The Active Users report can help you quickly gauge the level of user interest in your website. Click on the Active Users report under Audience.
Active Users measures the number of unique users who initiated sessions on your site over the last day, seven days, fourteen days, or thirty days. You can use this to monitor traffic drops. Short-term drops may be due to negative press or social content, while long-term drops may signal new release problems or the inability to build a growing audience.
The Cohort Analysis report lets you examine specific groups of users and their behavior, to better inform your marketing. Click on the Cohort Analysis report.
At the top of the report are several menus we can use to understand whether the Google Merchandise Store is increasing product revenue.
Cohort Type lets you select a single dimension of cohort to report on. The cohort type “Acquisition Date” groups cohorts based on when users started their first sessions with your site.
Cohort Size determines the size of each cohort. You can group by day, week, or month of acquisition.
The metric selector lets you choose the metric you want to evaluate for each cohort.
The Date Range selector has preset date ranges that vary based on the cohort size. If you group the cohorts by day, the date range will offer choices from 7 to 30 days.
To check product revenue, set the Cohort Size as “by week,” the metric as “Revenue per User,” and the date range as “Last 9 weeks."
Notice that the Cohort Report builds a table that shows the average revenue per user for the cohorts we defined.
The top row shows average revenue per user across all users.
The other rows show each cohort by week of acquisition. Darker blue indicates higher results and lighter blue indicates lower results. If you ran a marketing campaign during a specific week, you could track if it prompted higher revenue per user and run similar campaigns in the future.
If you see that revenue per user tends to plateau around week 2 post-acquisition, you could leverage that insight when planning your remarketing campaigns.
To compare cohorts of general site users with those who first landed on Android pages, apply the Android Landing Page segment you created earlier.
By comparing these segments, we can analyze the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns that brought users to Android product pages.
Next, we'll explore the Benchmarking reports.
To see data in Benchmarking reports, you must first enable Benchmarking. An account admin can find this feature under Account Settings. Checking the box to enable Benchmarking sets your account to share your own data anonymously. Data will populate in the Benchmarking reports in the Audience section.
Under Audience, click Benchmarking, then Channels.
Benchmarking reports enable you to compare your data with anonymized aggregated industry data from other companies who share their data. This can help you set meaningful business goals, gain insight into industry trends, and give you a baseline to measure your own business.
At the top of each report, you can select from over 1600 industry verticals to compare your business against. You can also select a particular region and a daily session size that’s comparable to your own.
Click Industry Vertical and type "All Shopping" into the search field. Select "All Shopping."
Select the Country “United States” and “All Regions.”
Select size of daily sessions: 5000-9999.
This allows us to compare the Google Merchandise Store property with all the properties in the “Shopping” industry in the U.S. that receive comparable average daily sessions.
The Channels report compares your channel data to benchmarks for each channel in the Default Channel Grouping. You can quickly see which channels perform better in Acquisition and Behavior based on the green up or red down arrow.
More darkly colored cells indicate larger differences in outperforming or under-performing other businesses in the category you selected.
Click the Location report.
The Location report compares your Country/Territory data to the benchmarks for each of the Countries and Territories from which you receive traffic. Since we already selected Country/Region of "United States," we'll only see the U.S. show up in this report.
Click the Devices report.
The Devices report compares your Devices data to the benchmarks for desktop, mobile, and tablet traffic.
Note that you can click a visualization button to turn the metric values in the table on and off:
You can click another visualization button to turn the heatmap colors on and off:
