We all have been using custom reports on Google Analytics to have more control over what kind of data we would like to see. When you are investigating and want to dig deeper, what do you do? Add a secondary dimension right? Well if you are like me, then you are not happy with only the secondary dimension, you would wish that there were third or even fourth dimensions that you would like to add to your GA report so that you can wear your detective hat and crack on the case.
For example, this is a snapshot from Google merchandise store and let’s imagine that you are the marketing manager of this store. You have been running ad campaigns for a while and you would like to know which campaign is contributing to the purchases on the store. You have created a custom report with all the important metrics that would help you answer this solution. Now you see that adding a campaign is not helping you derive any insights, so you add the keyword as a secondary dimension to split this data on a keyword level.
What if your colleague Phil says, ‘Hey, we know that the world is heading towards mobile, are the majority of purchases happening on mobile for these keywords?’ or if it is your nerdy colleague Nathan asks ‘which match types are working well for the keyword set?’. Well, the traditional method would be to pull out a report in an excel format and then adding a pivot table within the offline file to address this question. Hold that thought, because this function will make your life much easier by saving you a ton of time especially for all the gazillion questions that pop up during the analysis phase. Introducing pivot function!
How to Acess Pivot Function in Google Analytics
- Click on the extreme left icon within your report, see the screenshot below for reference.
- You will be navigated to this view. As you can see the data is split by the campaign into the columns to the right with the session metric.
- Adjust the metric to the one you would like to investigate i.e, it would be eCommerce conversion rate in this case. To accomplish that, click on the drop-down next to pivot metrics. I have shared the screenshot in case you are having difficulties finding it.
- Choose the correct metric from the drop-down and the view changes to the following depicting the eCommerce conversion rate as requested.
- As you can see, the campaign names are listed within the columns and you would like to see the device category to answer Phil’s question. For that, select the drop-down next to ‘Pivot by’
and now choose the device category from the drop-down.
- To address Nathan’s question, you simply have to change the pivot by drop down again to the keyword match types to get the data set.
That’s it, it is that simple 🙂 Now you are equipped to do some deep analysis on what factors are affecting your KPIs and gain some useful insights that would help you to improve your conversion rate. Hope this was helpful and if you are looking into boost your conversion rate, feel free to check out the remarketing article here.
