New Google Analytics Reports – Acquisition, Behaviour & Conversions

If you’ve logged into Google Analytics this morning you’ll no doubt be seeing the new reports on the left hand side: Acquisition and Behaviour.

Acquisition section replaces the Traffic Sources section along with two new additional reports – Overview and Channels reports.

Google Analytics Acquisition Report

The Behaviour section replaces the Content section but still contains the same reports as before.

Acquisition – Overview Report

When you click on the ‘Acquisition > Overview’ report you will see something that looks like this:

Google Analytics Overview Acquisition Report

What you are presented with is 3 metrics each along the top grouped by Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions.

Update: The blue bars are best viewed in isolation. Please see comments below for an explanation.

At a quick glance you can see how each channel is performing from:

  • Acquisition (how much new traffic are we getting?)
  • Behaviour (What is the traffic doing?)
  • Conversions (Is this traffic turning into leads/orders/bookings/conversions etc)

Note: You can edit the channels to include your own marketing campaigns (banner ads, direct mail, social campaigns etc) if you’ve been using UTM tags to tag all your campaign links or you could just select from the drop down which mediums you would like to view:

dropdown

Acquisition – Channels Report

The Channels report is similar to Overview but allows you to drill down into each source or medium and then view how each specific channel is performing from an Acquisition, Behaviour and Conversions point of view.

Below shows you the new report for Referral Traffic:

Channel referrals report in Google Analytics

So from the above you can see that referring traffic from Distributors and Merchants is great for Acquisition. High % of new visits all round.

However, that traffic is not sticking around for too long. High bounce rates. Maybe the traffic should be going to another page which is more relevant? Prices? Dimensions? Packing Quantities?

Notice how traffic sent from Burton Roofing sticks around longer? Only a 25% bounce rate compared to others, and is generating us some conversions. Thank you Burton Roofing for sending us good traffic.

Below is the same report but this time for our Email campaigns:

email

All of the answers to common questions (how much new traffic are we getting? what is it doing? is it converting?) can now be obtained from one quick and easy to access report – as opposed to setting up lots of custom reports previously.

If anyone requires any help with understanding their Analytics data or require help setting up their Accounts then please do get in touch.

About Stuart Dinnie

Stuart has worked in the world of digital marketing for over 15 years. With his measured and planned approach, he has delivered robust digital strategies for construction companies to achieve real business growth. He now heads up the team at Pauley Creative as Managing Director and is leading his team & clients towards digital marketing excellence. He’s worked with over 100 construction clients; helping them on their digital transformation journey, providing sustainable strategies that return year on year incremental growth, delivering award-winning websites and adding value from board level to marketing assistant.

4 Responses to “New Google Analytics Reports – Acquisition, Behaviour & Conversions”

  1. Tim

    I’m confused by the blue bar chart style ranking – that is, is it a ranking, a nominal score, a share of the sources or what?

    Reply
  2. Pritesh Patel

    Hi Tim

    Yes it can be quite confusing having taken a 5th look. All the bars need to be looked in isolation I think.

    The blue bars in the acquisition column are ranked by visits – so the blue bars show % share of overall visits for each source.

    Behaviour bars show the bounce rate (if selected). So 66.92% being the highest so it respectively has the longest blue bar. Then each other bar works its way down from 66.92%. 33% would be half filled for example.

    Same for conversions – highest conversion rate has largest %.

    In a nutshell:

    Acquisition: Bigger the bar the better it is
    Behaviour: Bigger the bar the worse it is performance (bounce rate only)
    Conversions: Bigger the bar the better it is

    Hope this makes sense.

    Reply

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