7 Tips On How to Use Google Analytics (Advanced Users)

So you’ve got your Google Analytics account set up and you know a lot of the basics – but are you making the most of this feature-rich tool? Here are 10 quick tips that will help you get even more out of your traffic tracking.

[If you’re a beginner to Google Analytics and need to setup the account, please read How to Use Google Analytics (for Beginners)

1. Save some time, set up alerts.

You can have regular email reports sent to you as often as you like (daily, weekly, monthly) so that you don’t have to keep visiting your Google Analytics Dashboard to get the same information over and over again.  To get any of the reports on your Dashboard sent to you directly, just click “view report” and then at the top of the next page, you’ll see a button for “Email.” Click that and set your preferences and you’re up and running.

You can also set it up to alert you when you hit a certain goal you’ve set – a number of pageviews, unique visitors, almost anything really.  To set up a goal and an alert, Click on “Intelligence” on the left side of your Dashboard, then “Create a custom alert.” On the next screen you’ll be able to choose the metric you’d like to track and check a box to email you when you hit it.

2. Don’t count your own traffic.

You visit your site, and probably more than you think.  So to get an accurate count of your traffic, you’ll want to ignore your computer’s IP address.  This can be done with a simple setting change:

On your Account Overview page, click “Edit” to the right of site you want to make this change.

Choose “+Add Filter” and choose to Exclude traffic from the IP addresses that are equal to (and enter your IP address).  Here’s a simple site to find your IP address.

3. Set up custom link tracking.

This can be helpful if you have advertising on your site and want to track clicks on a certain ad or just to see how certain links are doing individually.  To track a link in Google Analytics, add this piece of code to the end of it:

<a href=”http://www.advertisersite.com” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/bannerads/advertisername/bannername’);“>

It is a good idea to keep your categories easy to understand and file.   In the example above, it will create a bannerads folder with subfolders for advertisername and bannername – making it very simple to see attribute the track correctly.  This can be done similarly for regular links, not just ads.

4. Track downloads of pdfs or free e-books.

If you offer a downloadable product on your site, you want to know just how many people are actually downloading it.  You can track this using the same convention as link tracking – each click = one download.  Here is one categorization suggestion:

<a href=”http://www.yourpdfURL.com” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/downloads/documentname’);“>

5. Quick week and month trick!

This one is so obvious that most of you probably don’t know about it.  You’ll feel silly if you didn’t know, but you’ll also be really excited about such a little thing.

If you click on the Month name or the little block before any week when choosing a date range, Google Analytics will automatically select the whole month or whole week.  There… now isn’t that fun?

6. Track a 404 page.

Want to know how many times people encounter your 404 error page and don’t find what they’re looking for (so you can fix it, of course)? Add modify and add this piece of custom code to your 404 page and then look for /404.html in your Top Content page results to see how many times people hit it.

<script>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? ” https://ssl.” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src='” + gaJsHost + ” google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script>
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxx-x”);
pageTracker._trackPageview(“/404.html?page=” + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + “&from=” + document.referrer);
} catch(err) {}
</script>

7. Tracking for social media

Social media is where it’s at right now, so of course you want to know how much traffic you’re getting from Facebook, Twitter and the rest of their social network friends.  To make it easy to see with Google Analytics, you can lump them into one “Social Media” category.

You’ll need to set up a custom filter with the conditions in the image below.  Some fields to use as social networks are:

wikipedia|stumbleupon| groups.google|bloglines|groups.yahoo.com|linkedin|
facebook|del.icio.us|digg|feedburner|twitter|technorati|blog|wordpress|newsgator|PRweb|

You’ll now see all social media traffic show up together, making it much clearer to see how much of an impact it has on traffic.