Tips and Tricks in Google Analytics

Tips and Tricks for Google Analytics

Are you new to Google Analytics? Are you still trying to figure you way around using google analytics faster? In today’s article I’m going to be talking about a few tips and tricks for google analytics. Have a nice read!

1.      Dashboards. The first tip and trick is how to create your own dashboard on Google analytics. So going into your google analytics account to dashboards, you will see where it says create. Now of course you've got to have, to do this as it enables you to create a Dashboard that other people don't necessarily get to see. This is a user level feature here. So you've got two options, Blank Canvas and Starter Dashboard. Let’s do a starter dashboard, you go to Create Dashboard, named it and Create your Dashboard. And it automatically populates with some things to get you started. Well, the difference between this report and the other ones, is you can edit these because this is you report, you own it. The google default dashboard, you really can't do that. So, Blank Canvas, you're going to, again, create that Dashboard. And as you do this, you're going to see not a whole lot here because you're literally starting blank. You just have the, okay what do you want? So you’re going to select and create a metric on your own based on the information you want to receive. That will form a widget. So, you keep creating widgets until you get all the information that you want.

2.      Saved Reports and Alerts. The next among the tips and tricks is how to actually save a report so you can easily access it whenever you'd like and the second is using Google Analytics' Alert feature to sort of tap you on the shoulder when something might need attention. So, we're going to come in, we have a question that we're trying to answer and we've already thought through the information that we're going to need, and we already thought through the actions we're familiar with based on the report. Let’s assume the information that we needed was around traffic sources and we really needed to know Google Organic so we drive down to Google Organic and they wanted to be able to know the results of how many people were seen engaging with-coming from Google Organic traffic but they wanted that broken down by device category. So we go to the source-medium reports section set up a table filter, and we would go into Users, and now let’s to say users greater than 1,000. We break it down and isolate it for Google Organic traffic. Then, we add a secondary dimension with the Device category. So, if you will need to report this again, instead of coming back to recreate this report, you can simply save it. Just click on where it says save and name the report then it will save under customized reports, so whenever you need it you can always access it from the list of customized reports. For alerts, you go to the custom alerts section and set up a way for google analytics to proactively mail you or text you when the report contains a certain value. For example if the page title contains ‘page not found’, you can tell google analytics to notify you of that error daily, weekly or monthly.

3.      Channels. Next tip and trick is channels. Maybe I want my paid Facebook advertising to be in a Paid Search chat or a page Channel, and not have a Paid Search Channel. Maybe I want my Google CPC to be in a Paid Channel and not a Paid Search Channel. Well, how do we do that? How can we actually figure that stuff out? Well, that is when it comes to actually starting to customize our Channels. And so there are a couple of ways to do this. And so we go back into Google Analytics, we have our Channel Report we go back to Channel Grouping, and create a new Channel Grouping. So define a New Channel. You can use regular expressions to Source contains Twitter, or Source contains LinkedIn. Then you click done. You could also go to admin and change the default channel grouping.

4.      Multi-channel Funnel reports. The last tip and trick for this article is Multi-channel funnel reports. Why do we even have multi-channels and how are they different from the standard reports? So let's dive in. We're going to go into Google Analytics and we're going to start with standard reports. Now first let's define that. So the standard reports are all contained within the four categories. Remember who are the users, where they're coming from,w hat actions are they taking, what are the results. Within this standard report section, the Goals and Ecommerce, there is this Multi-Channel Funnels. Multi-channel funnel reports take each individual session and they do not do any extra thinking. If you come back direct none on that second visit, it's going to attribute direct none, and I'll show you that in just a few minutes so it makes a little more sense. But first when we talk about the standard reports, there's that one big, big difference as to how it decides what goes here, right, which is the last known attributable source of traffic. Under multi-channel reports drop down, we have, overview, assisted conversions, top conversion paths, time lag and path length. So multi-channel report shows a couple of useful information that you may not know about.

That’s it for this article, I will be posting more articles in the following weeks with more knowledge and insight about Growth Marketing.

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Catch you later!