Google Analytics is the most important online tool that you can use to make important online marketing and business decisions. The freemium online service offered by Google gives you insightful information about your website. More specifically, with Google Analytics, you can track how many visitors visited your website during a particular period, where they came from, and how much time they spent on average browsing your website.

With Google Analytics, you can track online traffic of your website and monitor effectiveness of various online marketing campaigns. You can use the information and insights obtained from the online analytic tool to know most popular and relevant keywords for your website. The best thing about Google Analytics tool is that it lets you drill down various metrics in detail and provide information what will prove invaluable in improving your website’s traffic.

Here, we will share with you five important Google Analytics features that you might be missing that will provide you with the complete picture about your website.

1. Annotation

Annotation is a great feature in Google Analytics that helps in recording key events on particular dates directly in the interface. Using the annotation features users can leave private or shared notes on the Google Analytics graphs. This will help in recalling important events and reduce time spent on analyzing past online traffic data.

You can create an annotation through either the Admin or the Report interface. To create annotations through the Admin interface, you must click on the Admin tab in Google Analytics, and select Annotations under the View column. Enter the data and description of the annotation that you want to record.

For creating annotations through the Report interface, you must open any analytics report and click the little arrow just beneath the graph. Next, click on “Create New Annotation” to enter and save an annotation. You can also make the annotation shared or private in Google Analytics.

2. In-Page Analytics

In-Page Analytics is an invaluable option in Google Analytics that provides detailed information about your website traffic. The feature provides key statistics about each page of your website. Using the In-Page Analytics option, you can find out links that get the most attention from online visitors on each page and the way they interact with the website.

The feature allows you to get insightful information about various important website metrics such as page views, bounce rate, average time spent on page, conversion rates, and many other important information. You can use this information to improve overall user experience of your website and attract greater number of online visitors.

However, note that there are also certain shortcomings with this Google Analytics feature. For instance, you cannot know which links the users clicked on the page. If a webpage has lot of content and you have used anchor text on the page for improved view-ability, you will not know which anchor text is clicked by the users. Also, you cannot monitor ‘submit’ buttons on the forms. Other than that, this is certainly a useful feature in Google Analytics that you should use to gain deep insights about your website.

3. Multi-Channel Funnels

Google Analytics can provide insights into how your online visitors convert i.e. purchase your products or services offered on the website.

Your online visitors don’t always view the ad, visit the website, and make a purchase. It’s rarely works this way. In reality, the online visitors that come to your website and make a purchase come through various online channels (as opposed to just AdWords marketing channel).

They may arrive at your site through an organic search that leads to a blog posted in your website, and then clicking on the purchase link. The online visitors may also visit your website by clicking on an ad posted on a social media site or an affiliate website.

Understanding the conversion paths will help you to fine-tune your digital marketing strategy, and increase conversion rates. You can gain this valuable information by clicking on Conversions, then Multi-Channel Funnels, and Top Conversion Paths.

4. Custom Audience Segments

Visitor segmentation is a great feature in Google Analytics. You are missing out on a wealth of information about your online visitors if you are not using this feature. With visitor segmentation, you can classify or group your visitors according to different characteristics such as age, location, affinity, gender, and others.

In order to view visitor segmentation data, select the Audience, then click on Demographics or Interests. You can also create a custom segmentation report by clicking on the Audience tab, then select the small arrow next to “All Sessions.”

You can now create a custom segment report to gain information about a specific group of people. You can refine your custom segment by adding the date, the visitors visited your site and the source of the traffic. You can also compare different custom segmentation to gain better insights about your online visitors.

The insights about visitor segmentation will help you in improving your AdWords and social media marketing campaigns. You can use the information to better target your audience and increase the effectiveness of the online campaign. For instance, if you find out that most of your visitors are young adults (ages 25-34), you can fine tune your marketing strategies to focus on that group to increase conversion rate of your website.

5. Tracking Site Speed

Speed is a major factor in conversion rate optimization of a website. With Google Analytics, you can also track average load speed of your website. You can access the site speed metrics by clicking on Behavior -> Site Speed -> Overview.

The default site speed settings in Google Analytics do not display accurate data. In order to properly implement site speed tracking, you must enter the following code in Google Universal Analytics (analytics.js library).

ga(‘create’, ‘UA-XXXX-1′, ‘auto’, {‘siteSpeedSampleRate’: 50});

If you are using ga.js async library you should enter the following code for more accurate site speed.

