3 Tricks To Make You An Analytics Pro Understanding your visitors is probably the most essential factor in maintaining and expanding any website, and one of the most important tools to help understand your visitors is Google Analytics. While Analytics looks simple enough for any user to glean basic information, with a little know-how, anyone can go from Analytics novice to Expert, fairly quickly. For the best help with analytics, we recommend using a PPC company to help ensure that you're getting the most visitors and conversions.
1. Audience Segments
Audience Segments are a really powerful way to look at Analytics data in different and more specific ways. For example, suppose you decided to run a promotion on the site. After the promo you want to analyze customer behavior, but you’re really only interested specifically in the users that were targeted with that particular promotion.
With segments, using a set of rules that you define, you basically have Analytics segment out the data of the users that match the rule from everything else. Then, when you activate the segment, you can go through all of the areas of Analytics as you normally would – except now the data is filtered to show only the users that you’ve segmented out. Creating and segmenting is really easy. Let’s try creating a segment for our example above.
- First, click on the Add Segment button, then click “New Segment” and name it under “Segment Name”
- Click on Traffic Sources on the left, then on the right choose “Source” and then “Contains.” In the blank box begin typing one of your previously used UTM sources.
- Notice on the right, Analytics is already showing a preview of the number of users that match this criteria.
- Hit Save
You’re done. All of the data is now showing information for that segment only. Conditions can be a lot more complex, containing multiple “and” and “or” conditions to suit your needs. Once you’re comfortable, try using the Import from Gallery option in Segments. Here you’ll find pre-made segments so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel.
For example, there’s one called “Engaged Traffic” which measures traffic from high-value visitors who view at least three pages and spend more than three minutes on your site. There’s literally no end to the information you can get when using segments. Try something simple, then move on to bigger and better.
2. Sample Size
Now that you’re familiar with Segments, what you may not realize is that by default, Analytics only reports on a fraction of your visitors using a sample size. This helps keep the Analytics machine well-oiled and speedy fast in its performance, but it may also lead to slightly inaccurate results. Thankfully, you can actually increase the sample size (at a slight hit to performance) pretty easily.
3. Become A Real Power-User with Analytics Education
Google is constantly improving and growing Analytics, and you may at times feel overwhelmed, or just outright confused about what you need, how to find it, or how to use it. Luckily, on many of the areas of Analytics, look again to the upper-right corner for this icon:
Clicking the graduation cap brings up Analytics Education, which includes explanations, tips and tricks, even videos to help you understand and use Analytics better. As new features are rolled out, or even to understand existing ones, there’s no easier way than to use Analytics Education on the spot. So stop reading and go try out some of these tips! I guarantee your site will benefit and you’ll find a whole new world waiting to be explored. I also recommend using a PPC company, like BlueSwitch, to help with your PPC efforts.
