Basics
The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics
While it’s hard for many to believe, there are still websites that are not using Google Analytics (or any analytics, for that matter) to measure their traffic. In this post, we’re going to look at Google Analytics from the absolute beginner’s point of view. Why you need it, how to get it, how to use it, and workarounds to common problems.
Building Your Marketing Funnel with Google Analytics
The goal of this post is going to walk you through how to identify the channels that are performing best for you in all sections of the marketing funnel. Once you know those, you know where to invest depending on your company’s needs or priorities.
Using Google Analytics for Advanced Visitor Insights
In this post, Kissmetrics shows you how to segment your traffic by age, gender, and interests and then begin monitoring the traffic of each segment independently. They’ll identify top conversion paths and figure out how to properly attribute conversions to originating traffic sources. Also, they’ll show you how to visualize visitor flow to spot potential website navigation issues and identify pages causing your visitors to drop out of your sales funnels.
How to get a professional-grade Google Analytics setup in an afternoon
Ruben Ugarte shows you the 5 steps that you can follow to be better than 90% of the companies he sees when it comes to creating actionable data dashboards. He does this by establishing your important user actions or “goals” and properly tracking all of your incoming traffic.
He ends with organizing this information in a way that helps you make quick decisions without spending hours looking at a spreadsheet. These are things you can do once in an afternoon and then use forever.
How to Get Actionable Data from Google Analytics in 10 Minutes
That’s the thing about GA. It’s biggest upsides is also one of its biggest downsides: tons and tons of information!
Unless you’ve been using GA for a long time, you might be asking yourself the same question that Neil Patel was asking in those early days: “What exactly should I be looking at?” In this post, he give yous the inside scoop and breaks everything down, step-by-step.
10 Disciplined Approaches to Google Analytics
You need to use data from Google Analytics to get better, stronger, faster, and more able to deliver the experience your customers want. Or better yet, use the platform to answer your questions
4 Google Analytics Goal Types That Are Critical To Your Business
Tracking pageviews and visitors to see how much traffic you’re getting is incredibly important right? WRONG. Finding out if your website actually helps your business is MUCH more important.
Google Analytics doesn’t tell you how your business is doing without some additional setup. You have to tell Google Analytics to keep track of what’s critical to your business – and you do this with goals. This post will show you how.
Analysis Paralysis: Using Google Analytics Data as Inspiration to Act Now
Google Analytics is a very good tool in your arsenal. Good…but not perfect. It does have its shortcomings. But that shouldn’t stop you from turning to it again and again.
Need some inspiration on how to be inspired by the data you’re collecting? I’m here to help. Break the analysis paralysis cycle with these five ideas.
Google Analytics: How to Analyze the Behavior of Your Site Visitors
Do you want to learn more about how people use your website? Wondering how the Behavior reports in Google Analytics can help?
To explore how to navigate the Behavior section of Google Analytics, Michael Stelzner interview Andys Crestodina.
Blogging
3 Google Analytics Reports to Help You Find Blog Post Ideas Your Readers Will Love
As a content marketer, you can take the guesswork out of the process by using data-driven empathy: using analytics to get into the heads of your visitors and find topics they care about most (and the topics that will convert).
Here are three ways to pull blog post topics right out of your Google Analytics account – so you can write blog posts that are sure to resonate with your audience.
4 Google Analytics Reports Every Content Marketer Should Use
While you can use the data from Google Analytics in infinite ways, you need to understand the four most helpful reports for your content marketing – traffic, navigation summary, traffic from organic search, and conversions.
Once you understand what this data is and how to track it, you’ll be able to mix and match insights to take advantage of opportunities with your web-based content, driving more traffic to your website and (more importantly) doing more with the traffic you have.
A Powerful Exercise inside Google Analytics to Set You Up for a Successful Year of Blogging
Darren Rowse shares an exercise that he does at the end of every year that helps to grow his blogs in the year that follows.
He breaks this post down into three main sections which are based upon the three main categories in Google Analytics – ‘Audience’, ‘Acquisition’ and ‘Behaviour’. This post also includes 9 questions he asks himself about content reports in Google Analytics.
