Website Hosting

click for details

You’ve probably to got Google Analytics installed yourself, but did you know you could do this?

Since it’s launch in 2005 Google Analytics has fast become the industry standard website reporting tool. It has even been reported to be used on nearly 50% of the top 1,000,000 websites as ranked by Alexa. Most often it’s used for understanding top content, trends and popularity on websites but there’s other functionality that can be harnessed to further understand your visitors.

1.  Using Filters to Understand website pages

When it comes to bigger sites you make find that traffic to your website only goes into one area. And that people that visit area-a, aren’t going to be interested it area-b. Would it be great if you didn’t see both kinds of people bundled into one group? Using filters you can segment traffic into separate profiles. Profiles are like sub-accounts in side your main website tracking account. Each website traffic account can have many profiles. To set this up, select your Analytics account then click the ‘Analytics Settings’ button on the right. This is your ‘Website Profiles’ pages. To the right hand of the account you wish to make a sub version of, there’s a link that says ‘+Add New Profile’ click that. On the ‘Create New Website Profile’ page give your new Profile a Descriptive Name such as ‘websitename.com/area-a [area-a Traffic Only]’ press continue and that new profile should appear next to your existing profile.

At the moment both profiles are collecting the same data. We need to filter the content so that just traffic to ‘area-a’ is tracked. On the bottom right hand corner of the page you should see a link called ‘Filter Manager’, click it. This is the page where we create filters for our newly created profile. To create the filter press ‘+ Add Filter’.

We’ll start by giving a descriptive name to the filter, so following the name we gave to the profile above we’ll call it ‘websitename.com/area-a [area-a Traffic Only]’ again. We’re going to create a custom filter so press the custom filter radio button. Notice how the options increased massive? Don’t be intimated. We want to ‘Include’ only the ‘Request URI’ traffic using the Filter pattern ‘area-a’. You could make this case sensitive but I generally don’t.

Finally apply the filter the profile ‘websitename.com/area-a [area-a Traffic Only]’ by clicking it and pressing add. With that you’re done, simply repeat this to filter traffic form other area’s of your site

2. Tracking downloads

It’s a common misconception that you can only track webpages. It’s not true, using cleverly placed javascript on links, you’re allowed to track downloads as if they we’re pages on the site.

Firstly ensure your site is running the latest GA code. Once you know you are, find any link you wish to track and amend the ‘a’ tag like so:

<a href=“/downloads/awesome-file.zip”>Click to Download</a>

to:

<a href=“/downloads/awesome-file.zip” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/downloads/awesome-file’);”>Click to Download</a>

Easy huh!

3. Exporting Reports

Instead of having to check out the website at the beginning of every month, why not set up a report and get it to email you at the end of each week or month? You can choose to receive this as a .pdf file, or .csv. for more detail visit this small article: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=57161

4. Comparing Traffic

A featured you probably already know about, and maybe even used one or twice. It may seem a bit pointless comparing your traffic to the past but it can be one of your greatest tools. We all want our websites to grow in traffic and further more revenue but to understand where you’re going, you need to know where you’ve been. Preform month-on-month checks frequently, not just over the month prior, but the same month in the previous year. You may discover new opportunities with just a few minutes exploring.

5. Looking at your stats from within your CMS.

One of the features many of us don’t realise is that Google offer a comprehensive API’s to application developers and as such, they’re have been some awesome tools created to view you Google Analytics stats through you Android phone, your iPhone and even your CMS. The plugins available for most of the major CMS’s that allow you to view your Analytics traffic inside the CMS.

Here are the popular ones:
Wordpress: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/
ExpressionEngine: http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/cp-analytics/
Joomla: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/site-analytics/12097

6. Intelligence (5 just wasn’t enough)

If you’ve every looked at your traffic and gone, “Eh?! that don’t look like right” and spent the next few hours working out why your traffic has dropped/increased then this is the tool for you. Newly released in 2010 this awesome tool constantly analyses your website traffic and makes you aware through Alerts when things aren’t looking normal. It’s looks for the good and the bad and gives a scores the severity of the change by the number of alerts it gives. To analyse why things have changed, simply click on the day the alert occurred and a break down of what happened is presented to you. It maybe the bounce rate increased, or you’re getting more traffic from Norway or something but no matter what, you must check this frequently.