Google Analytics
Articles and resources about best practice use of the Google Analytics web measurement tool.
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Sharing Personalized Dashboards using the Analytics API
- Posted by Pete Frisella, Google Analytics API Team. Google Analytics Blog, Wednesday, March 28, 2012. "Web agencies often rely on Excel and Word to create analytics reports for clients. It's a manual process that involves a lot of copy and pasting. Yet an agency’s main value-add isn’t report creation, but analyzing data and providing key findings and recommendations to clients. And while Google Analytics provides the tools to slice and dice the data, many web agencies also want to present clients with personalized reports, complete with the agency’s logo. And they want to be able to deliver and share reports without requiring users to log in, especially in large organizations where report distribution can become an onerous administrative process.
DashThis addresses these challenges with dashboards that combine simple automatic reporting with accessibility..."
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Measure your website's performance with improved Site Speed reports
- by Mustafa M. Tikir, Google Analytics team. Google Analytics Blog, Friday, March 23, 2012. "In our continued effort to improve your experience of Google Analytics, we are excited to release an updated Site Speed report that distills all the key metrics into a quick & easy to read Overview report..."
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Capturing The Value Of Social Media Using Google Analytics
- Posted by Phil Mui, Group Product Manager. Google Analytics Blog, Tuesday, March 20, 2012. "Measuring the value of social media has been a challenge for marketers...
That's why we're releasing a new set of Social reports within Google Analytics. The new reports bridge the gap between social media and the business metrics you care about - allowing you to better measure the full value of the social channel for your business...."
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How To: Share Custom Reports, Advanced Segments and Dashboards on Google Analytics
- By Tim Gray, Business 2 Community, March 18, 2012. "... Last week the search giant upgraded Analytics' existing custom report sharing and added the ability to share advanced segments and dashboards with other Analytics users, making life a bit easier and definitely more organized.
Here a a few tips to consider when looking for the Share button in these sections:
- Custom Report: In the Actions menu on the table that lists your reports.
- Dashboard: In the top-left corner over your dashboard.
- Advanced Segment: Visit the Admin tab in the top right corner of your account, then select Advanced Segments to enable sharing..."
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Share your custom reports, advanced segments and dashboards
- by Gilles Roux, Google Analytics team. Google Analytics Blog, Thursday, March 8, 2012. "We are excited to announce more ways you can share insights through Google Analytics. We have upgraded the existing custom report sharing, plus added the ability for you to share advanced segments and dashboards with other Analytics users..."
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Maximizing Google Analytics Insight for SEO with Custom Reports
- by Taylor Pratt. SEO Book, March 5, 2012. "Google Analytics - one of the most powerful tools for any SEO, assuming you know how to get the data you need from it. One of my favorite things about Google Analytics is how many tools that put at your disposal for quickly analyzing the data you care most about. But again, that all assumes you know how to get it.
A custom report in Google Analytics is similar to their custom dashboard features in a lot of ways. Remember, the dashboards are meant as snapshots of what's going on with your campaign, these custom reports are what you should be using to fully analyze the results..."
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Tracking Micro Conversions with Event Tracking for Improving SEO Campaigns
- by Taylor Pratt. SEO Book, February 28, 2012. "Conversions. The one metric we all know we should be focusing on, and yet it's the one thing that gets overlooked the most. So many of us focus on just one main conversion point, and forget how many other types of visitor engagement exist on our sites. These other engagement points, or less-important conversions are what experts call "micro conversions."..."
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Setting Up Actionable SEO Dashboards in the New Google Analytics
- by Taylor Pratt, SEO Book, February 22, 2012. "There have been many mixed reviews about the latest Google Analytics UI. Putting the frustration of having to learn a new UI aside (here's a great guide to navigating the new Google Analytics interface), the new Google Analytics actually brings to the table great customization options. One of my favorites being custom dashboards.
Both the old and new interfaces offer a standard dashboard that acts as an overview of your analytics profile. But where the new UI has its advantage is with your ability to create your own dashboard - in fact, you can create up to 20 of them for each profile..."
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Google Analytics Now Data Sampling: What's The Catch?
- by Benny Blum, Search Engine Land, March 2, 2012. "Google made a significant event out of Leap Day 2012 by releasing a new version of Google Analytics featuring Data Sampling. The idea behind data sampling is commonplace in any statistical analysis: in order to get results faster, you analyze a sub-set of data to identify trends and extrapolate aggregate results based on the percentage of overall traffic represented in the sub-set..."
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Understanding Google Analytics Time Calculations
- By Justin Cutroni. Analytics Talk, February 29, 2012. "Measuring time on a website can be hard. Really hard. Every web analytics tool has issues, and that includes Google Analytics.
I'd like to clarify how Google Analytics track time on page and visit length. It's probably different than you think.
Understanding Engagement Hits
The key to understanding Google Analytics time calculations is understanding the data that is sent to Google. We affectionately refer to these data as HITS. I know, that's a terrible term to use when talking about analytics. But they really are hits..."
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Creating an Ecommerce Tracking Plan for Google Analytics
- By Justin Cutroni. Analytics Talk, February 9, 2012. "Someone asked me how I would set up Google Analytics for an ecommerce website. And, before I get into all of the setup details, I wanted to lay the foundation from a business perspective. I'll describe the Google Analytics features and how to configure them in another post.
So this post is all about my measurement plan. A quick caveat: there are lots of different sized ecommerce businesses, some more complex and advanced than others. This plan will work good for a mid-size business. We'll get into more complex ecommerce measurement like lifetime value and cohorts some other time..."
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Advanced Content Tracking with Google Analytics: Part 2
- By Justin Cutroni. Analytics Talk, February 23, 2012. "This is part two of a two part series on advanced content tracking. This post is about the reporting and analysis of how people interact with content..."
Discusses: The Reports; Page Level Reading Metrics; Advanced Segmentation; Advanced Data Analysis; Custom Variables.
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Advanced Content Tracking with Google Analytics: Part 1
- By Justin Cutroni. Analytics Talk, February 21, 2012. "This is part 1 of a two part series on advanced content tracking. This post is about why you might want to use this technique and how to implement. The next post will cover the reporting and analysis.
The default content tracking content in Google Analytics is fairly straight forward. Using the standard page tag you can get all sorts of information like time on page, bounce rate and pageviews.
But sometimes this is not enough. For publishers and minor bloggers (like your’s truly) these metrics can be sub-optimal..."
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Google Analytics Tutorial: 8 Valuable Tips To Hustle With Data!
- by Avinash Kaushik. Occam's Razor, January 30, 2012. "Here is a summary of the eight incredible recommendations in this post: #1. Create a Customized Dashboard – Earn Love, Drive Change. #2. Leverage Custom Alerts – Let Data Kick Your Butt Into Action. #3. Use Table View Options (Comparison, Pivots, In-line Filters) – Faster Initial Insights. #4. In-Page Analytics – Re-imagine Traveling Through Data. #5. Perform Recency, Frequency & Pan Session Analysis: Fall in Love with People not Page Views. #6. Matched Query Type, Keyword Position, Day Parts: Sexier PPC Analytics. #7. Custom Report Filters, Tabs: Bring Deeper Relevance To Your Custom Reports. #8. Quit Google Analytics: Move Beyond Tool/Creativity Limitations..."
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A 10-Point Best Practice Privacy Guide for Working With Google Analytics
- Measuring Success - Official blog for the book Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics by Brian Clifton, February 13th, 2012. "... Whatever the impact of the EU Privacy law, the key to any organisation's privacy strategy is it's privacy policy document – your communication with your visitors about what you do with their data. I have therefore put down my guidelines for writing a best practice privacy policy that will stand you in good stead if you are using Google Analytics in the UK and elsewhere in the Europe..."
This category last updated: 9 May 2013