How I use Google Analytics ‘Compare’ Feature to Motivate Me to Grow My Blog
Darren Rowse shares how he uses the audience overview report in Google Analytics to compare his blog traffic to the previous weeks. He then uses this data as motivation to better the previous weeks results.
Social Media
A 6-Step Guide To Tracking Social Media In Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides you with data to see where your website visitors come from and understand your visitors’ behavior on your site. Additionally, when you setup your Google Analytics account to track and measure your social media initiatives, you’ll then be able to adequately prove the ROI of social media for your business.
To get you started, Hootsuite put together this guide to tracking social media in Google Analytics in 6 easy steps.
Google Analytics and Social Media: What Marketers Need to Know
Do you track the return on your social media activity in Google Analytics? Want to discover some valuable shortcuts?
To explore cool hacks for Google Analytics, Michael Stelzner interviews Annie Cushing.
How to Use Google UTMs to Analyze Your Social Traffic
Do you share your blog posts on social media? Want to know how much traffic comes from those posts? By adding Google UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) parameters to the links you share, you can attribute traffic to page posts, group posts, and ads.
In this article, you’ll discover how to analyze your social media traffic by adding UTM parameters to your links.
Returning Visitors
Google Analytics: When Are New Vs. Returning Visitor Ratios Useful?
One of the things Christopher S Penn has lambasted Google Analytics about in the past is the new vs. returning visitor ratio metric. This ratio tends to mislead marketers, especially marketers new to analytics. In aggregate, the ratio tells us nothing useful; as far as marketing objectives go, we want more of both. We want more new users AND we want more returning users.
Is there a time when these ratios might be useful, might give us some insight? The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes: when we’re looking at individual channel performance
How to Track High-Value Returning Visitors with Google Analytics™
One of the most valuable people to visit our website is the returning visitor. This is the person who’s already aware of us, who’s already been to our website. However, not all returning visitors are the same. Some are much higher value than others – visitors who have been to specific pages on our site.
In this video tutorial, learn how to set up returning visitors tracking for specific pages using Google Analytics™, then do some basic analysis of where those visitors come from, and how to prepare to advertise to those visitors.
Ideas For Reports
10 Optimization Experts Share Their Favorite Google Analytics Reports (Copy Them!)
Google Analytics won’t tell us what the problems are, we need to interpret the data ourselves. In this post, Peep Laja reached out to fellow experts on the field and asked them for their go-to reports when digging for conversion uplift opportunities.
12 Google Analytics Custom Reports to Help You Grow Faster
Most of what you spend your time looking at (and re-looking at) is merely suggestive in Google Analytics. You have so much data available to you, but only a fraction of it will help you optimize and make better business decisions.
The most actionable, useful data is concealed and it can only be revealed through custom reports and segmentation.
Problem Solving
Analytics Spam
How to Crush Google Analytics Spam in 2017
This article will fully explain each type of spam that may affect your Google Analytics profile and exactly how you can remove it to prevent spam from ruining your data in the future.
How to Remove Referral Spam in Your Google Analytics
If spam is inflating your analytics, everything else gets thrown off. You could waste time, money and energy on strategies that are ultimately useless.
All it takes is a few minutes to set up these filters and you’ll successfully eliminate 99% of spam. And, if you spend a few more minutes every month updating your filters, you’ll be even better off.
‘Not Provided’ Keywords
The 7 Best Ways to Unlock Your ‘Not Provided’ Keywords in Google Analytics
If you are willing to approach your keyword analytics with unconventional tactics, there are a number of simple (and not so simple) ways to access the data that Google is so meticulously trying to hide.
Traffic Drops
Diagnosing Traffic Drops Using Google Analytics
It has happened to every marketer out there – you are just going about your daily reporting when you log onto Google Analytics and see an unexpected, and noticeable, decline in traffic.
Want to diagnose the cause of your traffic drop? Read on and get your web traffic back on track.\
Health Checklist
Google Analytics Health Check: Is Your Configuration Broken?
The fact is that a lot of the people relying on Google Analytics are relying on bad data. No, not because Google Analytics is awful. Because their configurations are broken.
As time goes on, add these types of issues to your checklist.