Chapter 23: 11 Google Analytics Tricks to Use for Your Website
Editor's Note: Google Analytics offers a wealth of valuable data to anyone managing a website, and is loaded with options. You don't need to know how to use all the features Google Analytics offers you, though—just the ones that will present you the data you need to track in way that is meaningful for your business. In this post, originally published March 1, 2012 on The Moz Blog, Eugen Oprea introduces 11 of Google Analytics' most accessible features.
The most common question that I am asked every day through social media networks, forums and email is “How do I get insights about my Google Analytics data?” People approach me saying that they have had a Google Analytics (GA) account for years, but they look only at page views or the number of visitors they get. This is wrong, so wrong, when they have powerful, free web analytics tools—tools that they could leverage to gather insights about their visitors, and then use those insights to better serve their visitors.
That's why in this chapter I will teach you some GA tricks that you should use for your website.
You can also sign up for my free Google Analytics course, which covers the basics, at http://www.eugenoprea.com/google-analytics, or pick up advanced Google Analytics tips at www.moz.com/blog/advanced-google-analytics-tips-and-tricks.
1. Set Up Your Analytics Goals
After you install the tracking code on your website, you need to set up goals in GA (http://mz.cm/169fJQq). The goals you set up for your website will be the foundation of your website analysis. Your website goals are, ultimately, your business goals.
If you are wondering what goals you need to set up, start by asking yourself what the purpose of your website is. Is it to sell tangible goods as an ecommerce site? Is it to become a popular blog that earns revenue from ads? Is to promote your business' offline services? Is it to become a leading educational resource in your field? Once you figure out what the main purpose of your site is, you can start setting up goals based on your business objectives.
If this is still unclear for you, here are some examples of analysis goals to give you some traction:
• Product purchases—Enable ecommerce tracking (http://mz.cm/XTqvH2) to track the sales cycle for your products, from product viewed, to item placed in shopping cart, to final purchase.
• Visitor engagement—Track the number of people who spend more than one minute on your site.
• Free Downloads—Use event tracking (more on this later in this chapter) to measure calls-to-action (CTA) like downloading your eBook.
• ROI on Ads—Again, use event tracking to measure your best-performing ads.
• Subscriptions—Use analytics to track the number of email subscriptions on your site and related data.
Later, these goals will help you track conversion rates and get insights about what traffic sources convert best on your site, what keyword searches send you the most customers, which landing pages have the most sign-ups for your newsletter, what are your most engaging content pages, etc.
Use these examples to get started, but please note that every website is unique and will have customized goals.
2. Connect Your Google Webmaster Tools Account
Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is another free product from Google which helps you see data about your website, such as the number of impressions for your search queries and their position in Google, the number of links to your site, or diagnosis information reported by Google after crawling your website.
Additionally, you can check +1 metrics, your site performance, or submit a sitemap for Google to index.
But the really interesting thing is that you can connect your GWT with your GA account to access to the new Search Engine Optimization reports (www.moz.com/blog/seo-reports-google-analytics). Once you do that, you will be able to see three new reports in your GA account: Queries, Landing Pages, and Geographical Summary. These reports will help you learn more about your top performing search queries (keywords) and landing pages. Then, you can use that data to identify the following:
• Keywords with a low click-through rate, but a good average position. Once you know them, you can change the meta title and description of your page to improve their click-through rate.
• Landing pages with a good click-through rate, but a low average position. These pages can be easily run through an on-page optimization process that will improve their rankings.
• The home countries of your organic visitors, which you can compare against your target market(s).
To connect your GWT and GA accounts, go to the Traffic Sources section of GA, select Search Engine Optimization and then choose one of the three reports.
At this stage, you will see a page that explains the benefits of linking your accounts, as well as a button labeled Set Up Webmaster Tools Data Sharing. Click that button, and then click Edit in your settings for GWT. You will be redirected to your GWT, where you can connect them with GA.
3. Leverage Site Speed Reporting
Site Speed reporting is also a neat feature of GA. It lets you see the load time of your pages (www.moz.com/blog/google-analytics-now-tracks-page-load-speed). This will help you check which pages need your attention, and enable you to look for ways to speed up your page load times.
