The new Google Analytics Solutions Gallery tools
Value: [rating=3]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Solutions Gallery
Google Analytics offers many features to customise its reports to a business, which is great for a free tool. But I know from running Google Analytics training courses that many of the customisation tools aren’t used, so reports aren't really tailored to a business and different users in the business. I think this is mainly down to the time and specialist input needed for customisation.
Google are obviously aware of this issue since they have created a new set of tools within their Solutions Gallery to help users with customisation. I think this is a great initiative and will be useful both to marketers at companies and consultants and agencies improving reporting for their clients.
What type of customisations are available?
Customisation are available for three different types of assets…
A review of 9 updates to Google Analytics
Google Analytics have rolled out a series of fairly big changes to their User Interface. They do this every so often, either to incorporate extra functionality, or simply to clean up the user interface & improve user experience. (See the tweaks they made last time, for example). This time around most of the changes are purely around the interface, though there are some large, useful functionality tweaks too.
Editor's note: At the time of writing there isn't a new post on the Google Analytics blog to point you to for more detail, but we'll add that once available.
This post covers the 9 main changes made to Google Analytics:
1. Top Navigation Changes
The top navigation (and the overall information architecture) has changed quite considerably. There are still 4 options, but they’ve altered:
Here was the old top nav:
…
A roundup of key new features for you to apply in 2013
In October 2012 Google officially retired the old version of Google Analytics meaning that everyone will now use the new version 5 which has been in beta test for around a year. This coincided with a flurry of activity with new features introduced. So it’s a good to time to think about how you’re using Google Analytics to improve the results from your digital marketing.
Most businesses will have been using the new version, but users will likely need education or training to understand how to use the new features. It’s also a prompt to check that Google Analytics is set up to tailor analysis and reports specific for your business, more on the details of this in my article next month.
In this post, I will summarise the main changes introduced over the last year, so you can check you’re…
How Googles's new Universal Analytics and other planned features add to the tools available to improve business insight
The relentless pace of change at Google
I joined Google in 2005 - just after the acquisition of Urchin, the forerunner of Google Analytics. A big factor for me coming on board with Google (it was not a "no-brainer" as I had my own business and staff to consider), was the promise of the continued development of the product.
At the time, many an industry "luminary" predicted that once acquired, Urchin would just be another product/tool on Google's shelf. Many mergers and acquisitions are like that - once acquired the interest of the acquiring company moves on to the next thing - but not Google. In fact, what still amazes me is that after 7 years since the launch of Google Analytics, the pace of change is even more rapid than during the first 3 years...
Take…
Google provides a new interface for integrating customer data into Google Analytics to enable more customer-centred analysis
Value/Importance: Most businesses [rating=1] Large and tech-savvy businesses [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google’s announcement of Universal Analytics
I must admit I found the explanation from Google short on details of the options for businesses to apply the features of its new “Measurement Protocol” data integration feature announced at this weeks Google Analytics Summit. With headings in the announcement post such as “the world is mobile” and “your business is unique” it wasn’t as clear as I’ve come to expect.
So, I’ve been talking about the implications for digital marketers of Universal Analytics (UA) to analytics specialist Dan Barker who helps many businesses on Google Analytics (GA) setup and using it for sales optimisation and who is better at reading between the lines…
A tutorial to building a content marketing dashboard in Google Analytics
This post is the third in the series Measuring your content marketing efforts. The first two posts are: The Geek Guide to Measuring your Content Marketing Efforts and Introducing Profit Index: Revolutionary Way to Measure your Content Marketing Efforts.
In the first post I outlined the definition of great content and how this greatness can be measured in monetary terms. In the second post I have talked about a new type of index called ‘profit index’, why you need one and how it can be optimized to increase the conversion volumes and sales on your website.
In this post I am going to explain how to create what I believe are two "top notch" dashboards (in Google Analytics) to quickly measure the performance of your content. Let us start with measuring the performance of a piece of content you have…
Shortcuts give you quick access to your favourite reports and customisations
Importance: [rating=1]
Value for user: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Support Page
I’ve just been taking a look at this new Google feature. Although it doesn't involve a new report or big change to the interface, I think it’s worth sharing as a mini-tutorial since it could save you hours of time across the year if you know about it. I’ll certainly be flagging it up prominently on training courses.
What are Shortcuts?
Shortcuts simply remember your settings for an individual report. They’re like Favourites or Bookmarks for reports. Any Standard or Custom report can be added to your shortcuts but Goal reports, Real-time and Intelligence reports are excluded.
How do you set them up?
This is easy, for the report your currently viewing, just select the “Shortcut (Beta)” option from the options at the top of the report you want saving.
Here I've set one up…
A summary of recent changes relevant to marketers
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Google often announce developments in Google Analytics in bursts. In July we've seen several changes notified via the Google Analytics blog that it’s worth being aware of if your company uses Google Analytics. Some are just name changes, others are more significant. Here’s our summary:
1. New Google Analytics version now standard. From 18th July the original version of Google Analytics was retired. Most businesses will now be using the new version, but this is a prompt that users may need training to be aware of the new features such as multichannel funnels and social analytics.
It is also a prompt to check that Google Analytics is set up to tailor reports to improve marketing for their business (see our Google Analytics setup checklist for details of 15 setup options).
2. Google Website Optimizer now integrated as Content Experiments. GWO was originally…
10 goals you should be measuring on your B2B website using Google Analytics
Having a good method for quickly reviewing the effectiveness of your B2B website is really important as the majority of your time and effort will be spent trying to get people onto your website as early on as possible in their purchasing cycle. Once prospects are on your site it’s then up to various factors around the quality of your content that must work together to get the visitor to convert into a lead.
How important is your website as part of the overall marketing strategy?
“Our website gets over 10,000 visits a month which is really good” or similar is a comment I often hear from marketers, but probably have no idea about how many actually convert into leads or data capture for further opt-in marketing. Whilst traffic is easy to measure and most of the holds no value, it…
An introduction to setting Goal Value in Google Analytics
Goals in Google Analytics (GA) open a multitude of interesting and thought provoking questions when analysed properly.
In this post I'll show how to select the right goals, showing why it's so important to apply a value to those goals to help with data-driven decision making.
What is a Goal?
Within Google Analytics you have the ability to setup a specific action or interaction that can be used to calculate the flow of users within the site. You can setup funnels or just a single step funnel which Google Analytics can use to create a goal. Key to the principle behind goals is to understand what the users having been doing, in what order and trying to get an understanding on the the value generated to the business of their visit.
Which Goals do I need?
The…
