10 Google Analytics Tips

<span style="font-size: small;">Most of us who have been users of the web, have forayed into making their own site. Be it a personal blog, or acommunity site like CE, or </span><span style="font-size: small;">full-fledged e-commerce portals … all of us are</span><span style="font-size: small;"> interested driving more traffic to our website.</span>

<span style="font-size: small;">That is where web analytics comes into picture. We chose Google Analytics (GA) because it is a comprehensive free suite.</span>

<span style="font-size: small;">Below is a compilation of some of the tips that have been tried and tested, but of course it is not limited to this list, the readers are encouraged to contribute to this list, and we will be sure to add your contributions to this li</span><span style="font-size: small;">s</span><span style="font-size: small;">t.</span>

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Google Analytics

</span><span style="font-size: small;">For beginners, it is suggested that they go through the </span><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><span style="font-size: small;">installation guide</span></span><span style="font-size: small;">.</span>
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[*]<span style="font-size: small;">Use Analytics </span><span style="font-size: small;">for the longer run</span><span style="font-size: small;"> – Keep this in mind and you won’t be disappointed with the results. Analytics will not give you immediate results; it will only give you a measurement system. After that you need to act based on your observations.</span>
[*]<span style="font-size: small;">Google is your best friend </span><span style="font-size: small;">– To increase your web traffic organically, remember that Google (and other search engines) is your best friend. As long as the content on your portal matches to what people are searching, you will get traffic from search results. GA gives you a handy tool so that you can track what searches are leading to traffic on your site.</span>
[*]<span style="font-size: small;">Rinse and repeat </span><span style="font-size: small;">– Google is offering some great tools for webmasters. One such tool is </span>#-Link-Snipped-#<span style="font-size: small;"> by Google.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> Using a combination of webmaster tools and GA will be the toolbox of a good webmaster.</span><span style="font-size: small;"> It allows you to carry out experiments on the site, experiments are essentially small tweaks on the site which you can measure the effectiveness of.</span>
[*]<span style="font-size: small;">Annotations </span><span style="font-size: small;">– GA has come out with annotations on the timeline. This allows one to mark milestones in the lifetime of the site. So you could mark the time you changed the look and feel of the site, and observe how the traffic changes post that event.</span>
[*]<span style="font-size: small;">Click-through</span><span style="font-size: small;"> – GA lets you track the entire lifecycle of a visitor. From the first page the visitor lands, to the page on which he left your site. If you gather enough data over time, you will soon realize at which pages your traffic bifurcates, at which pages your traffic reduces. These are the pages you need to take care of, experiment with these pages and direct the traffic to the pages where you want people to go to.</span>
[*]<span style="font-size: small;">Content Tracking</span><span style="font-size: small;"> – Search engines love sites which are active, which have dynamic content. If you have a dynamic site, then you can use your website traffic to gauge the quality of your content. </span>
[*]<span style="font-size: small;">Funnel and Goals </span><span style="font-size: small;">– If your site is workflow oriented (registrations, checkouts, etc), then make sure that you add goals to your GA profile. This allows you to track individual goal funnels and see at which state the traffic dips. These pages need to be changed.</span>
[*]<span style="font-size: small;">Finding referrals </span><span style="font-size: small;">– Over a period you develop affiliations with many other sites. You post your links on those sites, now how do you know which site is giving you more traffic and which site is not helping at all? GA lets you do that through Referring Sites in the Traffic Sources Review. For example, CE gives my blog regular visitors.</span>
[*]<span style="font-size: small;">Understanding your user</span><span style="font-size: small;"> – You can even find out where you are getting your majority of readers from; Geographically, Internet Service Provider wise and even the configurations of their browsers and operating systems.</span> <span style="font-size: small;">There was a time when I used to get 75% traffic of IE users, I put an IE specific page which urged all these users to switch to Firefox. </span><span style="font-size: small;">Now IE is down to 25% </span><span style="font-size: small;">J</span>
[*]<span style="font-size: small;">Power users</span><span style="font-size: small;"> – If you are well versed with basic level of analytics, then you should go for custom reporting. This requires a bit of in-depth knowledge and some tinkering with GA, but you can track things like how many readers are coming to your site and leaving within 30 seconds, country-wise search results, the opportunities are endless especially when you combine them with custom variables.</span>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Engineers are naturally good at analysis. In fact given enough time, GA can be a source of entertainment where one can experiment and try out different creative things. Care to share some of the experiments that you did and how it turned out? We shall be happy to publish your experiments on </span>#-Link-Snipped-#<span style="font-size: small;">.</span>