ga tips and tricks london measurecamp

GA Tips and TricksLondon MeasureCamp September 2012

Coming up:

Quick Tips • profiles & filters• dashboards & reports• various• sharing resources

Custom Variables • ideas

Custom Tracking • ideas• more ideas• extreme custom tracking

Using GA data outside GA

• API and more

Content Experiments • tips

Quick Tips: profiles and filters

Calibrate GA

Always have a raw profile

Filters: group search terms into categories then populate campaign dimension with category names

Use data hygiene filters

Consider using a summarised search and navigation profile

Filter out bots by ISP

Quick Tips: dashboards and reports

Use multiple versions of the same widget

Combine dashboards with custom reports

Take another look at Reverse Goal Path report

Keep an eye on conversion rates by browser version

Use annotations!

Try the latest interface tweaks

Custom Variable Ideas

Logged-in users

Now OK to use a visitor ID (Offer incentives to log in)

Behavioural targeting and m/v test groups

Use custom vars for attribution

Shopping basket contents

Content Experiments

Avoid the bug in Google Content Experiments with subdomains

Experiments on sitewide content - testing headers and footers

Custom Tracking Ideas

Capture additional device and browser information in GA by adding the user agent string to an event.

Record details when a visitor looks at products which are out of stock

Use server-side tracking to invisibly send sensitive or additional e-commerce transaction data.

Track error messages and configure as goals

Use events for tracking on-site promotions and campaigns

Use Ecommerce Tracking to Qualify Leads (and anything else)

Content Reading - track where people have read to

Tracking scrolling single page websites using virtual pageviews on HTML elements

Testing tagging changes with greasemonkey

Extreme custom tracking

Use GA as a central place to store non-website data to allow comparison with website data

Use GA date outside of GA (API tips)

Use the Data Feed Query Explorer to perform a Pareto analysis of product sales by ABC class and look for anomalies.

Use GA data in MySQL

Use Google Spreadsheets API integration


Calibrate GA Running a large scale production site? Need to *KNOW* that your GA data is correct? This technique will enable you to measure and precision and accuracy of GA and confirm your data is solid.

Doug Hall

Always have a raw profile And always have a spare profile as well!(And make sure you have a spare admin log in too)

Tim L-B

Filters: group search terms into categories then populate campaign dimension with category names

Using profile filters and regex, organic and paid search terms can be grouped into categories. These can be as simple as brand & generic but also more extensive e.g. product types. The category names are populated into the campaign dimension allowing for easy investigations in GA

Peter O'Neill

Use data hygiene filters e.g lowercase URI; use regex search and replace filter not 'default page' to fix canonical home page;

Tim L-B

Consider using a summarised search and navigation profile

Use filters to summarise all keywords into 'Brand' and 'Generic' and all page groups into e.g 'aCategoryPage', 'aSubCategoryPage', 'aProductPage' (but now easier and easier to do in standard reporting anyway).

Tim L-B


Filter out bots by ISP If you don't know the IP numbers, try using "ISP organization" instead. Starting point:^(global crossing|psinet uk dedicated hosting|cable & wireless uk p\.u\.c\.|compuware corporation)$

Quick Tips: dashboards & reports

Use multiple versions of the same widget

Filter them so that each one shows different data for visual comparison

Tim L-B

Combine dashboards with custom reports

Create a task-based closed environment with everything each person needs by linking from dashboards to custom reports

Tim L-B

Take another look at Reverse Goal Path report

Useful exportable table view of most common routes to unpredictable goals (eg errors, but maybe also add to cart)

Tim L-B

Keep an eye on conversion rates by browser version

Auto-updates sometimes introduce problems. Works well if you have micro conversion rates and funnel abandon rates.

Tim L-B

Quick Tips: various

Use annotations! Annotations are a great way to add event driven information to GA reports. For example, you can add an annotation for an offline marketing campaign, or for a major market event, so you can evaluate the impact of these events on KPIs. This helps with trend analysis and data interpretation.

James Gurd

Try the latest interface tweaks Shortcuts; compare to previous year Tim L-B

Quick Tips: sharing resources

Good online resources for GA segments, reports and dashboards

You can share dashboards, custom reports and advanced segments so SHARE THEM!

Doug Hall

GaCrowd.com

CustomReportSharing.com

www.dashboardjunkie.com

http://www.dashboardjunkie.com/


Logged-in users If you have a login on your site (or just a purchase funnel where you have a confirmation page) you can setup a custom segment to look at the behaviour or people who are logged in / previously purchased and compare against new visitors - or not logged in users.

Russell McAthy

@therustybear

Now OK to use a visitor ID(in some countries)

GA terms changed in some countries. Now OK to store an anonymous ID number, which YOU could link to user off-line, as long as Google (or anyone else) could not use it. But check local ToS for your country.

