If you already use Google Analytics to monitor your website traffic then you have joined about 90% of successful websites. Congratulations!
If you asked your web designer to add Google Analytics to your website, or you added it yourself, but hardly use the tool (now that it’s installed) then you are also in about the 90th percentile. This, is less commendable. But you’re not alone..in fact this is pretty common.
Google Analytics is a statistics engine. You run a business in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. You probably don’t have time to analyze statistics regularly- or if you do, perhaps you don’t really understand all the jargon and buzz and even mathematics that Analytics requires. Today I am going to write a short piece about upping your game Google Analytics. When you’re done reading this, you will be able to use this wonderful tool in new ways which will help your business to grow.
3 Cool Google Analytics Tricks:
- Make Custom Alerts: This is one of the most simple, fast changes you can make to your Google Analytics account. G.A. will email you or text you (or both) every time some metric is reached. This is handy because you stay in the know, without having to dig into your website’s Analytics data each day or week. Google describes the custom alert, like this: Alert me when: Select the metric to which the alert applies, the condition that generates the alerts (e.g., Is less than, Is greater than), and enter the value for the condition (e.g., Is less than 20).To find your custom alerts click on the Admin Cog button in Analytics:
A couple sample alerts you can create are:- Alert me every time my website gets n visits per day, or week
- Alert me when my traffic decreases by n%
- Alert me when my website traffic increases by n%
- Alert me when my website stops working!
- Alert me when people find my website by searching for a particular keyword
- Find out which screen-sizes and devices view your site: You would think this is easy, but it’s not. Everyone talks about “mobile this” and “mobile that” now a days, but Google Anlaytics does not make it very easy to build a comparative data set, which shows you all the devices which come to your website. To see all the devices which view your website, in one quick view, do this:
Click: Audience -> Technology -> Browser & OS
Set: Primary Dimension: Screen Resolution
Set: Secondary Dimension: (search) Operating System
Once you have done the above steps, you will have a table which looks something like this:
This is a very clear table of information. I built it off of a company who I do web design for, in Saskatoon. If you know how to read this table, it tells you that you website traffic is composed of the following devices, in this order:
Samsung Galaxy S6
Apple iPhone 6
Windows Desktop
Apple iPhone 5
Apple iPhone 4
- Event Tracking of all the things a web designer or a programmer can do for your website, in Analytics, this is truly the big one. Your website visitors do stuff while they’re on your website, but you have no idea what. Right out of the box, your Google Analytics will only tell you which pages are loaded in which order, and how long people stay. What about everything in between? What buttons do they click on? How far down the page do they scroll? How many images in your gallery do they swipe through? Event tracking allows you to monitor anything you want to monitor. It’s amazing. It requires a tiny bit of code, so people tend to shirk away from adding event tracking to their website, but don’t be one of those people. If you don’t care what people do when you spend money marketing to them, just print a flyer. If you’re going to build a website, leverage the power that is available to you. Learn your market by learning their behaviors.
If you have a company in Prince Albert , and your company needs a new website, and you want that website to deploy Google Analytics in amazing ways- then …..