_gaq.push([‘_setSiteSpeedSampleRate’, 100]);

At the end of the day, Google Analytics will be your most valuable resource to critically analyze online traffic and improve the performance of your website based on effective keywords. The easy-to-use interface of the online tool makes it easy for you to monitor the performance of your website by analyzing, comparing, and reporting various metrics.

The post 5 Effective Google Analytics Features You Might Not Be Using appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

Have you ever been wondered how to use the Google Analytics (GA) reports efficiently for enhancing the conversions of your website? Due to the immense data available on the different advantages of using Google Analytics reports efficiently, it sometimes becomes difficult for social media experts to decide which of these GA reports will go in favor of their businesses and their successes.

Google Analytics reports are frequently used by eCommerce sites for assessing their site’s performance and conversion rates, but it is not so easy to predict as to which of these reports really help in boosting conversion rates of their websites.

Standard Reports Categorization in GA

Although GA comes with 78 different standard reports, I am going to list here five important custom reports of GA that could be used efficiently for enhancing the conversion of your eCommerce site:

• Traffic Source Report
• Audience Reports
• Content Report
• Ecommerce Overview Report
•  In-Page Analytics Reports

1.Traffic Sources Report

As the name suggests, the Traffic Sources report is used to provide information related with the traffic on a particular website. This report could be accessed by clicking the TRAFFIC SOURCES section on the left hand toolbar of Google Analytics dashboard. You can also obtain every bit of information about the incoming traffic on your website using this report, which includes:

• Did your website searched by using the URL of your website?
• What keywords have been used by the visitors on search engines to locate your site?
• Do the people visit your site due to your Facebook or twitter updates or simply due to your monthly newsletters mailed to them?

The Traffic Sources report of a website is given as follows:

By understanding the mediums through which your traffic is coming to your website, you can learn where to invest properly to gaining maximum profit. You will also get to know that there are majorly four mediums from where the traffic comes to your website, which includes:

• Search engines
• Direct traffic
• Other websites
• RSS feed

While a good website must get equal amount of traffic from all these sources, if your site lacks in getting traffic in any of these sources, you could work hard and invest more to get the sufficient traffic to your website, which will ultimately enhance your site’s conversions

2.Audience Reports

The Audience reports of Google Analytics offer profound information of your website’s traffic along with the user behavior on your site. Apart from this, the Audience report is also designed to offer information related with various aspects of the users coming to your website like:

• How the audience consumes and reaches your site’s content? (It includes Mobile and Technology)
• Who are your audience? (It includes Demographics, Geo, and Interest)
• User engagement and loyalty (It includes Behavior)

All these information are very useful in determining the user behavior and their preferences, which is necessary for understanding the causes of conversions on a particular website and hence, you can use this information efficiently before investing more in reaching your target audience.

For navigating this report, you have to select “Audience” from the left hand toolbar of Google Analytics Dashboard, which will display the Audience Overview

3.Content Report

The Content report is again a very important report of Google Analytics as this report displays the Page Views of your website and the active users’ percentage on your website. This will also provide you an insight of which of type devices the readers use for visiting your web pages and this information is necessary especially when you are the owner of a website as often, the web pages having maximum page views can be focused more for generating significant conversions on your site by offering better user engagement.

For navigating the Content report, click the Content option in the left hand toolbar on GA dashboard under the Real –Time category.

You can see that it displays that the percentage of active users on different web pages of your website. From this you can interpret, which of the pages are receiving good page views and how to increase better user engagement over those web pages.

4.Ecommerce Overview Report

The Ecommerce Conversions report is one of the most effective reports of Google Analytics that gives you the “outcomes” of your online store. It also gives answers to most of queries of a search engine optimizer like:

• Do you convert good number of visitors this week?
• Do the conversions happen in business hour or after it?
• Which of the traffic sources are major contributors of conversions on your site?
• How much time it takes for users to convert?
• Which of your products or services are most popular and demanded?
• Which of the browsers gives the best conversion rate?
• Do all the browsers bring equal conversions on your site?

All these queries can easily be answered by using the Ecommerce Overview report of Google Analytics, which are overall responsible for bringing conversions to your site. Moreover, if you have a large ecommerce site and you sell immense variety of products on your website, then you can also enable the ecommerce tracking to check from where your loyal customers are coming and their behavior on your website. Here are some key tips to improve the conversion rate of your site.

