We have already gone through an introduction to Google Analytics in one of our previous articles. That was one of our most popular articles ever and we decided to write a follow up article on some of our favourite Google Analytics tips below. We hope you enjoy our tips and do send us an email if you have any enquiries.
Find Out Where Your Audience Comes From
Do you know where your audience comes from? Even if you are only operating a local business, you will find that you will get visitors from overseas as well as your search results will appear in foreign search engines.
The graph above shows you where your audience comes from. The darker the colour, the more people are visiting from a particular region.
Learn RegEx
We’re not suggesting that you become an expert coder, but some programming knowledge is definitely useful if you’re doing anything related to the Internet.
Regular Expression, or more popularly known as RegEx, is simply characters expressing a pattern to be searched within a longer piece of content. This is the language that Google Analytics uses to perform more complex searches.
When you are able to use RegEx, you can use it to
- Create segments or filters in Google Analytics
- Unify various thank you pages into one goal
- Remove spam referral traffic to get a better idea of your true overall traffic
Automate Your Reporting
There is huge difference between preparing reports and analysing those reports. Analysis requires a large degree of skill and competence. Preparing reports can get tedious over time. When a task is repetitive, then it makes sense to find ways to automate it to make it easier.
There are many third party tools and solutions that you can use to help your automate your reports. One of my particularly favourite tools is Swydo. This makes it it easy for you to get beautiful and clear reports emailed each month.
Where Swydo is a paid solution, you may consider a free solution such as Google Data Studio as well.
Setup Multiple Views
One of the most common mistakes that we see companies who use Google Analytics do is that they simply use one view for all of their data. The power of Google Analytics is that it can slice and dice data to a very granular level, but using just one view makes that difficult.
The moment you sign up a new Google Analytics account, you should set up the following three views:
- Master View
- Raw Data View
- Experiments View
The raw data view is the one that should remain unmodified. This is because the moment you include a filter, it will permanently change the data that is collected forever. You want to at least have one view that is perfectly untouched.
You will use the Experiments view to conduct different types of tests on your Google Analytics account. This may include new implementations, filters and so on.
Once you have found a new implementation that works, you will want to include this into your Master View. The Master View will contain only the final set of settings that your organisation will depend on to gather its data.
Conduct a Google Analytics Audit
Do not take it for granted that your Google Analytics has been installed correctly on your website. The most important thing is that your company can trust the data that it is receiving. You should conduct an audit each year to verify this.
What are Your Favourite Google Analytics Tips?
We all have our own favourite tips and tricks when it comes to Google Analytics. Did we miss your favourite one out? Share it with us and our readers by leaving a comment below!
