- The first report I look at is the daily trend of visits. Increasing visits are generally a good sign, but a trend in line with an earlier period can also be fine. The trend of visits compared to the same period of the previous year, on the other hand, should always be growing.
- The second report is the sales trend in the Conversions section of google analytics. Here it is important to look at the conversion rate which should have a fairly linear trend except in the presence of advertising campaigns that can bring many new users to the site and few conversions.
- The third is the sources of traffic that is inside Acquisition> Channels. Traffic is generally divided into direct, organic, referral, email and social. This is to understand where we are generating traffic from. Then if we want to see the trend of a specific channel, I check the check box on the left of the channel and draw the lines. See image below.
Then I'm going to see how sales are moving on the different devices. Desktop, Tablet and Smart phones. I usually compare the current period with the previous period by selecting from the Google Analytics calendar at the top right.
The last report is the one relating to user behavior, in particular the number of subscriptions to the newsletter. Given that a large part of the traffic comes from the newsletters that are sent to users, it is important that new subscribers are always acquired and that those who unsubscribe are under control at the same time.
Bonus report
A report that I look at weekly is the one related to the keywords searched through the internal search engine on the site. This report tells me exactly what users expect to find when they come to the site.