Speaker: Annie Cushing (@AnnieCushing)
Annie knows a lot about Google Analytics and runs Annielytics where she helps people find the meaning behind the data they collect. In her talk she explained how to get actionable business information from the Google Analytics reports.
- Link to resources she mentioned in her talk – https://bit.ly/microconf-bundle
- Tons of tools for marketers – https://bit.ly/tons-of-tools
- Audit checklist – https://bit.ly/audit-checklist
Metrics to track
- Which marketing channels are your heroes?
- Don’t use last click attribution but multi-click attribution
- If you have e-commerce tracking, deselect goal and bump the lookback date to 90 days (standard 30 days)
- Tag your email campaigns as they would be referenced as direct otherwise – https://bit.ly/ga-campaign-tagging
- Where do your best links come from?
- There are no standard reports for the job. Custom report instead.
- The standard reports aren’t Google Analytics. They’re templates. Rely more on custom reports.
- Using “Full referrer” dimension. Some sources don’t have a full URL (Facebook, Youtube, inbound.org). If you need to know, tag the links.
- https://bit.ly/referring-urls
- https://bit.ly/api-help
- https://bit.ly/custom-ga-reports
- What do your visitors search on your website
- Use the custom search to find out what keywords you shall address
- You need to change the query parameter in the Admin > View, Site search settings
- How many pages does it take to convert?
- GA provides info on how to much time it takes to convert but not on how many pages
- You can find days/visits to conversions (Conversions > Time to conversion). Not a standard way to find out how many pages a person has to drill through the site to convert.
- Apply an advanced segment. Builtin > Visits with transactions, close out all visits. That way you just have visits with conversions.
- Then go to engagement to see how many pages it takes to convert.
- