Make Google Analytics Work for You

Google Analytics provides a plethora of data about your website, but what does all that data mean? For your website analytics to tell a story, it is crucial to understand what the information is telling you about who is visiting your website, how they are getting there, and how they interact with its content. Let's dive into a few reporting features that will help you better understand your website's visitors and demonstrate the importance of using marketing analytics.

Create Custom Visitor Segments

Custom visitor segments are essentially a fancy way of defining specific subsets of your website traffic. For example, you may wonder about how millennials are using your site or if men are converting more often than women. Creating custom visitor segments will help you to parse your data in a more meaningful way. You will use the Google Analytics Audience reporting to define these segments for use in your reporting.

Add Value to your Goals

The best way to see how certain parts of your website affect your bottom line is to assign a value to each of your website goals in Google Analytics. This can be done in the Admin section of Google Analytics. Although every website conversion may not have a direct monetary value (i.e., a purchase), it is helpful if you can try to quantify the value of each of your most important website actions. This metric can help you make difficult decisions about website structure and content, as in the end, you want to receive the most ROI from your website, and assigning a value to your goals can help you identify where you are getting the most ROI.

Analyzing Conversion Paths

Google Analytics provides data on users' conversion paths, beginning with the first time they accessed your site, and ending with a conversion. Some users will arrive at your website for the first time and convert. Others will take a more convoluted path to conversion, which is where conversion paths come in handy. It can also help you understand which marketing efforts are driving users to your site, how many times, in what order, and how this could affect those who convert.

Using Intelligence Events to Monitor Irregularities

Intelligence Events are features that every webmaster should use to help flag irregularities in website traffic in almost real-time. By setting parameters outside your site's normal fluctuations, you can be alerted via when things go awry (because nobody can spend every minute watching their Google Analytics page). It's a good idea to set some alerts for sessions and pageview metrics across popular pages of your website so you can address any anomalies (for better or for worse) at the moment.

Compare Current Site Data to Historical Site Data

You can easily create a comparison in Google Analytics right within the date range box by checking the "Compare to" checkbox and then choosing what timeframe you'd like to compare from the dropdown menu. You can use one of Google's pre-determined ranges or create your own based on what you are trying to see. (Pro tip: Keep in mind that some months have extra days when comparing month-to-month data)

Annotating in Google Analytics

Using custom annotations within Google Analytics is a great way to keep track of significant events on your website and help keep your team apprised of updates or observations. Annotations look like little speech bubbles that appear below a specific date or time on your Google Analytics graph. To open a timeline of annotations, click on the small gray downward arrow below the chart. You can then click in the upper right to add your annotations and select who can view them.