Advanced Google Analytic Features

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for marketers to better understand their website and the habits of those who visit. By understanding click patters, traffic sources, and other metrics, marketers can determine an audience’s key interests and make the necessary adjustments to improve the user experience and develop an interface that encourages conversions. Google’s package is comprehensive, free and offers a number of other key benefits that separate it from competitor products. Among those features are goals and filters. These tools help marketers maintain more accurate numbers and generate reports that better measure the return on investment.

Purpose

Filters have become a hugely important factor in helping measure campaigns, events, AdWords success or whether certain products or services are successful on the web. For instance, let us say that we are the marketers for Adidas and we just recently released a new basketball sneaker. It is currently the main product being showcased in our television commercials and within our search ads and social media marketing promotions. All tactics are pointing to a unique landing page which features the new shoe. The web visitor might take a particular path to eventually purchase this product. For instance, he or she views a mention of the sneaker on social media and clicks on the link, arrives on the custom landing page, drills through to the product specification page, selects gender, color, size, etc, for the specific style he or she wants, then moves onto the checkout page, enters credit card information, verifys and purchases, and finally receives a “thank you” page receipt. This simple one-stop purchase required the user to view six pages.

This exact path taken by the user, or funnel, can be better analyzed with the use of filters. Every online business has steps that people must take to become a customer…Whether people are attempting to sign up for your online service, or purchase a product from your website, there will be a certain number of steps they will have to take in order to give you money. Funnels help us see this process (or processes)easily, by giving us a visual representation of the conversion data between each step. Thus, e-commerce sites should take tremendous advantage of these Google tools since it demonstrates direct correlation of their efforts and how ads and pages should be improved. Moreover, other brands or Google users who are not selling products, can also take advantage since a goal does not necessarily have to be a monetary purchase. A blogger for instance might want the user to sign up for his or her updates, to receive a notification whenever a new post is published. Or a B2B brand might seek a “contact us” form completion to better understand interest from potential customers. Every brand can and should formulate goals. Filters help to gauge success of those conversions.

Examples and Use Cases

Google Analytics allows up to 20 goals per profile. With those goals, one can apply filters. One of the most basic filters, but also most important, is the exclusion of IP addresses. From Blogger Kyle James, excluding a specific IP Address from your profile can be valuable to make sure that your main editor isn’t destroying your data because they are all over your site editing content. How many times per day do you visit your own website? Perhaps to read co-workers’ blogs, double check on statistics or corporate info, share products via social media, and of course, web maintenance. All these visits from users within your company can severely damage the accuracy of your traffic. Hundreds, if not thousands, of views each month may be internal staff that has no relevant on your reported numbers. By using filters, you can easily restrict certain IP addresses or servers so those visitors will not be included within your metrics.

Another useful tactic within these Google features is designing funnels specific to a certain goal. By doing so, marketers can see in a given path which pages may have led to a drop off, or, where a user left the site instead of moving forward toward a conversion. Drop off rates can also help you isolate content that is driving visitors to convert better. Say, a large percentage of traffic going to page A is converting as opposed to other pages. It could mean that content on page A (be it an offer, a value proposition, a testimonial or something else) strikes a nerve with your audience. Without filters, marketers might have a general idea of which pages fair better. But with filters, they can see more clearly how audience members arrived, where they intended to go, and which specific page(s) led to a drop off. This accurate measure leads to more tailored messaging and more powerful promotions.

These are only the beginning. Within Google’s free offering, you can dive deeper into your paths to ensure a close eye on visitor traffic with the main focus on conversions. Lars Lofgren at KISSMetrics offers some examples of findings that can be determined with metrics that are measured with the use of filters.

-         -  Determine what steps are causing customer confusion or trouble

-          - Figure out what language or copy might be altering customer’s emotional behavior during checkout or sign up

-         -  Be aware of bugs, browser issues and other technical nuisances

To just add a few more, marketers can zero in on particular countries or geographic regions, or focus on certain demographics if an event/campaign is expected to generate higher interest from certain groups of people. We all strive to have a usable site that helps us meet our business goals. Certain elements within the site could be holding us back from our potential. It is critical that we use analytics to help diagnose the problem and work to find effective resolutions.

Conclusion

Glen Gabe of Search Engine Journal states that the best approach for web business comes from a web-balanced strategies – one consisting of SEO, paid search and social advertising. He also notes the importance of measurement. If you don’t have the mechanisms in place to easily see how visitor segments perform, then important questions could go unanswered.  And that’s not good for enhancing your business. Google Analytics might be one of the most powerful tools in place to help measure web performance. By identifying goals and funnels and using filters, marketers can have an accurate understanding of visitor habits on a particular site. At the end of the day, all parties are concerns with the investment involved around a website and how to get the most out of that asset. These Google tools help marketers better achieve that success.