GA+ Report Settings
Audience Selection
For all reports we will generally apply an overall filter to exclude traffic from Mondaq.com – the keyphrases from Mondaq that you are tracking in your own GA instance (this is only if you have ‘GA Integration’ switched on).
We will limit your audience to the country/ies where you are most focused (unless you are a firm with a more global emphasis).
If you are interested in any particular metrics or regions just let us know and we’ll change your report format.
Metric Used
The reports show Users and not Unique PageViews because Users gives you a ‘truer’ and more useful representation of the activity because it counts each person once over the period.
Unique Pageviews counts the person once per visit (“session” in GA’s terminology). GA assumes a visit is over when no page on your site is hit by the user for 30 mins.
Blog sites (or other separate websites you run)
The GA+ reporting reports on your main website and may not have access to any other site you run. We recommend that you are better off centralising your reporting through one GA instance as then you do not get a fragmented view of your digital activities. Our GA Enriched product also does that for you (we will integrate reporting so that it picks up your visitors to all your subsites, correctly labelled and consolidated in one report).
Clean data
GA+ reporting reports on all traffic in your GA instance. Visits from your own network addresses should normally be excluded for most firms, or internal referrals if you have multiple subsites. Your GA instance should also be set to exclude automated bots which can impersonate users (you can exclude a continually updated list of some 14,000 bots out there).
As part of GA Enriched we clean your data to more accurately reflect the market you are interested in.
GA+ Report Structure
Detail Report
This reports contains where traffic to your website is coming from and where they went. It breaks out top practice areas, fee-earner biography activity, articles inside and outside search, third party channels and more for your major markets.
| Column | Graph/Table | Description |
| 1 | Social media visitors & number of visits over quarter | unique people by social media for your key markets and by the number of visits to your website. |
| 1 | City of visitor & number of visits over quarter | unique people by city for your key markets and by the number of visits to your website. |
| 1 | Websites sending visitors & # of visits (NOT search or social) | Unique people by websites they came from and the number of visits to your website. We exclude social media traffic and search engines from this graph as this is reported separately. We also manually exclude some referral spammers (these are sites that you will see as referring traffic that are in reality not doing so but are randomly hitting Google’s Analytics API to get you to visit their website to see who they are) and GA Enriched puts in a place a more systematic method for excluding referral spam that does not involve manually investigating urls. We also exclude job hunting websites as this report is focused more on business development / marketing outcomes. |
| 1 | Organic search phrases & ONLY New Visitors | Unique (new) people who hadn’t previously visited and how they found you (which website they came from and what search phrases they used). |
| 2 | Most visited lawyer profiles & visitor’s area | What bios unique people visited and from which cities/areas they are from. |
| 2 | Most visited practice area pages & visitor’s city/area | What practice groups unique people visited and from which cities/areas they are from. |
| 2 | Most visited news (NOT search engines) & visitor channel | What articles unique people visited and which channels they are from. This graph attempts to measure traffic just from your newsletter program (to measure this properly we suggest GA Training for your staff as it leads to better tracking for your newsletter and other outreach programs like social media campaigns). Note that if you are running your articles as PDFs (or you are running a duplicate PDF with every article) you will not be able to track traffic (which often comes directly from search) to your articles (simply because there is no Google Analytics tracking code executed on a PDF). Your analytics will therefore significantly understate your traffic if you depend heavily on PDFs. Most firms are now phasing out PDFs for these and numerous other reasons. Read more about PDFs disadvantages here. |
| 2 | Most visited pages from search EXITED IMMEDIATELY | Includes all the top landing pages where only 1 page was visited or the user didn’t go anywhere else. They may have read the page or exited immediately. |
Comparative Report
Your data is compared to the previous period. If you have recently done a website revamp, the comparative figures will be vastly different and sometimes even zero.
| Column | Description |
| 1 | Quarter-on-quarter changes for key cities, user type and mobile |
| 2 | Quarter-on-quarter changes in how you’re acquiring new people |
| 3 | Quarter-on-quarter changes in interest in your bios, articles and practice group areas |
HVA Report
The custom Google Analytics reports we build are based on ALL visits to your website – but not all visits are equal.
Some visits are of higher value – we label them ‘High Value Activity’ (HVA) visits. For example, visiting the Contact Us page can mean the visitor wants to contact you; visiting a lawyer’s profile page that a prospective client might be assessing you.