If you wonder why this is important, I can tell you that the load speed of your pages can significantly improve your visitors' experience on your site, which will increase conversions, and is a minor ranking factor in Google search. (http://www.moz.com/blog/site-speed-are-you-fast-does-it-matter). So a good load speed can make your visitors happy, increase conversions, and possibly give you a little boost in the SERPs as well.
Editor's Note: The Shortcut link pictured in the screenshot is now a standard feature of the top navigation bar, and DOM Timings has been added as a subtab of the Explorer tab (next to the Site Usage and Technical subtabs).
Along with the number of page views and bounce rate, you can see the average page load time (in seconds), and the number of visits that have been used as a sample for every page on your website.
Additionally, if you click on the Performance tab, you can check different buckets of your page load time and see the average load speed of individual pages.
The Map Overlay tab will show you the load speed for different countries or territories, cities, continents, and sub-continent regions.
4. Enable Site Search
It's a fact that visitors who use the search box on a site are more likely to convert than the ones who don't. This is because they are more engaged with your website.
The beautiful thing about site search is that it lets you discover the exact keywords that people use to search for your products, so you can take this a step further and use them in your search engine optimization campaigns. You can use the most important keywords that people use to search on your site to optimize your pages and drive more targeted traffic to your website. Additionally, visitors might look for products or services that you do not have on your offer. Because people are already looking for them, you now know that adding them to your site will increase sales.
If you have a blog, site search is a great way to see what your readers are looking for and get a ton of article ideas.
If you would like to enable Site Search in GA, first make sure that you have a search form on your site, then customize your GA tracking code for Site Search (http://mz.cm/ZopPrd) and install (or re-install) it (http://mz.cm/XS0Jml).
5. Track Events
Event tracking is a powerful feature in GA (www.moz.com/blog/google-analytics-event-tracking-to-monitor-calls-to-action ). It can help you track the following items, among others:
• How many people download your eBook
• What ads are performing better and who clicks on your ads
• Which signup form converts better (sidebar, below the post, about page)
• Who pauses, fast forwards, or stops a video
• What errors a visitor encounters during checkout
But that's not all. Using the latest version of GA, you are also able to set these events as goals, which can help you see the performance of your events based on different metrics.
Enabling event tracking is not a difficult process. All you have to do is add the following code next to the URL of your link, before you replace the default values:
onClick=“_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent', ‘category', ‘action', ‘opt_label', ‘opt_value']);”
These default values will help you identify your events. Here's what they represent:
• Category (required)—You can use this element to identify what you want to track: eBook, video, signup form, or ads.
• Action (required)—This element can be used to define the interaction of your visitor. The choices are click, button, play, and stop. Personally, I use it to specify the place of my button/signup form/ad.
• Label (optional)—Use this to identify the type of event that is tracked.
• Value (optional)—This element helps you specify a value for your event that can be used when you set up a goal for your event.
• Non-Interaction (optional)—This element, when set to true, identifies that the event will not be used in bounce-rate calculation.
If you would like to see a working example, here's what I used to track a link to my new product, where Ads is the category of my link, Sidebar is the place where I added the link, and WAB is the label.
<a href=“http://www.webanalyticsblueprint.com/”
onClick=“_gaq.push([‘_trackEvent',
‘Ads', ‘Sidebar', ‘WAB']);”>Start Free Trial</a>
Once you have set up your links, you will see event tracking data. All you have to do is set up that event as a goal using the category, action, label, and value conditions you have set up for your event (http://www.blastam.com/blog/index.php/2011/03/how-to-use-events-goals-google-analytics). You will also see data appearing in Event Tracking Reports, which can be found under Content and in the Events Flow reports.
6. Real-Time Reporting
Google has taken analytics one step further with Real-Time reporting, which allows you to see how many visitors are on your website in that moment, where they are on your website, how they found you (keywords and referrals), and where they live.
Editor's Note: Top Social Traffic data is now available in Real-Time's Overview report as well.
Additionally, you have access to another three reports with more insights about their location, how they arrived on your website (including Social sources), and what pages they visit.
To access this feature, select Real-Time from the Standard Reports tab.
The Locations report provides information about the number of visitors currently on your site, and as well as the cities and countries where they are located. You can even check their locations on a map.
Traffic Sources displays information about where they come from to reach your site. You will see the medium and source along with the total number of your visitors.
