6 Tips for Google Analytics is here for you to help you to improve and refine your analysis for SEO, your web marketing strategy and usability of your site. Google Analytics is a statistical tool which is relatively widespread and popular among the web-masters. The reason for this popularity is simple: the tool is free and effective. This is not necessarily the best or most suitable for each website, but it will satisfy most webmasters. You can read our previous article on Outgoing Link Tracking with Google Analytics, which is written for the current version (at the time of writing) of 6 Tips for Google Analytics.
6 Tips for Google Analytics : Back to Old School
Others are old, the interface might be different, but still they are quite important to read as the basics of Google Analytics, since it was introduced, has remained the same :
- Google Analytics : Understanding the perfect usage
- Why the data of Google Webmaster Tool and Analytics are different?
- How to use Google Analytics™s in-page analytics to increase pageviews?
These articles can be old more than 4 years but are still relevant to our current topic – 6 Tips for Google Analytics.
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6 Tips for Google Analytics
IP exclusion from the statistics
This is the basis of this article 6 Tips for Google Analytics. If you want to be sure that your stats are reliable, start by excluding your own IP from the statistics of your website. To do this, go to each site’s administration menu at the top right of the page. In the profile menu of your site, you will get the “Filters” tab. Click “New Filter”. Give it a name and choose the Filter box with predefined settings, among which you will get the option to add your own IP address.
And voila, your computer is now excluded from the statistics in Google Analytics.
This will only work with a fixed IP address.
Alerts by Email
Remember that, it is possible to ask Google Analytics to send you automatic alerts. This is very useful to quickly detect a problem on sites where we work. Back to the administration menu of your site, find the “Custom Alerts” menu. Then click the “Create Alert” to develop an automated monitoring system.
Redefining the bounce rate
Bounce rate, which which we wrote comprehensively in the linked article, measures the percentage of people arriving on your site and leaving immediately. The concern is that, this data does not measure any user interaction with your website, such as pressing a download button for example or when the visitor remains several minutes on your content. For example, a visitor may find a logic to remain more than a minute on the page which is relevant and therefore he/she is much more interesting to you than someone who leaves the same page after 5 seconds. To make this difference and keep only the “real” bounces, search your Google Analytics code the following line:
1 | _gaq push (['_trackPageview']).; |
Add this after the code :
1 | setTimeout('pageTracker._trackEvent('NoBounce', 'NoBounce', 'Over 10 seconds')',60000); |
You can also add a follow-up event on clicks and interactions that do not modify the page, such as a subscription to a newsletter or click on the download button. To do this, add this html code to your links and buttons:
1 | onclick = "_gaq.push (['_trackEvent', 'category', 'name of this action']);" |
By applying these methods, the bounce rate which will be displayed as people leaving in less than 60 seconds your site or that do not interact with your site. And still you can find the initial bounce rate, know that, it is always present in the statistics page of Google Analytics. Again, the guide on Outgoing Link Tracking with Google Analytics is important to understand the usage.
The different types of display option
Another trick to better analyze the data is to spend some time and have fun with different types of viewing your pictures. Top right of each of them, we can indeed find small icons to change the presentation of data.
Then you are free to compare any relevant criterion for you in each table, for example traffic sources with respect to income per visit.
Set Goals
For sites that do not directly sell products and services, therefore do not have ecommerce tag for such statistics, you must establish your goals and site. Goals can still measure the profitability several elements, e.g. each traffic source for each page. The idea is then to reuse this data in all your dealings, especially in the retail traffic sources to determine which are profitable or your page which generate revenue.
Weighted Sort Feature is Powerful
Again, this small option is not well known yet, but it is very useful. In many places, Analytics gives us access to a table with a lot of statistics. By default, the tool shows data by volume, either by visits, pages viewed, sales etc. but sometimes you may want to sort our data by secondary value, like; what are the pages with the highest income per visit? which pages have the highest bounce rate? What sources of traffic serve you nothing?
To do this, click the drop-down list at the top of each table which is in use, then select the “weighted sort” when it is available. You will see that the data to be displayed by Analytics.
We think, this guide on 6 Tips for Google Analytics gave you some idea about the somewhat not known features to all the users.