Because the order of pages visited is measured, you can trace a visitor’s journey, for example, from reading an article through to visiting your author’s bio. And over thousands of visits you can see which articles most drive new business – for other examples see GA Enriched.
The insights you get in practice depend on the number and types of High Value Activities (HVAs) – which in turn depends on your website’s design and your Google Analytics implementation. You can read more about HVAs and contact our GA support team to discuss how to fix missing data, for example, to track lawyer HVAs such as someone phoning a lawyer from their profile.
| Column | Graph/Table | Description |
| 1 | Social media channels generating most HVAs | Which social media channels are generating the largest number of HVAs as opposed to simply sending the most traffic. You should compare this information to the internal efforts you are putting into those channels. |
| 1 | Device types generating most HVAs | What devices are currently driving HVAs and what device categories are growing fastest. Device categories with higher HVA Rate levels should be the most prominently used for testing and there are also copy implications e.g. high growth in mobile HVAs should also mean shorter and more broken up copy. |
| 1 | Third party websites most HVAs (excl social media) | Which 3rd party websites high value traffic is coming. This can show what, if any, money spent on 3rd party websites is effective. |
| 1 | Cities/States generating HVAs | Which cities/states are generating the most higher value activities amongst new and returning visitors to your website. Compare the results to your marketing activities to evaluate their effectiveness in those areas. GA Enriched provides the HVA Rate which shows you the percentage of visits that result in a high value activity so you can also use this to understand which areas might generate the highest return for you if you gave them more marketing resources. This information may also be useful in talking to staff in offices in those areas. |
| 1 | Hours and days generating most HVAs | What days and times of the week are typically associated with higher value activity and what are associated with lower value activity. Newsletters, or other promotional activities like social media updates or even seminars should potentially be targeted to the times of higher value activity. Ideally these times should have both high HVA rates and also high traffic levels (provided in GA Enriched). You should compare this data to the times that you currently release updates. |
| 2 | Lawyer profiles generating most HVAs | How many high value activities are associated with a lawyer. GA Enriched provides a conversion rate (people who go to a lawyer’s profile actually contact that lawyer) for each profile in addition to HVAs. Profiles with a high conversion rate indicates that most people who go to that profile go to the contact details for the lawyer so typically you will want to preserve text in those profiles and potentially look at the text to understand how it compares to other people in that practice group. |
| 2 | Practice group pages generating most HVAs | Which practice group pages are driving the most HVAs. Practice group pages that have high traffic but are driving low HVA Rates should be your priority in terms of edits, as changes to them are likely to have the biggest impact. Also of secondary interest should be pages that have low visit counts. These could also benefit from edits. Pages that have high HVA Rates may benefit from further promotion. HVA rates are visit counts are provided in GA Enriched. |
| 2 | Publications generating most HVAs (excl search engines) | For most firms, articles will typically generate the highest number of HVAs of any class of information on your website. Articles that deliver a higher number of HVAs (e.g. sending people to the firm contact details page or lawyer profiles) are possible candidates for other forms of promotion (sponsored updates on LinkedIn for instance or just LinkedIn campaigns) and this data can also help you understand what topics resonate the best with audiences that are most likely to convert to further business for you (as opposed to just articles that generate higher numbers of visits). Search traffic is excluded therefore traffic is most likely from your newsletters or LinkedIn. |
| 2 | Older publications most HVAs (from search engines) | These are articles read by people coming in from search. Cities that are a smaller source of traffic from organic search are included in the Other group. |
GA Metrics and Dimensions (alphabetically)
Avg. Page Load Time
Average Page Load Time is the time it takes for a page to display in the browser for a visitor. This report helps identify whether you have issues with the host for your website or with the code taking too long to run in your website but is not always available for all sites. The left hand axis of this graph shows time to download the page, the right hand axis shows the number of pages accessed by the visitor in the visit (normally the slower the website page load time the less pages are visited and studies demonstrate even quarter second delays can alter conversion rates on ecommerce sites by single digit percentages).
Campaign traffic
Traffic that comes from campaigns such as Google AdWords, email campaigns, banner ads or social media shares. Our GA Training covers how to achieve much better tracking. You need to be proactive and have a tracking strategy to properly track your campaigns.
City
GA uses IP addresses to identify location of visitors. However visitors coming from corporate networks may not always show the right city as large companies particularly often have one firewall in one city from which all traffic exits the internal network (for security reasons).
Clicks
How many times your advertisements were clicked by users if you’re using paid search traffic.
