Posts tagged Google Analytics

Google Analytics recently added 7 powerful new features. These new features enable Google Analytics users to get quicker insights, create deeper customizations, do more advanced analysis and track more mobile marketing!

1. Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts

Using an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine, Analytics Intelligence monitors data patterns over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Significant changes in data trends and insights you may not have noticed are surfaced directly in your account. You can also create your own Custom Alerts that monitor your selection of dimensions and metrics that can be sent by email or displayed in the Intelligence reports.

2. Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals

You can now track even more conversions by creating up to 20 goals per profile. Measure user engagement and branding success on your site with Time on Site and Pages per Visit goals. Set up your first Engagement goal in minutes.

3. Expanded Mobile Reporting

Google Analytics has expanded support for mobile websites and tracking for iPhone and Android mobile applications tracking. Adding server side code to your PHP, JSP, PERL, or ASPX mobile websites enables you to track non-Java-Script enabled phones. You’ll also be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section.

4. Unique Visitors Metric

Include the Unique Visitors metric in your Custom Report or Advanced Segments to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) visit your website. You can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics.

5. Advanced Analysis Features

Dive deeper into your data with Pivoting, Secondary Dimensions, and Advanced Table Filtering. These combined features enable you to perform in-depth, on the fly data analysis within your account.

6. Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report Templates

Share the URL link for an Advanced Segment or Custom Report with anyone who has an Analytics account. Sharing the link will automatically import the pre-formatted template into the person’s account. Also available now is the ability to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports by profile.

7. Multiple Custom Variables

Custom variables provide the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics to collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. Define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (member vs. non-member), session attributes (signed in or signed out), and by page-level attributes (viewed Sports section). Use custom variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviors on your site. Start learning more about them now.

At Savvyk, we use Google Analytics on all our clients’ websites to enable us to track all web traffic. This is an extremely powerful tool that helps to enhance your online presence and to make it as effective as possible. Please contact us to find out what is involved in getting your business website set up with Google Analytics.

Although a free service, Google Analytics offers excellent reporting and traffic analysis that can help you assess how well (or badly!) your website is doing. One of the recently improved features is Advanced Segments which is in Beta Mode.  It enables you to easily segment your website traffic into meaningful segments. These segments can then be applied (individually or combined) to all the various reports.

How do you do this? On the right hand side of  any of your Google Analytics Reports pages (such as Dashboard) you will see the following image. You will notice that it defaults to All Visits. Thus, if you leave it unchanged, ALL traffic will be reported.

If you click on the All Visits tab, it will bring up all your current Advanced Segments. These are separated into two segments, firstly Default Segments (as shown on the left) and secondly Custom Segments, which will start off as blank. Just with the Default Segments you can perform useful analysis. For example, if you wish to analyse all your Paid Traffic only, you simply unclick All Visits and then click Paid Traffic.

From that point on, all reports that you view will be for Paid Traffic only. You can easily change the Segments to be reported at any time. You can also click on multiple segments, and the reporting will then be segmented. This enables you, for example, to compare your Paid Traffic to All Visits.

You can also Create a new advanced segment that will be saved for future reporting. Simply click on the link for this (its on the left side of Default Segments). The screen below will then appear. For example, if you wish to have a Segment for New York Visitors , here are the steps:

1. Click on Visitors on left. This will bring up all the Visitors tabs
2. Click on City and then drag it with your mouse to the dimension or metric area as shown below with the red arrow (drag and drop)
3. Condition will then appear. Click on Matches exactly
4. Value will show all the cities. Click on New York
5. Click on Test Segment. This will show you how many visits were received from New York during the reporting period.
6. Enter New York in the Name Segment box
7. Click on Save Segment. You are done! From now on, this segment will appear in your Custom Segments
8. You can easily manage and delete Custom Segments in future.

Below is a video that demonstrates the use of Google Analytics Advanced Segments. Please do not hesitate to contact us for help with your Google Adwords and Google Analytics accounts.

Google Analytics does not provide traffic reports by IP address due to privacy reasons. This means that your traffic reports may be misleading as they include your own traffic! For example if you had 100 visitors during the day, but you had visited your website 10 times, your true traffic is 90 visitors.

Google Analytics provides customised filters that you can apply to exclude certain kinds of traffic. When you initially go into your Google Analytics account, on the bottom right of the Analytics Settings page you will see Filter Manager as shown on the right.

Click on Filter Manager, then click on Add Filter (right hand side), and your screen should look similar to below. Provide a Filter Name (eg Exclude-My-IP), then for Filter Type, choose Exclude all Traffic from an IP Address. You will then see a sample IP address so that the correct format can be applied. For example if you IP address is 198.999.111.1, you need to put the \ symbol before each fullstop. So this gives you 198\.999\.111\.1  or you could use 198\.999\.111\.* to cover similar IP address from your organization.

Once you have done this Add Available Website Profiles, so that they get selected on the right hand side and then Save Changes. You are done!

Your traffic should now drop, but it will be much more realistic!