10 New Google Analytics Features You Need to Start Using. Rachael Gerson spearheads the Analytics division at SEER Interactive. Follow her on Twitter @rachaelgerson. Over the past eight months, Google has steadily released one revolutionary new feature after another. On March 17, the company announced a new version of Google Analytics. Up until this point, users could decide whether they preferred to stick with the old interface or switch to the new one. However, Google recently announced that the old version of GA will be turned off in January 2012.
If you're not already familiar with the new version, take the next few weeks to get comfortable with it. To help you get started, let’s review the top 10 features of the new Google Analytics. 1. Dashboards got a much needed overhaul in the new GA. At a minimum, these four widgets would benefit the average user. Visits - Timeline (can also include Metric)Goal Completions and/or Transactions - TimelineSource/Medium - TableBounce Rate - Timeline 2. 3. 4. Why is this important? 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. SEO Dashboard in Google Docs with Google Analytics and SEOmoz Mozscape. If you spend too much time in your daily SEO reporting activities, pulling, integrating and sharing your SEO traffic data from Google Analytics and link related metrics from tools such as Open Site Explorer you have arrived to the right place! The Solution: An SEO Traffic & Link Popularity Dashboard in Google Docs. Let’s use the APIs of Google Analytics and SEOmoz MozScape to import their data to Google Docs and easily automate and share our SEO Dashboards.
I promise it’s going to be much easier than it sounds (no coding involve!) , since we’re going to use some already created scripts: To import Google Analytics data to Google Spreadsheets we’re going to use the Google Analytics integration with Apps Script released last August that allows us to pull and display the data in Google Docs. This script can be easily installed and run as explained in the following step-by-step video: After running the script we will get the following sheet with the desired Google Analytics data: Creating an Ecommerce Tracking Plan for Google Analytics. 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. I’ve divided the ecommerce data into four categories, and created a small graphic (because everyone likes graphics): The four types of ecommerce data. * Acquisition Data: Information associated with getting traffic.* Engagement Data: Info about how people interact with the website.* Conversion Data: Info about business success (revenue, revenue, revenue…..)!
The REI Ecommerce Website Acquisition Data Engagement Data. How to Set Up Blog Comments as Goals in Google Analytics Using WordPress Hacks. Analytics Checkup - Check Your Google Analytics Setup and Configuration.