30 Marketing Tips in 30 Days: Marketing Tip #27 – Soup Up Your Analytics Account

Dec 28 2010

Every website we know has set up tracking through a Google Analytics account. This basic information is critical to the success of your site, but Analytics can be customized in many, many ways to help you even more.

In a previous post, we’ve mentioned the importance of setting up Goals in Analytics, but here we list a few more ways to tweak your account to make your tracking data more effective.

Set up “Events” to track outbound links and PDF downloads. Analytics Help can show you how to write custom scripts to modify the links to external pages or PDF documents on the site so Analytics will count how many times they are clicked by your visitors. These action counts will display in your Analytics report under Content/Events at three levels of detail.
Use your Benchmark report. Most industry verticals are included in this comparative data Analytics provides. You can access a general report that shows your performance on basic measures like visits, pageviews, and bounce rate compared to sites of similar size. Better, choose to share your traffic data with Google and you can choose which industry (and often which industry segment) for which you want to be compared, and get more highly targeted reports relevant to your market niche. You can use the data to determine which areas of your site need work.
Do you run an Ecommerce site? If you do, definitely define the site as Ecommerce in Analytics to get detailed reports on purchases right along with the rest of your traffic data. Your developer or webmaster will know how to connect Analytics to your shopping cart. Analytics will report the value of sales by product or service, SKU, or category, and allows you to compare traffic sources by sales just like any other Goal. This data is perfect for evaluating traffic sources for yield, cost per sale, and sales conversion rate.
Use Annotations to track when important events take place on your website. Analytics allows you to insert comments by date so you will know when important changes or promotions took place. You can use this information to evaluate the impacts of different events like email newsletters or specific promotions on your traffic, clicks, and conversions.
Create Advanced Segments to view important subsets of your data. Navigate to the ‘Advanced Segments’ pulldown at the top of Reports and choose ‘Create a new custom segment’. A screen will open that allows you to select which ‘Dimensions’ and ‘Metrics’ you want to use to define your segment. For example, you can make a segment based on geographic source of visits to be measured by ecommerce performance. Making several of these segments will generate comparative reports in your main Analytics views so you can see graphically where your best performing traffic comes from.

Analytics keeps adding important features, and still all free. Make use of this data to get the most out of your Inbound Marketing investment.