Analyzing Website Activity

MBI allows you to easily integrate your advertising cost data with the rest of your data. This not only enables you to understand your website activity, but empowers you to derive the percentage of visitors on your website that become a registered user or make a purchase.

This article demonstrates how to set up a dashboard that will track your website activity - including page views, sessions, and users - and your customer conversion rate over time.

Prerequisites

Import your advertising cost data - Connect Google AdWords to MBI - this automatically syncs your AdWords spend in MBI.

Track user acquisition channel data - To tie your Google AdWords data to specific orders in your database, you must track user acquisition via Google Analytics E-commerce. This allows you to connect each order with a utm source and medium.

User acquisition campaigns

This collection of reports is built using the following:

  • Metrics that are automatically generated when you connect your Google AdWords data
  • Basic metrics that should already be available on your account, like Number of orders and New users
  • Dimensions created when joining your Google Analytics Ecommerce data to your database, like order’s utm source and order’s utm medium. Contact the support team if these fields are not currently available in your account

Building your reports

Start by creating a report that shows the number of page views, sessions, and users over time:

  1. Create a report.
  2. Click Add Metric, then mouse over the Google Analytics section at the bottom of the dropdown and select Page Views.
  3. Add another metric, again mousing over the Google Analytics section, this time selecting Sessions.
  4. Add a third metric, again mousing over the Google Analytics section, this time selecting Users.
  5. Now change your time period to a moving range, from 31 days ago to 1 day ago, and adjust the time interval to by day.
  6. Give your report a name (for example, Page views, sessions and users by day), and click Save.

The second report looks at the number of page views over the past year:

  1. Create a report.
  2. Click Add Metric, mouse over the Google Analytics section at the bottom of the dropdown and select Page Views.
  3. Change your time period to a moving range, from 13 months ago to 1 month ago, and adjust the time interval to by month.
  4. Give your report a name, like Page views by month, and Click Save.

The third chart looks at the bounce rate over the past year:

  1. Create a report.
  2. Click Add Metric, mouse over the Google Analytics section at the bottom of the dropdown and select Bounce rate.
  3. Change your time period to a moving range, from 13 months ago to 1 month ago, and adjust the time interval to by month.
  4. Give your report a name, like Bounce rate by month, and Click Save.

Now, look at the average session length of new visitors compared to returning visitors:

  1. Create a report.
  2. Click UICONTROL Add Metric, mouse over the Google Analytics section at the bottom of the dropdown and select Average Session Length.
  3. Change your time period to a moving range, from 13 months ago to 1 month ago, and adjust the time interval to by month?
  4. Add a Group by and select New or returning visitor. Check the Show All box; then click Apply.
  5. Give your report a name, like Average session length, and Click Save.

Next, look at your top referring domains in the last 30 days:

  1. Create a report.
  2. Click Add Metric, mouse over the Google Analytics section at the bottom of the dropdown and select Sessions.
  3. Change your time period to a moving range, from 31 days ago to 1 day ago, and adjust the time interval to none.
  4. Add a Group by and select ga:source. Check the Show All box; then click Apply.
  5. Add another group by and select ga:medium. Again, check the Show All box; then click Apply.
  6. Give your report a name, like Top 20 Referring Domains, 30 Days, and click Save.

Finally, look at conversion:

  1. Create a report.
  2. Add the following metrics:

  • New users

    • Click Hide beneath the metric name

  • Number of orders

    • Add a filter for Customer's order number = 1 and click Apply
    • Rename the metric by clicking the metric name, calling it Number of first orders, then click Hide

  • Number of orders

    • Hide the metric

  • Users

    • Hide the metric
    • Change the time period to 24 months ago to now, and adjust time interval to by month.
    • Add the following formulas by clicking Formula.
    • A/D then click Apply
    • Rename the formula Registration conversion
    • B/D then click Apply
    • Rename the formula First order conversion
    • C/D then click Apply
    • Rename the formula Any order conversion

  • Now give your report a name, like Conversion by month, and then click Save.

Next steps

Now that you have access to data on your web traffic and conversion rates, you can begin to mine this to drive business decisions, such as Which sites are best at driving traffic to your site? or Which of your campaigns are most effective at acquiring customers with the high lifetime value?

As you adjust ad spending and marketing strategy, you can continue to track the results in MBI, iterating on this dashboard to meet your company’s evolving priorities.

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