It can be said that the Google Analytics source and medium report is one of the most widely used reports in analytics.
In this article, we want to introduce you to the most useful report in Google Analytics. Because these reports are not always easy to understand and since there are more than 50 reports in Google Analytics, it seems logical to do this! So which report should you use? In this section, we will show you our favorite report in Google Analytics and share with you the reason why we have chosen this report among all these reports. The way to use Google Analytics among all of us may be different according to our business goals and the industry in which we operate. Therefore, it is logical that some reports are more important to us than others. But there is one report that seems to be very useful in different areas according to my experiences.
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Source and Medium report in Google Analytics
Welcome to my favorite report, the Source and Medium report in Google Analytics!
You can find this report under the Acquisition and in Source Medium. This is the report I look at if there is no other report in Google Analytics. This part is the most important and valuable part of all Google Analytics, at least until we want to have an initial analysis. This report is all about online marketers and those who care about where their users are coming from. This report not only gives you a good answer to this question but also goes a few steps further and tells me how the overall performance is and how it can be improved.
What is a Source and Medium report?
Source Medium is a category in Google Analytics that tells you where your users came from when they landed on your site. Unlike other reports that report on channels, Source Medium is an entry point for raw data about your website entries that you can influence through UTM parameters.
So every time a user enters your website starts a new session and enters one of the rows of the image below that tells us where he entered from.
Why is this report our favorite?
We can quickly identify our most important traffic sources, so in this case, the source of organic Google searches, any important referrals, how paid advertising works, Google CPC, for example, and of course the traffic that Google can’t categorize. Slow down I call this traffic, dead traffic.
This case does not provide us with any analysis and interpretation because we do not know where it came from. So my suggestion is to always try to minimize this traffic and always send traffic with UTM parameters attached.
Metrics Metrics – Data Analysis
In these metrics sections, we get a great overview of what’s happening to the traffic coming into our site.
We have this ABC analysis model which stands for Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions. You may be familiar with these topics through the great reports above.
These topics go deep into our analytics and answer our questions about where the traffic is coming from, what they’re doing on our site, and whether they’re meeting the goals of our website.
In the photo below, everything is separated based on these sources and intermediaries, and we can see line by line how they are compared to each other. This is great because we can quickly compare different sources.
For example, Google is bringing the most traffic but e-commerce conversion is much less compared to this mentioned source, with much less traffic but a much higher conversion rate.
Maybe you should work on increasing this traffic source more because it has a much higher chance of conversion. If you don’t see any information in your eCommerce reports, it might be because you have goals installed, but if you don’t see any data at all, it means you haven’t defined and installed goals, and that’s definitely what you’re doing. You must do
Acquisition – Where are my users coming from?
For example; In the Google CPC column, we can analyze the impact of our incoming traffic through paid ads on Google. We get good traffic.
Behavior – What are they doing on my site?
This site has a bounce rate of 57%. What does this mean? 57% of users who entered the website through Google CPC visited only one page in this session, which shows us how relevant our landing pages are to the ad we have. So what does the user expect when he clicks on the ad? To come to a website that can find a product, for example, it will jump if it can’t find it.
Therefore, you will try to reduce this bounce rate and help the user to go to at least one other page and interact with other pages, but this will only happen if your ad is relevant to the user and When he clicks on the next page, he sees that there is a product he might want to buy on that page.
When the user is on the page, he clicks on something and looks at an average of 3.61 pages in this session and stays on the site for approximately one minute and 52 seconds. I remind you, these numbers do not have a special meaning by themselves. You should compare them with your other traffic sources and see where you need to improve if this is part of your marketing activities.
Conversions – Did my site reach its goals?
We can see how many of those who entered our site and clicked on the items we wanted became customers and how much profit they made for us. Profitability can also be a great KPI if you are, for example, a PPC manager. You probably know how much money you’ve spent over a given period, and then do a quick ROI analysis to see if the campaign is still profitable for you. Therefore, by asking these three simple questions, you can access very useful and efficient insights and analyses through these reports.
Multiple selections for further analysis
We can always dig deeper into these traffic sources like Google CPC, and other Google Analytics reports are about the same. You have AdWords reports, Search Console reports, Referral reports, and other things available that you can use to take a much deeper look at each of the traffic sources.
Once you get a better overview of the data you want to analyze more specifically, you’ll have more questions, and that’s really what Google Analytics is all about, starting to research and analyze.