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A Quick Overview of Google Analytics for Clients

Google Analytics Overview

Google Analytics is a tool that measures traffic and behavior to a website. There are four main groupings of data within the analytics dashboard:

  • Audience: Who is coming to your site? Where are they located geographically and what systems tools, operating systems are they using when they visit your site
  • Acquisition: how did you acquire the audience? Did they perform a generic search? Did they click on a link on another website, including social media sites? Did they click on a PPC ad or through some other marketing campaig.
  • Behavior: Once they were on your site, what did they do? What pages did they visit? How long did they stay on each page? What did they look for on your site? What page did they start on? What page did they leave from?
  • Conversions: While they were on your site, what actions did they take that you wanted them to do? What did they accomplish? Did they stay on your site for 5 minutes? Did they submit a contact form? Did they visit your store? Did they read testimonials? Did they sign-up for an email campaign?

Each of these sections have more options and data available within them and we can dig into those further as needed. One to mention specifically for awareness is under Acquisition, within this, traffic is usually grouped into one of the following categories:

  • Direct: visitor typed the website URL into the browser themselves, clicked on a favorite/bookmark they have already saved or the specific referral information could not be identified and is grouped under this category.
  • Organic Search: visitor searched for a specific term or phrase on a search engine and clicked on a link to the site as a result of their search
  • Referral: visitor clicked on a link found on another website or within an email that ISN'T classified as a social site
  • Social: a visitor came from a specific identified social media website like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
  • (Other): usually refers to traffic obtained from other sources through some kind of paid advertising campaign

A Quick Review of the Main Analytics Page

The graph above compares traffic data from the last 30 days (blue line) to the 30 days previous to that (orange line). This is generally used to display growth patterns on a website month over month. In the groupings above, the key data points are explained as follows:

  • Sessions: the number of visits to any page on the site
  • Users: the number of individual users to the site
  • Pageviews: the number of individual pages viewed by all users
  • Pages/Session: the average number of pages viewed per visit
  • Avg Session Duration: how much time was spent on the site on average during each visit
  • Bounce Rate: how many sessions consisted of only 1 page being viewed on the site and then exiting
  • % New Sessions: how many visits were from visitors that have not visited the site before (Note: this number can be a generality based on a number of page factors and user behavior changes)

Example Scenario 1:

A potential customer ("User") visits your site four times in one week ("Sessions"). They spent about 10 minutes ("Avg. Session Duration") visiting 20 different pages ("Pageviews") averaging 5 pages per visit ("Pages / Session"). On their first visit they immediately left the site and didn't view any other pages ("100% Bounce Rate"), but after coming back 3 other times to visit the other 20 pages the bounce rate adjusted to 25%.

What Numbers Do I Pay Attention To

With all these numbers being collected for you automatically, sometimes it can be hard to determine which numbers are more important than others. In the total marketing effort they all have importance and can direct actions that need to be taken on a variety of levels. But depending on the client, campaign or goal of the website some may be more important than others.

Having thousands of visitors ("Users") coming regularly ("Sessions") to your site can be a good thing. But if they don't actuall "Do" what you want them to do, like sign-up for your email newsletter, purchase a product, fill out a contact form, then all of those visitors and sessions really didn't do much for you.

Your goal is to attract an engaged and qualified visitor to your site that's going to come and do exactly what you need them to do to get in your funnel and hopefully convert into a customer or supporter for your effort. Therefore the ultimate measurement factor within Google Analytics are measured by "Events" or "Goals"

Google Analytics Events: Just about any click on a website can be tracked as an event (link, button, image, video, etc.)

  • They clicked on a specific navigation menu item
  • They clicked a button in the sidebar to be taken to another page
  • Did they download a file
  • Did they play a video
  • Did they leave a comment

Google Analytics Goals: goals are similar to events and in fact can incorporate an event action as part of the goal

  • Destination: the user visited a specific page on the site
  • Duration: the user remained on a page or site for a specific length of time
  • Pages/Screens Per Session: an individual user clicked a set number of pages in a single visit
  • Event: the user competed a defined event

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WANTED: Google Analytics Overview Display

I’m digging into Google Analytics pretty frequently. Getting to the point where it’s multiple times per day across numerous accounts and websites. One of the things I’ve been wishing and waiting on for quite some time is some kind of overview display across a list of accounts. The data points I’m looking for could go right in the area I’ve highlighted below in a screenshot from their website.

