A few Google Analytics Tips and Tricks to Get the Most out of your Marketing Campaign
Google Analytics happens to be one of the free and the most popular tools that you can put to use in measuring the successes of your marketing efforts for inbound traffic. Using this tool, you will be able to view the volumes around the traffic your website is getting. You will be able to see where the users come from and where they end up going to. You will also be able to gain insights into why and how the users are coming to your website during any given periods of time.
Now of course, the tool of Google Analytics can be made as complicated or as simple as you would want to be. Most of the owners of businesses end up only scratching the surface of what is really possible inside Google Analytics. However, if you would really like to make the most of your company’s inbound marketing endeavors, it is high time that you took the time to dig a bit deeper. Try to incorporate these following Google Analytics tips and tricks in your campaigns:
Create Goals
Goals happen to be the simplest of the features that you can use in the toolkit of Google Analytics, however, they are also neglecting the most of most of the users. Head on to Admin, then Goals and then New goal in order to start setting up the first goal for yourself.
For most of the websites, conversion happens to be the most important of the goals, and Google brings you many templates that you can pick from to track your conversions in an effective manner. Once you are all set up. You will be in a position to monitor the progress of your conversion at a single glance.
Create your own Custom Dashboards
Just go to Dashboards, and then to New Dashboard in order to create your very first dashboards – you are allowed all the way up to twenty dashboards at any point in time.
Once one has selected the opening template, they are free to add any number of widgets as they like (widgets consist of both real-time and standard projections of data for all the metrics that you can ever think of). This comes in extremely handy in generating a report that is consistent or to get a high level overview of your progress so far.
Set up Custom Alerts
Not everyone of us has the time to keep checking Google Analytics on a daily basis to track unusual activity. That is where custom alerts come in really handy. Head on to Admin part of the tool and then click on Custom Alerts. You will now be in a position to create new alerts for any one of the supported behaviors or actions. You are free to apply the alerts to all your traffic or to just a given segment pertaining to your traffic, and then set the alerts to go off once a certain measure falls or rises in a dramatic way in a given set of time. This alert will then send you a text message or an email whenever the condition becomes true.
Stop yourself from Tracking yourself
If you really do care for your website, then you probably end up visiting it very often just to make sure that everything is working as expected or you may be doing so for managing or updating content.
This is awesome, but there is one tiny problem – the visits that you keep on making could end up skewing the traffic information that you see on Google Analytics. For you to successfully exclude you and your peers from the data on Analytics, create a filter under the panel called Admin.
If you happen to have a static internet protocol address, then visit All filters and then click on Add a new Filter, and then set up a predefined filter in order to exclude all the traffic coming from your particular IP address.
Integrate tools for Webmaster from Google
If you have not already done so, now is the time to set up your Webmaster Tools from Google for your package, we recommend that you do so. The Webmaster Tools shall give you the insights that Google Analytics is not able to offer, such as the information related to the links that are pointing towards your website, data about impressions, issues in index, spam actions that may be manual, and also the search keywords from the organic search engines and data related to clicks.
If you get to connect your account on Webmaster Tools to the account that you have on Google Analytics, you will be able to see many new reports like Landing Pages, Queries, and summary regarding the geography the visitors come from.
Consider segmenting your audience
You may have the case where you have different target audience visiting your website, and it may be of importance to you to have a distinction between them. Head on to Admin and select the Segments to start building your own customized segments which define various groups of audience.
You can call your segments, whatever you would like, and elaborate on them as much as you like. You will have the capability to distinguish between gender, age, location, language, technology that is being used for accessing your website, sources of traffic and behavior of users.
Keep a score of your speed
The speed at which your website loads is also a factor in ranking for your SEO, and can also be inviting or act as a deterrent for new users. You can look at your metrics related to your website’s speed by going to the Behavior tab, then Site Speed and then Overview or by going through Behavior, then Site Speed and then Page timings if you are keen on knowing how each individual page on your website is performing with respect to speed. This section can be very helpful to you in identifying and diagnosing any existing problems with your web site’s download speed.