Here is the Ecommerce conversion report of a website

This report also shows you information related with the total conversions of your site like:

• Total number of transactions occurred on your site
• Total revenue generated on your site
• The average order value that took place at your site in the particular time period
• Total purchased products from your site in the specific time period

5.In-Page Analytics Reports

Being an under-used feature of Google Analytics, the In-Page Analytics report helps you in recognizing the key areas of your website including the links that refers visitors to your website. With this feature, you can easily understand which part of your website is most likely to be visited and viewed by your visitors, which you can use for modifying the layout of your website to retain those key links in the areas where you receive maximum traffic.

For finding the In-Page Analytics, you can search this feature under the Behavior reports of Google Analytics:

When you will click on In-Page Analytics, the exact percentage of where users are clicking the most on your website will be displayed:

With this feature, you can receive the given details:

• The total page views of your website generated in a given time period
• The total unique page views generated in a given time period
• The average time on the website
• The bounce rate of your website
• The average page load time of your site in seconds
• The exit rate of different pages of your website

So here you finally get to know the five important Google Analytics Reports that could help in getting your conversion tracked on your website as well as also give you idea of using your strategies more efficiently for bringing significant conversions on your site.

Google Analytics is a great tool for getting clear understanding of your website visitors, but the use of these reports must be done efficiently to maximize the profit of your ecommerce site. Where these reports can give your some important insights about the performance of your website, but if you have some more reports of GA in your mind for enhancing the conversions, you can share here in the comment section.

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The trend that has forced almost all businesses to adopt the responsive or adaptive website design is none other than the multi-screen user experience that have completely changed the perception of internet usage in past few years. Gone are the days when people were merely stuck with using their desktops and laptops for accessing internet, but the evolution of Smartphones and tablets have entirely changed the scenario. To your surprise, the mobile internet users making final purchases from online shops have grown to 23% in 2014 from 20% in 2013 and it is predicted that more than 90% mobile device users will use their internet for online shopping by 2017.

Hence, businesses have to adapt with the responsive design to give their users an interactive and friendly multi-screen user interface. But the question, which still remains popping in your mind, is that why there is need for understanding the multi-screen tracking behavior of website with the help of Google Analytics (GA)?

Google Analytics Needs Improvement with Multi-Screen, Why?

While your website might have been developed using the responsive technique, but the analytics implementations often overlook the important information related with the use of websites via different devices. It is possible that if your website has different navigational layout for different devices, then it might offer different user flows depending on the type of layout preferred by your users.

Hence, if you completely understand the importance of Multi-screen tracking feature of Google Analytics and choose to upgrade your GA with this feature, you will be able to recognize and optimize the under-performing navigation layouts of your website to improve its performance on diverse devices.

These are not only the benefits that you will get while upgrading your GA with the multi-screen tracking feature, but if you choose to do, then you can efficiently learn how to overcome the common challenges faced by most of the businesses with responsive web design in terms of implementing the analytics techniques successfully.

Insights of Users by Screen Inches

Increasing demand of Smartphones and tablets have already brought immense revolution in the world of internet and here are some interesting stats that I am going to put down here to let you know how multi-screen has been widely adopted in our current techno savvy generation. The given chart shows the percentage of users based on the screen sizes of the devices used by them in one month time period.

You can see that the percentage of users having 4- inches devices has maximum percentage, while the users of 10-inches devices claims for 21% than the 17% of 5-inches devices. X`

Before understanding multi-screen tracking behavior of Google Analytics, it’s important to outline the common challenges faced by the businesses that have adopted responsive web design.

Common Challenges That Necessitate Multi-Screen Tracking with GA

1.Different Screen Sizes

Most commonly, Google Analytics classifies the devices in three categories namely Mobile, tablet, and desktop.

However, this categorization misses the important information on the physical sizes of these devices, which is necessary for the website designers. Let me cite an example here to make this point clear to you

Suppose, your website performs well in a 4-inch device and it also show a key message at the bottom of its website in these devices that contributes in increasing conversions to your website, but the same website does not show that key message in a 3-inches device appropriately without being scrolled at the bottom as the designer might not know that this key message plays a significant in the success of this page. Hence, device-oriented preferences make this challenge more troublesome and the analytics tools help in offering the correct insights required for adequate enhancement and understanding.

2. Navigational Layout

Layout is often measured in terms of device orientation and pixels, but having proper knowledge about the layout being used in evaluating website activity is important for the overall design enhancement. You cannot put a single advert layout for all type of devices because persistence always causes annoyance. Hence, for a professional website owner, it is necessary to understand how various adverts perform on different layout and screen sizes for recognizing the under-performing adverts and increasing their overall advertising revenue.

