Top Monthly Report Templates in Megalytic

By Megalytic Staff - February 10, 2015

Your boss just called. He wants a monthly summary report showing how the website is doing compared with the month prior. That’s it. No further explanation on what, specifically, he wants to see. No conversation about goals or the campaign elements he’s most interested in. “Summary report” – that’s all you’ve got to go on.
What do you do?
We’ve all been there, and it can be a little disconcerting. Management, marketing, clients – they often need reports but can’t yet tell you exactly what data they want. They are looking to you, as the data expert, to show them the data they should be looking at. You must decipher the request and determine what to show.
Luckily, Megalytic can help by offering a variety of built-in templates to get you started creating reports. Our templates have been designed based on our experience with the reports most commonly sought out by agencies, in-house marketers and business owners.
In this post, we take a look at some of these templates, how to use them to get started and how to customize them to suit your needs.

Monthly Report Templates in Megalytic

 

How to Use Megalytic’s Built-In Templates

When creating a new report in Megalytic, you have many options at your fingertips. You can start with a blank page, use one of our built-in templates or use a template you have previously created and saved. To begin, click the “Create a New Report” button at the top left of your Megalytic dashboard.

 

Create a Report in Megalytic

 

Here, you’ll be able to select the template you wish to use to generate your report. If you select the “Blank” template, it will generate an empty report that you can populate by adding your own widgets. Selecting any of the other options will automatically generate a report for you using that template.

To help you choose the best template for your needs, each has a short description. Simply, select the one that matches your reporting objectives most closely. As shown in the image below, if you need additional help deciding, each template has an associated explainer video, help document and a sample download to reference. Simply click on the appropriate icon on the right-hand side.

 

Megalytic Built-in Templates and Descriptions

 

Once you have selected your template, the report is generated and you can further modify it to meet your specific needs.

Website Summary

The Website Summary template is probably the most popular built-in Megalytic template, and is used as a starting point by many. This template contains a set of basic charts and tables that, together, provide an overview of website performance over the past three months (13 weeks).

The first chart in the Website Summary report shows Weekly Website Traffic. Rolling your mouse over the bars provides a pop-up with additional information about each data point.

 

Weekly Website Traffic Chart

 

This is a great way to start off a general summary report because it shows the level of traffic the site is receiving, as well as an overview of the recent trend. If you would like to show a year’s worth of traffic (rather than the last 13 weeks), it is easy to change the date range and period used in the chart.

Another great chart included in this template is Website Traffic by Channel. This table shows which acquisition channels are sending your website the most traffic, and provides an indication of the engagement of the traffic using the Pages / Session metric (right hand column).

 

Website Traffic by Channel Chart

 

You’ll also notice that beneath this table is a comment block. Megalytic templates provide spaces where you can enter and format comments to describe the data being presented in the report. Clients and management often like to have a text description to help illuminate the insights provided by the data. In this case, you can see that while Organic Traffic provides the most visits, Paid Search and Referral achieve considerably higher engagement. That is the kind of observation you might want to provide in the comments section.

The Website Summary is most appropriate to share with management and clients who need a general overview of the volume and sources of traffic.

Website – Date Range Comparison

Another top monthly report template is the Website – Date Range Comparison report. Like the Website Summary template, it provides a general overview of key site metrics. The main difference here is this report provides a month over month comparison of website performance.

The first chart appearing in the Website – Date Range Comparison template is titled “Key Website Metrics – This Month vs Last.”

 

Key Metrics Monthly Comparison Table

 

This chart shows some core metrics compared across the last two months. In this case you can see the raw traffic metrics have gone up (e.g., Users, Sessions), but the engagement metrics (e.g., Avg Session Duration, Bounce Rate) have deteriorated slightly.

Another great chart in this template is the Referral Traffic bar chart showing the change in web traffic volume from month to month across the top referral sources.

 

Referral Traffic Monthly Comparison

 

For example, in the above chart you can see that traffic from quora.com spiked between December and January, while traffic from linkedin.com dropped slightly.

Both management and marketers like this template because it provides insight, at a glance, into what has changed from last month to this month.

Website Conversion

Our third top monthly template is Website Conversion. Use this template to create a report that focuses on goal conversions. Note, that you will need to have Goal Tracking set up in Google Analytics in order to get useful data from this template.

One of the unique and useful charts included in this template is titled Conversion Rate vs Sessions and Conversions. It shows the growth in traffic alongside the growth in conversions and the conversion rate.

 

Conversion Rate Chart

 

Ideally, in this chart we want to see the Sessions and Conversions trending up and the Conversion Rate holding steady or increasing. This tells us that traffic is growing and maintaining its quality (likelihood of converting). In the example here, you can see that the conversion rate (green line) took a hit early in the year as traffic started to grow, but has leveled off at around two percent.

Another great chart in this template is the Top Converting Social Networks. This chart provides a quick overview of the social networks responsible for the most goal conversions.

 

Conversion by Social Network Chart

 

For websites focused on lead-generation, the Website Conversion template is particularly appropriate. This is the kind of report that the sales and marketing teams will be particularly interested in.

Additional Templates

In addition to the top three templates just discussed, Megalytic provide a number of other monthly reporting templates that are well suited to particular purposes.

Some of the other templates available are:

  • Content Overview - Identify the best performing content on your site. See which sources of traffic, social networks and devices provide the best engagement with your content.
  • Paid Traffic - Overview of paid traffic to a website. Includes summary data for campaigns, landing pages, geography and devices.
  • SEO - SEO summary report showing rankings of search queries (keywords), pages, backlinking domains and content keywords. Also shows trends in organic search traffic.
  • Organic Traffic Summary - Summary reports showing Organic Traffic performance. Trends in traffic, visitor quality, comparisons with other sources of traffic, search query rankings, etc.

You can learn more about all of the templates available through Megalytic from the support article Using the Built-In Templates to Create Reports.

Conclusion

Megalytic’s templates are a great way to jump-start your monthly reporting. Use them if your audience doesn’t (yet) have strong opinions about the data they want to see. They provide a good starting point from which you will get questions and feedback that will help you fine-tune the reports to meet the needs of your specific client or internal department.

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