How to Effectively Leverage Google Analytics 

Google Analytics is a free, user-friendly, customizable website tracking tool that aids users in making well-informed strategic business decisions. The tool allows you to gauge important website metrics and visitor behavior patterns to improve online marketing efforts. Ultimately, Google Analytics provides marketers with a platform to aggregate website information from multiple sources relating to specific business objectives and goals.

In an upcoming Aberdeen Web Analytics Study of over 230 organizations using free or paid web analytics solutions, “Google Analytics featured prominently as a solution provider of choice. In fact, of the 117 survey respondents currently leveraging Google Analytics, 64% indicated that they use Google Analytics in conjunction with a paid web analytics tool. This Research Alert provides insights into key findings from the study and presents vendor-specific highlights drawn from the research.”

Here are 6 tips on effectively leveraging Google Analytics:

1. Dashboards
The Reports dashboard is the main console for Google Analytics. Customization of the Reports
dashboard provides for efficient access to report summaries. Think of the dashboard as a
living, breathing snapshot of your website traffic and marketing efforts.

2. Search engines report – paid/non-paid
Search Engines provide the majority of traffic to many websites. To view this traffic, you can
access the Search Engines report in Google Analytics. The report shows Search Engine referral
traffic in two forms: paid and non-paid traffic. Paid searches come from Sponsored Link
Campaigns, while non-paid traffic comes from Organic Search Engine results.

3. Cross-segmentation
Google Analytics allows you to cross-segment report data with other metrics, such as the
“source” or “medium” of the traffic. This provides a very valuable and necessary level of
detail for any marketer.

4. Date comparison
This feature is essential to monitoring marketing initiatives over a period of time. You can
compare data over customizable date ranges to evaluate and monitor website changes or
marketing efforts.

5. Tagging
By adding customized tags to your online marketing campaigns, you are able to manipulate
the cookie values of visitors to your website. This creates synergy and ease of use when using
the Google Analytics tool.

6. Filters
Every company should add filters to their Google Analytics account to ensure the data does
not include internal or irrelevant information. Filters can exclude visitors from either Domains
or Static IP addresses. If your company is working with many vendors and strategic partners
who access your site, filters can prove to be very valuable to online marketing success.