Clicks vs. Sessions (PPC)
The Clicks column in your reports indicates how many times your advertisements were clicked by users, while Sessions indicates the number of unique sessions initiated by your users. There are several reasons why these two numbers may not match:
– A user may click your ad multiple times. When one person clicks on one advertisement multiple times in the same session, AdWords records multiple clicks while Analytics recognizes the separate pageviews as one session.
– A user may click on an ad, and then later, during a different session, return directly to the site through a bookmark. The referral information from the original session is retained in this case, so the one click results in multiple sessions.
– A user may click on your advertisement, but prevent the page from fully loading by navigating to another page or by pressing the browser’s Stop button. In this case, the Analytics tracking code is unable to execute and send tracking data to the Google servers. However, AdWords still registers a click.
– To ensure more accurate billing, Google AdWords claims that it automatically filters invalid clicks from your reports. However, Analytics reports these clicks as sessions on your website in order to show the complete set of traffic data.
Direct traffic
Traffic that comes when someone types your URL into their browser. ‘Direct’ can also refer to the visitors who clicked on the links from their bookmarks/favorites, untagged links within emails, or links from other documents that don’t include tracking variables (such as PDFs or Word documents).
Landing Page
The Landing page is the very first page a visitor hits on your website in a Session.
Medium
Every referral to a website also has a medium. Possible mediums include: “organic” (unpaid search), “cpc” (cost per click, i.e. paid search), “referral” (referral), “[custom]” (the name of a custom medium you have created), “none” (direct traffic has a medium of “none”).
New User
People where the GA cookie indicates they haven’t visited your site previously. This approximates how your website is doing in attracting people who have never visited you before ( the closest analogy to business development as it excludes staff and your existing customers). Also see Users below. In addition, to help you understand where you might be acquiring new business online, websites such as recruitment are excluded (see ‘Organic traffic’ below).
Organic Search traffic
The visitor comes from a search engine.This source is called “organic,” because it’s natural; it hasn’t been paid for. Note that quite often search traffic comes from existing clients who are simply looking up the contact details for one of your staff. In fact we estimate that around 15% of traffic to clients comes from Google where the visitor is a genuine prospect as opposed to an existing client looking up office address details or the like.
Pages/Session
For some pages you will see zero pages a session – the reason is that pages/session is only calculated based on that page as a landing page. If people only hit that page after already having entered your site pages/session will be zero.
Paid Search traffic
PPC (‘pay per click’) campaigns also fall under Search Engine traffic, even though marketers pay for them. Their ads are placed in distinct sections around the ‘organic’ results (see below). By using GA Enriched techniques Mondaq can set up sophisticated pay per click campaigns where we can track the path a lead followed all the way from search phrase to phone call to one of your staff, so you can very quickly measure ROI to start, close, and refine PPC campaigns
Referral traffic
Traffic that comes via a link in another (non-search engine) website. These “other websites” could be a partner site, blog, post on a social media site and more. Links from one page to another on your website can also come through as referral traffic if GA is not correctly configured. If Mondaq LinkedIn Integration is switched on, some (but not necessarily all) of the clicks from LinkedIn will be from LinkedIn Integration. GA Training for your staff will result in better tracking for your newsletter and other outreach programs like social media campaigns. We normally exclude things like student recruitment traffic as well as referral spam.
Sessions aka ‘Visits’
A session or visit is a sequence of pages in a 30 minute window. To some degree a proxy for how ‘engaged’ the visitor was (GA Enriched provides a better analysis of this). If they haven’t hit another page within the 30 minutes then that Session / Visit is considered over and any future activity is attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes are counted as part of the original session.
Session Duration
The session duration is the period of time a user is actively engaged with your website, app, etc but GA can only measure this by comparing the time you visited two different pages on the same site (if you only visit one page the session duration is zero).
Source
Incoming traffic to a website has an origin, or source. Examples include: “google” (the name of a search engine), “facebook.com” (the name of a referring site).
Users
Users that have had at least one Session within the selected date range. GA drops a cookie (small text file id on your hard drive) on each visitor device (PC / tablet / phone) and uses that to recognise return visits from that visitor. So each person should only appear once in the User column unless returning via a different device or blocking cookies. A ‘New User’ is someone for whom there is no GA cookie present. We typically prefer Users over Sessions or raw page counts so that we can provide you reports that are less influenced by outlier individuals accessing a very high number of pages or unfiltered internal staff.