The Content report shows you what are the active pages that your visitors read and how many active visitors are on each of the pages displayed on your report.
7. Multi-Channel Funnels
With Multi-Channel Funnels, GA provides even more value for users who are passionate about conversion rates.
If before you were able to track the last source that the visitor used to convert, with Multi-Channel Funnels you are now also able to track other sources (ads, referrals, social media, organic) that the visitor used to reach your website from.
Say, for example, that your visitor (Cindy) landed for the first time on your website from Twitter and subscribed to your RSS feed. On her next visit, Cindy used the feed reader to come and read your new articles. Ultimately, she was looking for advice on blogging and found your eBook using a search engine. Now, because she knows your site already, she will buy it and become a customer.
Using this example, in the old version of GA, the search engine was credited for the conversion; but now, with Multi-Channel Funnels, you can see the whole path that Cindy took to convert: Social Network⇒Referral ⇒Search Engine.
To check the Multi-Channel Funnels reports, go to the Conversions section.
Watch the video at http://mz.cm/XRMZak learn more about using Multi-Channel Funnels in Google Analytics.
8. Use Custom Campaign Tracking
Tracking online marketing campaigns will help you get past that large number of direct visits that come from URL shorteners like bitly (http://bitly.com), or apps like TweetDeck (http://tweetdeck.com). Additionally, it will help you track the effectiveness of your campaign activities more accurately.
To use custom campaign tracking in GA, you need to tag your URLs with special parameters. Those parameters can be added to your links using the Google's URL Builder tool (http://mz.cm/XTMmxV).
Once you tag your URLs with the mandatory parameters, you can use them as they are, or use a URL shortener when sharing them. Then check the Campaigns report, under Traffic Sources⇒Sources, to get insights about your online marketing campaigns.
To see step-by-step instructions for using custom campaign reports in GA, visit www.eugenoprea.com/google-analytics-campaign-tracking.
9. Plot Rows
Plot Rows allows you to create instant segments of your data in tabular reports. If you usually look at standard reports, you can use Plot Rows to get more insights from your metrics.
To use this feature, you need to select two rows from any tabular report and then click the Plot Rows button from the bottom of the table. Once you do that, you will see that the chart has changed, and you are able to see additional information there about the items that you have selected.
Use this feature to check how your main keywords, referrals, or pages compare with each other and with the overall site metrics. Make sure, however, that you select items that do not have a big difference between their metrics. (For example, don't compare a keyword with 2,340 visits with one that has 154.)
10. Custom Dashboards
In the old version of GA, you had only one dashboard available to you. Now you can create up to 20 dashboards and customize them to meet your needs.
To create a custom dashboard, go to the Home menu⇒Dashboards and select +New Dashboard. You will need to choose whether you will want to start from scratch with a blank canvas or use the Starter Dashboard. Then you can add slick widgets to it that create custom metrics, pie charts, timelines, or tables.
For more information on creating custom dashboards, check out my YouMoz post “5 Insightful Google Analytics Dashboards” (www.moz.com/ugc/5-insightful-google-analytics-dashboards).
11. Flow Visualization
Flow Visualization definitely deserves its own article. For now, I'll give you a brief introduction to its benefits.
Visitors Flow
GA rolled out two reports, Visitors Flow, under the Audience section, and Goal Flow, under the Conversion section. The Visitors Flow report displays the path your visitors used to navigate through your website. Selecting a dimension such as country source or keyword lets you see the exact path your visitors took and where they stopped to read your content.
On hover, the report displays additional details for each page like the total number of visits, how many visitors moved to a different page, and how many of them dropped out of the funnel and left. If you click on a page, you can explore all kinds of information about its traffic by highlighting it.
Goal Flow
The Goal Flow report is essentially a better representation of the Funnel Visualization report, and contains the same dimensions as the Visitors Flow report. The main difference between the two is that the Goal Flow report doesn't show data from all pages, and focuses on the steps you configured in the conversion funnel.
Additionally, you can use advanced segments to filter your data and gain additional insights into it from the Visitors Flow and Goal Flow reports.
Conclusion
I hope that the GA tools I've presented you with here will give you better insight into how your visitors use your website. Hopefully, you will be able to use this data to give your visitors more of what they want, which will give you more of what you want—increased conversions.