Analytics is a very powerful Google tool. We assume that if you have come this far, you already know her well enough to move around with some ease, so we will go straight to the google analytics tips and tricks that may be useful to get even more out of it.
Beyond the basic functionalities that everyone knows, Google Analytics hides in its interface a whole mess of sections, options, and filters that, well used, allow you to get more out of this web analytics tool than you would imagine. To show this, in this list, you will find functional tricks that you can use in Analytics in 2020.
Google Analytics is the most useful tool in web analytics. It allows us to know up to an unimaginable level of detail related to the visitors of a web page, and it is an essential resource to grow a project on the net. If you want to attract more visits, you first have to understand what your audience is looking for: for this, you will need to move around Analytics with the ease of someone who knows all the sections of this tool.
Beyond its basic functionalities –see the most viewed pages the previous day, know the bounce rate, analyze traffic in real-time … There are google analytics tips and tricks that allow you to obtain information that goes far beyond that. Such as, did you know that you can register which users play a video on your website? Or that you can know who spends more than ten seconds on a certain page?
The range of Google solutions for webmasters is extensive. In addition to Analytics, you will already know that there are other no less relevant tools such as Search Console, which allows you to inspect everything related to your website from the search engine itself. Whether you like it more or you like it less, working with Google is not optional if you want to fight to appear in its search results.
This list of google analytics tips and tricks aimed at beginner users of the platform. Those who have been working with this analytics tool for a while, who know more or less in-depth all its sections, but who at the same time still see very far away concepts such as behavior flow or conversion funnels.
Made the introductions, you are ready to go. Enter your Analytics account, get comfortable, and start trying the google analytics tips and tricks that we leave you below.
Eight Google Analytics Tips and Tricks that work in 2020
8 – Create an alert for when traffic drops
Do you have a website that brings you some traffic, but doesn’t spend time every day because you’re busy with other projects? In that case, a simple crash on your server can cause you to lose months of work … and what’s worse, you probably won’t notice until a few days have passed. In these cases, Analytics alerts are useful.
Alerts –as its name suggests– consists of warnings informing you of a certain situation without the need for you to navigate specifically to any specific section of the tool. They can be configured based on different parameters, but in this case, we will focus on alerts for traffic drops. The process to set your traffic alert is as follows:
- Drop down the “Personalization” menu and click on “Personalized alerts.”
- Next, click on the “Manage personalized alerts” button and click on “+ New Alert.”
- Since what we are interested in is creating a traffic drop alert, we introduce the following parameters:
- Name of the alert: The name we want
- Please apply to: We choose to which traffic view we want to apply the alert
- Period: In this case, we are going to specify “Day.” We also activate the box below, “Send me an email when the alert is triggered.”
Alert conditions:
- This corresponds to – All traffic.
- Alert me when – Sessions.
- Condition – This is less than.
- Value – We introduce here what we consider to be a suspiciously low number of sessions for the traffic that our website normally receives.
- We click “Save alert,” and we already have our traffic alert configured in Google Analytics.
7 – Use keyboard shortcuts
If you are tired of navigating between so many menus to get to the functions you use every day, you should know that there are keyboard shortcuts in Analytics. Open analytics.google.com, click on the question mark on your keyboard (pressing Ctrl/cmd before) and find out what shortcuts exist:
6 – Analyze the traffic of several URLs at the same time
You already know that this Google tool gives you the option to analyze in detail the traffic of a specific URL (an article published on your blog, for example), but what you might not know is that there is a trick that allows you to study traffic multiple URLs at once.
To test it, go to Behavior – Site content – All pages, and in the search field that you will see below the graph, enter the following:
/ [page_1] / | / page_2 / | / page_3 /
changing the text for the pages you want to analyze at the same time, so that if – for example – you want to see the traffic that your blog, your “About Us” section, and your “Legal information” section have had, the text to enter in the search would be the following:
/ blog / | / about-us / | / legal-information /
Welcome to the exciting world of regular expressions in Analytics.
5 – Check the loading time of your website
Loading time is one more positioning factor, so you have to take care of it as much as you do with any other aspect of your website. To see it in Analytics, go to Behavior – Site speed – Overview. Look at parameters like the average load time or the average server response time. And analyze it in detail by browsers, countries of origin, or pages.
4 – Find out what people are looking for on your website
Do you have a search engine on your website? Then you may be interested to know what your users are looking for when they enter your page. You can find out by going to Behavior – Search on the site.
3 – Set goals
The sea of ​​data that Analytics provides can be overwhelming, so it is important to focus on your objectives. For this, there is nothing better than establishing – never better said – objectives within your analytics. To create your first objective, go to the main page of the tool, click on the gear icon. That you will see at the bottom left of the screen, click on “Objectives” (make sure to select the traffic view you want to see above ) and follow these steps:
- Click on “+ New Target”.
- In case you have an e-commerce, most likely, the objective you want to create is already ready for use within the list of templates that Google makes available to you. So choose the one that essential suits what you are looking for. In case you prefer to bring your own goal to life from scratch, follow this tutorial.
2 – Don’t forget about the secondary dimension
When analyzing traffic data, imagine that beyond knowing which page of your website was the most viewed yesterday. You also want to know at the same time where the traffic that received each URL came from. Instead of having to jump from one report to another, there is a “Secondary dimension” parameter that allows you to see more information about your visitors in the same view.
You can, for example, see the traffic source information in a secondary view; or the time of day at which the traffic of each page viewed took place, or the average time users spent on each URL. It’s a matter of giving your imagination and combining views to know more about your audience. This is the ultimate goal of the information provided by Google analytics.
1 – Create annotations for essential events
Are you going to change the design of your website? Have you noticed that the page has been malfunctioning all day? Are you testing a major change in the source code structure? We are discussing very relevant events for your website traffic. Events that can mean a fall (or a rise) from one day to the next. To avoid that over time, you forget what relevant change you made on your website. And made use of Analytics annotations.
Enter any traffic report that shows the graph of a period of time, click on the icon of an arrow pointing downwards that you will see just below the graph. And, within the menu that will have been displayed, select the option “+ Create a new entry. ” Inside, enter the text that you consider relevant to include in your annotation.
There is also the possibility of adding annotations directly from your profile’s configuration. As they count in step number two (2) of this guide.