Tim

(Offer incentives to log in) Classic ecommerce example: make perpetual carts and wish-lists available on multiple devices

Tim

Behavioural targeting and m/v test groups

Each time you implement a 3rd party system for e.g m/v testing, behavioural targeting, merchandising etc, insist that they send at least some clue to GA

Tim

Great big list from Matt Clarke

http://techpad.co.uk/content.php?sid=166 Matt Clarke


Use custom vars for attribution Not everything in attribution is in the source, sometimes its in the page itself - if you want to see if your blog posts are contributing to conversion you can use a custom var to see not only if people have visited in this session, but any session from the same computer

Gerry White

Shopping basket contents Can track unconsummated interest in your products!

(or consider using Events -- Matt Clarke)

Michael Hayes

[email protected]

Custom Tracking Ideas

Capture additional device and browser information in GA by adding the user agent string to an event.


Record details when a visitor looks at products which are out of stock

Measure revenue lost to stock outs by firing events when customers view products that are sold out. Set KPIs on % of customers who encounter stock outs and revenue loss per visit. http://techpad.co.uk/content.php?sid=183

Matt Clarke

Use server-side tracking to invisibly send sensitive or additional e-commerce transaction data.

You can track profit, margin, discount, checkout method, latency, lifetime spend, total purchases and more...

Matt Clarke

Track error messages Powerful way of improving usability and conversion: start by fixing the big pain points

Tim L-B

Configure error messages as goals

Use Insights Alerts to warn when conversion goes us. Check Insights detail reporting for clues on where extra errors are coming from

Tim L-B

More Custom Tracking Ideas

Use events for tracking on-site promotions and campaigns


Use Ecommerce Tracking to Qualify Leads (and anything else)

For any website that doesn't have "real ecommerce tracking" think about how best to abuse the ecommerce functionality to capture relevant context (think of it like a supergoal that can contain as many properties as you like).

The end goal of a lot of websites is not a transaction, but a lead captured via a form. Often those forms contain various qualification selections (what product are you interested in, which region are you in, what is your company's turnover)... none of which are captured. Hence a big disconnect between lead quality (self evident from the form submissions) and traffic source/prior engagement.

Bend the language of Ecommerce tracking, and on submission treat each drop-down option selection as a "product item" and the form completion itself as a "transaction". Then your "product reporting" becomes a lead segmentation/scoring report. No custom variable slots used up, and less messy than event tracking.

Andrew Hood


Content Reading - track where people have read to

Using event tracking to monitor where on the page people have scrolled down to is great for content based pages. You can see where people have got to the comments section etc.

Russell McAthy

@therustybear

Tracking scrolling single page websites using virtual pageviews on HTML elements

Single page websites are becoming more popular. Most of these involve a long vertical or horizontal page, which is scrolled using the scrollbar/mousewheel. See some examples here: http://www.1stwebdesigner.com/inspiration/single-page-website-designs/

One of the issues is the ability to track which content was consumed by users. Adding standard GA code to your site will only allow you to track the top-level page.

Some problems you will face:- How much of the element needs to be on screen to count as a 'pageview'?- Does scrolling past one element to reach another cause a pageview?- How can we build the code to be reusable on other sites or updated easily when the content changes?

Drew Forster

[email protected]


Testing tagging changes with greasemonkey

I've been using greasemonkey to add or edit javascript tags on my browser, to test changes on client sites before I send them through for implementation.

Plus I'm curious - has anyone else done this to test analytics tags? I've not found any mention online of people using the technique for this purpose.

Michael Hayes

[email protected]

Extreme custom tracking!

Use GA as a central place to store non-website data to allow comparison with website data

Matt Clarke

Use event tracking to capture data on operational issues (damages, returns, errors) and report on the revenue you're losing as a result. http://techpad.co.uk/content.php?sid=208

Matt Clarke

Analyse complaints and customer service issues by attaching events to forms used to categorise/record problems on your e-commerce platform back-end. http://techpad.co.uk/content.php?sid=191

Matt Clarke

If you're event tracking related sets of data use the label field to hold a primary key and reconnect the data using the API.

Matt Clarke

Matt Clarke

Use GA data outside of GA (API tips)

Use the Data Feed Query Explorer to perform a Pareto analysis of product sales by ABC class and look for anomalies.


Use GA data in MySQL I use the GA tracking code and MySQL to more accurately and efficiently attribute all of my companies multi-channel leads. Previously we were using an automated email form that read the GA tracking code to tell us what channel the lead had come from. From there we had someone manually inputting data into Act(our CRM platform). Now we have a CSV that we pull daily and upload to Act that automatically aggregates the leads into referred by columns based on the GA tracking code.

Desmond

Use Google Spreadsheets API integration

Google Analytics Report Automation (magic) script. Instructions here: http://bit.ly/gaMagic

Tim L-B

Content Experiments

Avoid the bug in Google Content Experiments with subdomains

The standard GCE control script is buggy. If you have more than one experiment running on a site that has subdomains (think www and non www, or www and test) then your second (and third etc) experiments will all exhibit inconsistent variation behaviour - GAHH!

Here's how to fix and avoid...

Doug Hall

Experiments on sitewide content - testing headers and footers

Here's how to A/B test a header, footer or other site wide content in GCE - MVT in an A/B Framework

Doug Hall

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