Google Analytics & Online Marketing

Google Analytics is a very useful tool for Internet business especially online marketing. Google Analytics is probably the only free enterprise class tool available for website owners. It’s amazing the kind of features available for users at no cost. The amount of analysis, insights that can be accomplished is enormous considering the tool is available for free. The auxiliary benefits of Google analytics tool such Benchmarking & Google Trends is equally big.

Most website users have already used Google Analytics as online visitor reporting tool, however new features like Custom reports / Advance segmentation has upgraded it to an analysis tool. With Google Analytics you can achieve detailed analysis to make well informed decisions for online marketing & Internet business in general.

Some of the new features in Google Analytics are:

Advanced Segmentation: This is a most important feature to segment GA data as per your criteria.

a. Define segments based on any Site metrics, Traffic, Content, E-Commerce or Systems parameters available.
b. Apply these advanced segments on any report to view slice of data as per your criteria.
c. Apply more than one segment, along with overall visits for comparison.
d. Use predefined segments available by default.
e. Understand behavior of users for each segment and differentiate your action for each of them.
f. This feature along with regular expression can identify key pain points & opportunities that can make huge difference to your website.
g. E.g Segment1: Visitors landing on home page and bouncing from site.
h. E.g Segment2: Visitors landing on inner pages.

Custom Reports: This is a user defined report, where you can choose to identify elements in rows & columns in a data table.

a. Choose desired dimension parameters in rows and your desired metrics in columns.
b. Select other sub-dimensions for drilling down the reports. You can select drill down parameter to three levels.
c. Sub dimension chosen will be a slice of data from top level dimension. Since you have the ability to choose any dimensions for both levels, you can get absolutely wonderful segments.
d. E.g : First level dimension can be Geography, drill down to Top Landing pages & Network location.
e. E.g: First level can be Count of Visits, drill down to Traffic Sources, Top landing pages.
f. These reports can be saved, exported, sent to email and viewed anytime online.

Motion charts: Great Visualizing techniques like motion charts are available for users to pictorially view metrics over a time period. You can choose other site metrics as bubble sizes with different colors.

a. You need give Google motion chart API code access to your GA account.

Data Export API: Use Google Analytics API to import data from Google Servers. This is very useful as you can store GA information in your database or use it third party reporting software.

a. Export Data on Dimensions & metrics which can be used in combination for a custom report.
b. Common calculation such as formula for Bounce rate (bounces/entrances), Exit rate (exits/pageviews) and more can be found here http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataReferenceCommonCalculations.html

Flash & Dynamic Page tracking: Use ga.js new code for tracking dynamic pages with _trackpageview function.

a. Track Videos & various actions like pause, play, stop etc.
b. View Developer Docs present at http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/

User Defined functions: You can configure Google Analytics to store user attributes like Age, Income, demographic, psychographic attributes. The website needs to capture these attributes in first place and using the setvar function in javascript code, you can pass these values to Google Servers. Setvar function overwrites new values for same cookie, to avoid this there is another function called supersetvar, which can be used to append future values to existing ones.

a. You could slice,dice, segment data on Age, Income & custom defined values.
b. View the list of functions which can be used to customized data representation in GA. http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApi.html

Internal Site Search: Configuring your GA for site search can be done by enabling in main settings panel. You also have to give the parameter which stores the search keywords in URLs.

a. Search Exits, Bounce Rate, User behavior during search, post search and pre-search.

Ecommerce Tracking: You can use GA to store your e-commerce transactions. This is done by enabling e-commerce settings. You also need to place additional code in Thank You! Page to capture the elements of transaction such as price, product name, quantity etc.

a. You can find more info here about installing the Ecommerce tracking. You can even track 3rd party shopping transaction. (can be done by _linkByPost function) http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55528 http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=11001

Adwords Integration: Integrating Adwords keyword, impression, cost, cpc, clicks metrics on GA will be extremely useful as you can segment, slice, dice cost, cpc, impression via Geography, content, landing pages, visitor behavior, loyalty etc.

a. Adwords optimization is done based on conversion, however using GA we would be able to identify various segments of users such as Visitors doing research, Visitors browsing FAQs, Visitors commenting, browsing etc. Therefore we would be able to attach value to each segment and hence can better optimize Adwords campaigns based on different actions done by users rather than just conversion.

Coming articles will contain more information on GA regular expressions, using Goals, filters and advance implementation on pageviews etc.

This Article is originally available only in http://www.praveenkodur.com/blog/