How to Get the Best Out of Google Analytics When You Don’t Know What You’re Using it For…

I spend hours each day working with GA and helping clients use the system to learn how to make improvements to their site and their revenue.

Google Analytics is a wonderful system. But it’s very difficult to ge started when you don’t know where to start or really understand what you’re trying to get out of it.

The articles below contain some of the things I’ve found useful.

Get an Instant Checkout Health-check With This One-stop Report

November 29, 2011

See if anything is wrong with your checkout at a glance with this Google Analytics Custom Dashboard. If you have an ecommerce web site you know that the performance of the checkout is critical. If anything goes wrong with the checkout it will be costing you money. That’s why first thing every morning, before I [...]

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How Multi-channel Funnels Give You More Insight Than Ever Before

August 26, 2011

Multi-channel Funnel Reports in Google Analytics bring us a whole new depth of understanding to how people come to web sites over the course of several visits. And there’s a bonus: we can also start working with our SEO keywords and other sources of traffic with a level of control which was previously only available [...]

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Download Custom Report to Compare Days of the Week in Google Analytics

August 19, 2011

Here’s a great custom report for you to try. There’s a link below to import the report straight into GA, but first let me explain why I think this is so exciting. Retailers and other web sites with strong weekly visitor patterns need to be able to compare Mondays with Mondays and Saturdays with Saturdays. [...]

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Learn the Secret Power of Google Analytics Custom Alerts

August 11, 2011

Here’s a quick way to get Google Analytics to shine a light on problems on your site and help you sort them out. You can also use this tip to spot promising sources of new customers and other good news like that. In the practical example you’ll learn how easy it is to set GA [...]

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If Social Marketing is So Big, Where Are All the New Visitors?

June 30, 2011

You’re almost certainly getting a better return on your social marketing that you think. It’s just not showing up where you’re looking for it. The recent announcement of Google +1 has turned the volume of excitement over social marketing all the way up to 11. But for some time now the people who count numbers [...]

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Bonus Google Analytics Site Search Tips

June 14, 2011

In the first two parts of this series I explained why on-site search is such a powerful tool for learning about the intentions of your visitors, and showed how you can use Google Analytics Site Search Reports to learn about your market and improve customer experience. Now I’m going to wrap up the series with [...]

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How You Can Put Google Analytics Site Search to Work for You

June 1, 2011

In part one of this series I explained why site search reports are so valuable. These reports contain the words actually typed by your visitors, so they give you valuable insight into the intentions, needs and language of your market. The site search reports do a lot of the heavy lifting for you: they give [...]

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Let Your Customers Tell You What They Want: Paths of Desire

May 25, 2011

Listen to your customers. Let them tell you what they want… Let them show you how to make your site better. Navigation is one of the biggest problems we all face when shopping online. It crops up again and again as a pain point in customer surveys. So why not let your customers help you [...]

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How to start working with brand keywords in Google Analytics

September 28, 2010

Separating your ‘Brand’ searches from ‘Generic’ searches will help you measure and improve your customer acquisition and retention programs. Consistency is important here if you are to make and track changes over time. So this article explains the starting point for using this information in a systematic way in Google Analytics. As a bonus, the [...]

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Let Google Analytics tell you when your visitors are having a bad experience

August 19, 2010

If you want to know what to do to make your site better for your visitors, you need to know what they find bad. And one of the best indicators that someone is having a bad time is if they keep seeing annoying error messages. Why error messages are a shortcut to improving customer experience [...]

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