Google Analytics is a very powerful and easy to use tool but many people don’t know how to use it effectively. This is a very powerful tool, but there are some aspects of Google analytics which aren’t as obvious. In this post, I’m going to explain these advanced features and hopefully you’ll be able to use them to improve your business.
It is used by more than 10 million websites and can provide you with valuable data about your website visitors. The solution is designed to help users gain a better understanding of their customers, market trends and much more. If properly configured, it can help you to optimize your website for increased success and improved conversion rates.
Placing the acquisition, behavior, demographics, and geographical details of your website visitors into your hands can offer you valuable insights into who your audience really is and what they are looking for.
For many beginners, understanding how to use GA can be a challenge at first. It may seem overwhelming at first glance, with lots of data that needs deciphering. However, with a few steps and tips in mind, you will soon be well on your way toward mastering Google Analytics!
In this article I will provide you with some Google Analytics tricks and hacks. These tricks and hacks will help you improve your conversion rates, website usability, and visitor engagement. You will hear a lot of people saying that it is difficult to hack into Google Analytics.
10 easy google analytics hacks
If you’ve ever used Google Analytics before then you’ll know how powerful it can be. However as most of us are aware, there is a lot to sift through and work out with regards to analysing your data. While it’s not an easy task, it can be simplified.
In this post I aim to bring together the best 10 google analytics hacks that you can use on your website – whether you’re a beginner or more experienced user, there will surely be something for everyone!
1. Verify your site’s mobile usability
Test your site to see how it looks on different mobile devices. You can check the usability of your site using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool. If your site is not mobile friendly, you can optimize it by resizing images and removing unnecessary flash content.
2. Track visits from social media platforms
If you have a business page on Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site, there is no way for Google Analytics to track the traffic from it. This is because social networking sites use a secure connection (https) to transfer data and Google Analytics’ tracking code can’t follow secure pages. However, there is a way around this problem that involves using bitly’s free “Social Stats”.
Social Stats enables you to see details regarding your visitors’ behaviour when they arrive on your website via social media platforms. You can see the number of clicks each link on the page has generated and which ones are most popular. You can also see how long they stay and what pages they visit afterwards.
3. Identify top-performing landing pages
Landing pages are a crucial part of any effective marketing campaign. Landing pages are the first touchpoint that your customer has with your brand, and thus, they have the biggest impact on whether or not a lead becomes a customer.
In order to build an efficient landing page, you need to be able to determine which elements of your page are working, and which ones aren’t. This can be difficult to do without detailed analytics data. Fortunately, Google Analytics has some useful built-in reports that you can use to optimize your landing pages quickly and easily.
4. Understand what your visitors want
You are always one step closer to your goal of improving your website’s usability and conversion rate when you know what your visitors want. So the best way for you to achieve this is by using Google Analytics, a set of tools that allows you to track and analyze your website traffic in much more detail than standard web statistics alone.
There are many ways to gain insight from the data collected by Google Analytics. Here is a list of handy tips that you can use for your specific website in order to understand what your users want and how you can improve your website for them.
For each tip, I’ll first share a short summary, then I will explain the tip, and finally I will give you an example from one of my websites.
5. Pinpoint the geographic location of your visitors
Find out where your web visitors are located: In Google Analytics, click on “Audience” and then “Geo” to see a map that shows the origin of your web traffic in real time. A bar chart at the top of the page will tell you how many visitors have come from each country.
Click on the map to get more specific results: You can drill down further by clicking on individual countries within the larger map, which will give you more granular information about cities and even ZIP codes. This is particularly useful for local businesses, such as restaurants or dry cleaners that want to find out where potential customers live.
6. Get a better understanding of how long your audience stays on your page
By defining key stages within your conversion funnel (in our example we will use the welcome, pricing, sales and thank you pages), it allows you to see how many people convert after visiting each stage: In our example above, we can see that 39% of people visit the pricing page from an organic search result but only 4% of people actually convert on that page.
The next highest amount of conversions comes from a referral source at 16%.
7. Determine which search terms bring visitors to your website
Google Analytics gives you the ability to see what search terms were used to find your website and determine how much time was spent on your site by each visitor.
Google Analytics provides a lot of useful information about how people interact with your website, but it can be difficult to figure out where to look for the specific data you are looking for. I like using the advanced segmentation feature in Google Analytics because it allows me to view specific subsets of data based on my criteria.
The advanced segmentation feature in Google Analytics is fairly easy to use, but there are some common pitfalls that will prevent it from working correctly. When Google Analytics segments data, it creates a virtual table that contains all of the unique values (or rows) returned by the segmentation query.
If you have too many unique values, then Google Analytics will not create a virtual table and will display an error message similar to this: Error: The number of rows in the result set for this report exceeds the maximum allowed (5000).
8. See where on the page visitors are dropping off or getting distracted
Where you want to see people go depends on the kind of site you run. If you’re hoping to sell something, then obviously you want people to click on the “buy” button. If you’re running a blog, though, you might want them to read other articles on the site instead of leaving right away.
As long as you track these paths through your site (which you can do with Google Analytics), you’ll be able to see exactly how well each page of your site is working. That way, when someone leaves your site, it won’t be in vain. You’ll know where he or she went and what caused him or her to leave in the first place.
9. Find out what percentage of overall traffic actually converts into leads or sales
Analytics is essential to any website, but it’s even more important for your business-to-business (B2B) website. The data you collect can help you understand which type of customers are visiting your website, what they are looking for, and whether or not they have been converted into leads or sales.
Make it easy to track the online sales process by setting up ecommerce tracking. Ecommerce tracking allows you to monitor and analyze data based on where the sale occurred — whether it was on your website, in a store or through an affiliate link.
The key feature of ecommerce tracking is auto-tagging, which automatically attaches a virtual “ecommerce cookie” to each customer’s purchases.
This cookie allows you to distinguish between sales that occur online and offline. You can even set up additional cookies for specific product categories or brands.
10. Use Google Analytics event tracking to get more insights about the actions you’re looking for.
Use goals to track conversions. Goals are a critical part of the analytics process, because they allow you to track how effectively your efforts are converting visits into leads or sales. They’re also much more accurate than tracking sales through referrals, because they’re specific about what happens when a visitor converts (i.e., making a purchase).
If someone views multiple pages on your site before making a purchase, for example, referral tracking won’t pick up on them unless it’s a direct link to the final product page.
Use advanced segments to filter out irrelevant traffic from reports. The vast amount of data provided by Google Analytics can be overwhelming at first glance; fortunately, it can also be broken down into more manageable pieces through advanced.
Conclusion
Google Analytics is by far the most popular web analytics service that has ever existed. Its many features, from ecommerce statistics, to real time data, to competitive insights, have helped countless businesses learn how to optimize their sites for traffic growth and conversion rate optimization. While the interface can be overwhelming to many who are new to Google Analytics, the service itself is fairly simple in its design and execution.
The information within GA can be used to perform just about any analysis a user desires in order to maximize conversions on a site. For example, even if your internal team’s expertise is not very advanced with respect to web analytics, you can still gain powerful insights into your site’s performance by using a google analytics hacks list that has been ranked by a reputable source inside this article.
