I first have to give a shout out to my buddy Jason Stum who helped me identify a leak in our adwords budget.

Once I started to dig in a bit more, I was able to uncover and recover a pretty hefty refund from our agency partner.

 

In this post I am going to show you how I built some customized reports in Google Analytics that drill down in to device types, regions, user domains and why it’s important to look at this stuff.

You first want to start by loggin into your Google Anaytics account and make sure you are looking at the main homepage there.

Then, you will click CUSTOMIZATION in the top nav. This is where we can build all types of custom reports that drill down data in ways you just cant do using the standard Analytics reports.

Next, you’ll want to click on NEW CUSTOM REPORT.

This is the dashboard we will use to create our report and set up the data in way that is kind of like a data tree. So, if you are able to think ahead of time how you want the spread to look. You’ll save a lot of time. More on that later.

Now that we have a blank custom report canvas, we can begin by giving this report a name and making sure that the report type is EXPLORER.

METRIC GROUPS:
This is the basic metric or number of what you want to see. For this exmaple, we are looking for SESSIONS. So click on ADD METRIC and search for SESSIONS. Once you find it go ahead and add it to the report.

DIMENSION DRILLDOWNS:
This is the really fun part. As I mentioned above this is where we get to choose how we want the data ordered and displayed.

To give you some context of what I was looking for when I built this report. I was looking for

• Paid traffic
• Either Mobile or Desktop
• Regions outside of mine
• Network Domain (this tells us if someone was on wifi or cell)

Putting yourself through a quick excersize like this will save you a ton of time.

Q: What number am I looking for
A: Sessions

Q: What kind of Sessions?
A: Paid Traffic Sessions

Q: Paid Traffic from Mobile or Desktop
A: Both

Q: What Now?
A: Show me their region

Q: Now What?
A: Show me what network domain they were connected to

FILTERS
One of things I mentioned I wanted to do was look at the data above but outside of my region. So by building this into the report from the get go I wouldn’t be wasting my secondary drilldown to exlude region.
So in here you will want to

EXLUDE > REGION > EXACT > STATE NAME

Awesome! Now here is the really cool thing. Especially if you have a bunch of GA accounts. Instead of rebuilding this report for each of them you can simply click on the VIEWS option and select all the other accts you want to have this report.

Now click save and boom! Thats it…You should be redirected to the report you just built and can now start to drill down into all the various data points you’ve created.

So lets drill down a bit.

I want to see PAID TRAFFIC

What kind of Paid Traffic?

Desktop Paid Traffic..

What?! Why do I have PAID TRAFFIC coming in from Indiana when I am in Nevada? They aren’t even close.

Lets add a secondary dimension and see what KEYWORD these people are coming in on.

At this point, you can give your agency or whoever you might be having manage your adwords budget a call and find out why they are showing ads to people who live half way across the country…

There are many reasons why this is bad. Mainly because you probably dont sell cars to people across the country for one. 

Hope that helps some folks out there and below i’ve added a quick link that you can use to add the report to your custom reports tab if you are too lazy to build it yourself.

https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/template?uid=GvyEvnDBTj-xd0Nl6J3muQ