If you are webmaster, blogger, or anyone else with a web presence, you surely are already aware of how helpful having detailed metrics of your visitors. Knowing who your visitors are and where they came from is helpful, but there is so much more that you can learn. Additional details help you to optimize your site content and cater to the types of visitors you want, and Google Analytics is one of the best tools for gathering, tracking, and analyzing this information.
Google Analytics is somewhat easy to use for anyone. Beyond the basics, however, there are additional features that you can tap into and get even greater information to further benefit your domains. The following advanced Google Analytics tips are not exhaustive, but they can provide you with a great start to gather even more valuable data that can help you grow your reach and build your bottom line.
Advanced Google Analytics Tips
Have goals.
As you surely know, goals are important in any endeavor, but setting up goals in Google Analytics is probably the best advanced Google Analytics tip I can offer. If you haven’t done this already, you should do it right now, as it is an easy process.
When you set up goals, which should be in line with your business goals, everything will focus on both your goals and your conversion rates. As you set goals, think about your site’s main purpose. For example, if you are an eCommerce site, you may want a goal to track a specific page in you checkout process to see how many potential buyers you have, and if people are clicking away once they see how much shipping is. If you have a blog and want to know how many real readers you have, you could evaluate for how many people read two or more pages on your website.
Try out Real-Time Reporting.
Still technically in beta, this is a great feature that you need to start harnessing. It displays information about visitors that are presently using your website at the present moment, letting you see what pages they are viewing, where they came from, where they are located, and more.
Particularly valuable if you have a busy site, this particular Google Analytics feature can be valuable if you want to see the direct impact of something you did. If you want to know if a social media post, mention from a blog or website, or a powerful presentation at a luncheon is immediately impacting your site, this helps out a lot.
Use Custom Dashboards.
A newer Google Analytics feature, customized dashboards are now possible, letting you create 20 dashboards that you can customize to better fit your needs. You can set these up from the Home screen by clicking on “New Dashboard” on the left hand column.
These are easy to set up; you can work from scratch, or you can use a starter dashboard as a springboard. From there you can create your own metrics, charts, and more. This helps you get even more pointed, powerful information from Google Analytics.
Go with the flow.
Two of the metrics presented by Google now have a Flow Visualization. If you aren’t one for numbers, these “flow” images can help let you see what is happening on your domain. By using the Visitors Flow and Goal Flow features, you are able to track where visitors go throughout your site, step by step, either in general or through the parameters of a goal you have set. A great new feature, this if you want to be an advanced Google Analytics user, you should consider harnessing flow today.
Have a need for speed.
Your pages’ load times are important. If pages load too slow, visitors can become unhappy, clicking away from your site before they get to any of your good stuff. You can monitor your site’s speed through Google Analytics.
As you look at other metrics for your site, you will see “Average Page Load Time.” This will show how many seconds your page takes to load and will report on how many visits were used to create a sample to create this metric. The “Performance” tab can also help in this way. You can not only check out general average load times, but you can even see the speed your pages are loading at for other territories and even countries. After taking in this data, you can tweak your site as necessary so that it helps to keep people there as long as possible.
Get connected.
Google Analytics can be paired with Google Webmaster Tools. Beyond standard analytics, these tools let you see all sorts of other site data like impressions from search, links in to your site, +1 data, and much more. This sounds great, but it gets better, because you can connect the Webmaster Tools account to Analytics, letting you get access to Search Engine Optimization reporting, unlocking new reports in Google Analytics. This helps you to see what SEO efforts are working and which ones are falling flat.
Have eventful data.
A great Google Analytics feature is “Event Tracking.” In the current version of analytics, you can track events like eBook downloads, ad performance, video playback, checkout errors, and more. With a little bit of code, event tracking is easy, and you can even set these up as goals to give access to even further metrics. Thanks to this feature, you get to know which cool site elements are having the affects you were hoping for on your visitors.
Plan and plot (rows).
When you “Plot Rows,” you can create tabular reports with your data. These customized reports can help you to get more from the metrics.
To set up this helpful tool, you should select two rows within a tabular report and click the button at the bottom of the table to “Plot Rows.” This changes your chart, letting you see even more information about the things you have selected. This additional information can be incredibly helpful in comparing pages, keywords, and other data, and looking at how these do within the overall site.
Conclusion
These tips are helpful for Google Analytics users because they help to uncover additional information about your site, its pages, and the elements on the site. By looking at these suggest features and elements, you can make the most out of Google Analytics, uncovering the things about your pages that work, and showing you the things that you should consider changing to boost web traffic and make more money.
A guest article is written by Kate Willer who likes social networks, google android, antimalware doctor and psychology.