Google Analytics Overview Could Go Here!

Google Analytics Overview Display

I’d like to be able to look at a view or list of sites like the ones above and in that wide-open area to the right of the domain names see all the basic stats like:

  • Visits
  • Unique Visitors
  • Pageviews
  • Pages/Visit
  • Avg. Visit Duration
  • Bounce Rate
  • %New Visits
  • Goals

What would be really great too is to perhaps even squeeze in comparisons to previous month and previous day for those stats.

Or perhaps some basic social sharing highlights that could also be incorporated in here if you’ve got all your social tracking data configured as you should. But that’s another huge discussion! You’d think it could get a little more standardized and manageable.

You see, Google Analytics has a wealth of information, but it gets old having to dig into each site profile to see what I may be needing to look at and be aware of on either side of the coin. It would be great to have this kind of overview available so I could see comparisons of some of my sites against others. I might be able to even pick out patterns of overall traffic increases across all my sites, leading me to think things like, “What was it about THAT day that made traffic jump on all my sites?”

Don’t get me wrong. I really enjoy and am using the custom dashboards more and more for individual properties. But what I’d really like is a custom overview dashboard that I could create perhaps. Services like Get Clicky and SEO Moz offer some nice dashboard options for viewing details across sites, just wish Google would follow suit.

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How to Filter IP Addresses from Google Analytics

One of the little tasks I’ve had in my To Do list for today was to figure out how to exclude a collection of IP addresses from counting as traffic in some client Google Analytics accounts.

Why would I want to do that you might ask? Well, if you want to know how well your website is doing at attracting new customers and visitors, you’re probably not (or shouldn’t be) interested in how many of your own employees are visiting the website.

So, we want to exclude an IP address range from our site traffic numbers, which can be done by setting up a custom filter in Google Analytics.

I’ll show you how to do this kind of backwards so it will be easier to setup when you’re ready.

First we want to grab the list of IP addresses that we want to exclude. Google has a little tool that makes this really easy. Since the result is a regex string, anything to make it easier for me is appreciated. I still haven’t figured out regex language yet.

Next we want to place the regular expression filter we just created into a custom filter in Google.

GA-ip-filter-setup

This is perhaps the most challenging part of the whole she-bang, getting to the Custom Filters section in Google.

  1. Click on the “Analytics Settings” link that’s found right under the Google Analytics logo. Once you click on that, click on the account that has the domain you want to create a filter. Once that page loads, there’s a link in the bottom-right-hand corner for “Filter Manager”. Click that! Once that page pops up on the right-hand side of the gray bar should be a link titled “+ Add Filter”. Click that and you should see the image above.
  2. Give your filter a name, select “Custom Filter”, select “Exclude”, select Filter Field by “Visitor IP Address”, paste the regular expression we created at the beginning as the “Filter Pattern”.
  3. Select which website profiles you want the rule to apply. Unless the client has multiple domains, I doubt you’re going to be choosing more than one here. However, you could create an IP exclusion for your own IP address and make sure that your own traffic is excluded from all of the websites you manage.
  4. Click “Save Changes”

VOILA! You’re done.

Hopefully that helps someone.

UPDATE:

After we played around with this a bit more, we realized it wasn’t immediately apparent that the filter was or wasn’t getting applied. I then found this little bit of information from Google:

If you’d like to apply filters to your data while keeping your “raw” data intact, you can create a duplicate profile in your account. To do so, add a new profile using the Add profile for an existing domain option. When this option is selected, the tracking code generated for the new profile will be identical to the tracking code for the original profile, and data will be imported simultaneously into both. You won’t need to change the tracking code on your site, and any filters applied to the first profile will not affect data in the second.

Setting up multiple profiles seems like the best option, but the idea of having an overlay view available within the analytics seems like a handy addition. To me they should handle it like any of their other custom segments or filters within the data and user-interface.