still stuck on HTML 3.0. You've probably noticed that most of the emails you receive are fairly basic in format.