Understanding the result of this variance in viewing probability and position can help you in experimenting with diverse positioning for Smartphones. Moreover, information related with the active layout of your web pages can help in improving your understanding about the benefits of upgrading the Google Analytics.

3.Performance Evaluation

Modern responsive websites perform differently on different devices and their performance evaluation is necessary for getting better results. Being an owner of a responsive website, you must be able to interpret how your website is performing on different devices and this can be achieved successfully by enabling multi-screen tracking feature of Google Analytics.

Multi-Screen Tracking –How It Helps In Coping with These Challenges

To help the website owners in understanding this diverse digital landscape, Google Analytics has come up with a solution to enable you see the app data and web data in the similar reporting view regardless of the collection method that you have used for bringing both data sets.

As the website owner, you must know how users are using different devices for generating sales to your website and Google Analytics does it by using its new userid feature that let your assign a unique ID to all the visits on your website. It will help in tracking all the important actions of users starting from tracking a visitor’s research for a product, checking reviews and taking final decisions for making a purchase through your website.

This unique ID will have no personally identifiable information (PII) like SSN/Email/Phone number and this also help you in tracking 90 days of user activities. Due to the assignment of unique ID, whenever a visitor will visit your website with three different devices, he or she will be treated as three different visitors. Now, you can easily connect all these touch points with the assigned unique ID by Google Analytics. Thus, the new userID feature of GA will help you in tracking the activities of same users through different devices.

Apart from tracking the multi-screen behavior of your users with this improved Google Analytics, you can also perform a lot of useful activities required for keeping a check on the performance of your website.

Custom Orientation

Apart from this, you can also add information to the Google Analytics through the “Custom Dimensions” that are labeled under the “Property” menu on the “Administration” screen. You can easily add up to 20 dimensions to a property in Google Analytics’ free version.

You can add the information related with the page request to Google Analytics by building a custom dimension and putting its value from the JavaScript. During a session, the device’s orientation could be changed, hence, the new custom dimension is fixed with a scope of “Hit”.

Device Orientation

With the improved Google Analytics, you can conveniently determine the required width and height of the window. It helps you in understanding, which devices prefer landscape orientation and which devices prefer portrait orientation. This is important for proper implementation of strategies needed for enhancing your website’s performance.

However, patience is always required for validating adequate results. The given chart will show you the percentage of Landscape and Portrait orientation’s usage in a one-month period

Overall, it depends on your whether you want to take advantage of this multi-screen tracking feature of this improved Google Analytics. As a business owner, you should know the factors that are leading great sales to your website and a little of configuration can definitely give effective results for you. You can use these results for ensuring better user experience to all your visitors.

The post Understanding Multi-Screen Tracking Behavior with Google Analytics appeared first on Digital Marketing Agency - TIS India Blog.

It seems Google Analytics will not stop rolling out new updates so soon. Even after the announcement of Universal Analytics out of beta, Google Analytics recently proclaimed to unleash new benchmark reports. Surprising isn’t it! These new benchmark reports will let users evaluate their results according to engagement metrics and industry standard acquisition.

This proclamation further asserts that users can easily choose reports from 1,250 markets, 1,600 industry categories, and seven-sized buckets with metrics by location, channel, device category dimensions. Besides, the reports also consist of a heat map feature for recognizing those areas, where more resources and time could be implemented for better outcomes.

Twiddy.com, a vacation rental company asserted that the latest benchmark reports of Google Analytics will help the company significantly in enhancing its email marketing efforts. Ross Twiddy, CMO of Twiddy.com says, “It was clear we were missing a huge opportunity in email marketing”. Twiddy further claimed that the company’s email marketing standard range open rate hiked to 48% and the company has also received a 40% hike in its click through rate after using the new benchmark reports.

Google claimed that the newly unleashed benchmark reports can be used by the vacation rental company for comparing data points, which have impacted the conversion rates. According to Google Analytics, the analysis performed by the vacation rental company assisted them zero in on the factors, which were steady in repeat bookings such as rental type, location, price range, and even the vacation week that would probably convert for each patron.

The benchmark report used by Twiddy.com is given below:

You can find the new benchmark reports in the “Audience” section of the reporting interface, but it will be accessible to the users who have picked in to share the data anonymously. For accessing the reports, you have to check the “Share anonymously with Google and others” option located in the account setting tab of Google Analytics on the admin page.

For companies looking to increase their online ROI, Google Analytics serves as an awesome piece of software providing actionable insights. You can hire web analytics consultants for data tracking and analysis who will help you to identify those channels of digital marketing that needs improvement.

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