If you have your own website, or work in the online industry, at one point or another you will cross paths with Google Analytics. Web analytics tools can be very expensive, hence why most people will start with Google Analytics, a powerful and free tool for website analysis.
Just because Google Analytics is free, it doesn’t mean it lacks some handy features that make it more than powerful enough to compete with the big guns. Here are five tips to help you get more out of Google Analytics.
- Filters – Make sure you are not skewing your results
- Trends not numbers – Are you measuring your results correctly?
- Annotations – Keep notes on spikes in results
- URL Tagging – Keep track of your online marketing campaigns
- Event Tracking – Get statistics on specific page elements
- Filters
When doing any sort of measurement and analysis, it’s important not to skew the numbers. You can start by filtering out visits from certain IP addresses and domains. You don’t want yours or your agency’s visits skewing figures such as visits, pageviews and time on site.
How
To activate, simply go to your account page and select Filter Manager on the bottom right of the page. You will be taken to a page where you can filter by IP address, Domain and Sub-directories. - Trends not numbers
Now that you’ve ensured you’re not skewing the results, it’s important to know what you’re looking for in performing your analysis. If you’ve had the opportunity to use a variety of analytics tools, you’ll notice that the numbers very rarely match up due to the different ways the tools measure their results. This is why it is important that you look at trends in your analysis, not exact numbers.How
Visits have increased by 12% compared to last month.
NOT
Visits have increased by 5,023 compared to last month. - Annotations
A relatively new feature to Google Analytics, annotations make it easier to make notes for particular results, especially useful if you are reporting for a client or sharing results. It is also quite useful for your personal analysis to keep track of why spikes in results are occurring.
How
To create an annotation, simply click on a date in a graph or on the arrow drop down button at the bottom of the graph, which will expand to let you add your comment. - URL Tagging
This is one of the most useful analytics tools and yet one that is most forgotten. If you send out an e-newsletter with links to content on your website, wouldn’t you like to know what links users clicked on in your email? Yes, most email marketing tools will show you the number of clicks, but what happens when they get to your site?You can add a tracking code to the end of the URL’s you used in your email that let Google Analytics know what campaign the users have come from, what link they clicked and what they did on your site. It works in a similar way to a Google AdWords campaign and can be used for all your online marketing campaigns, not just email.
How
You can tag all external links to your site so you get a better understanding of which links are bringing in the most traffic. You will find your results in the Content area of your analytics account, under Campaigns. To make it easy for you, Google have provided a tool that builds tags for you. - Event Tracking
Lets say you have a Google Map integrated into your page and you want to know whether users are using the map. This is something that can’t be tracked via your traditional pageviews or content statistics. Event tracking lets you track specific elements on your page such as maps and videos, and allows you to see what functions within these elements the users are interacting with.How
This requires a little more technical integration than the previous tips. You can find some specific instructions for event tracking here.
Your URL will look something like this:
http://yoursite.com/?utm_source=Monthly&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Comp
These tips should hopefully get you on the way to more accurate website analysis. There is a lot more you can do with the Google Analytics tool that I haven’t included here, but feel free to share your tips in the comments below.
