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.
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.
How
Visits have increased by 12% compared to last month.
NOT
Visits have increased by 5,023 compared to last month.
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.
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.
Your URL will look something like this:
http://yoursite.com/?utm_source=Monthly&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Comp
How
This requires a little more technical integration than the previous tips. You can find some specific instructions for event tracking here.
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.
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