There’s no need to hire a programmer–some of my favorite reports are quick and easy to create.

Create a Market Segment

If you’re a company that caters to local or regional clients, you may want to create an Advanced Segment first. This will allow you to view any reports—including custom designed ones—as they really apply to your target market.

Under Advanced Segments, create a new custom segment. For this example, we’re going to create a segment for the territory of Harrisburg, Lancaster, and York, Pennsylvania.

Select Visitors, then slide the “City” dimension over to the report form. For “Condition” select “Matches Exactly”, then type “Harrisburg”. Continue this process for Lancaster and York, ensuring that you put “or” between each.

Then, because some of these cities exist in other states, I will add an “and” statement and slide over the Region dimension and “Match Exactly” to “Pennsylvania”.

The last step is to name your segment. In this case, I’m calling it “York-Harrisburg-Lancaster-PA”. Then click on “Test Segment” to view the results. You now have the capability of viewing that market segment in any report—custom or canned. Now let’s monitor your traffic building progress.

Monthly Organic Progress Report

Organic search results are unpaid traffic that is sent to your website from the search results. To easily view your monthly organic search results, click on “Custom Reporting”, then “Create New Custom Report”. You’ll notice the same format you used when you created your market segment.

Start with the metrics—slide over the metrics for Visits, Time on Site, Pages per Visit, Bounces and Bounce Rate. Most of these metrics are self-explanatory except for the Bounce Rate. The Bounce Rate is important—it’s the percentage of visits that immediately click off your site. It’s a great indication that either the wrong traffic is being sent to your site, wrong keyword usage, or the site needs some work.

Now, under the Dimensions section, select “Medium” and slide it over to your report. Medium is the breakdown of organic, referrals, or direct visits to your website. To add a Sub-Dimension, slide over “Month”, then “Keyword” below that.

Be sure to edit the name to something you’ll better recognize. In this case I’m calling my report “Medium Progress by Month”. Your report should now look something like this:

To finish, select “Create Report”.

Save Your Report to the Dashboard

Select your report, then drill down to Organics, then Month. Apply your market segment filter by selecting the “Advanced Segments” in the upper right corner. Checkmark the “York-Harrisburg-Lancaster-PA” segment to apply to your custom report. You can deselect “All Visits” to view only your new market segment. Now that you have it the way you want to view it, select “Add to Dashboard” and you’ll have an instant view of the organic results every time you log onto your Analytics account. Or, better yet, click on “Email” and schedule this report to arrive in your inbox on a daily, weekly or monthly interval. Quick and easy—nothing to it!

Artspell Web Solutions offers affordable custom website design and web pages that are optimized from day one to get the best search engine results. Our full-service shop offers design, search engine optimization (SEO), traffic building, hosting, and database services.

“Why?” you ask. It’s simple–many of the websites competing for this keyword phrase are not search engine optimized. Most companies (particularly small ones) do not spend money on intangibles like search engine optimization. Chances are that if it wasn’t included in the price when they first had their site designed, it probably didn’t happen. Sad for them, but good for you–the competition.

Take care in selecting the right keywords for your business website. Use Google’s Search-Based Keyword Tool to find out how many monthly searches it brings in. Pay no attention to the competition gauge because this tool doesn’t rate the competition–remember, there is good AND bad competition. To rise in the rankings and generally become a much better competitor, you will want to:

- Marita Hines, Artspell Web Solutions

Artspell Web Solutions has been creating websites and database solutions for over nine years. We offer custom web design services at very affordable prices. We’re a full service shop–design, database, search engine optimization, hosting, domain name, and much more.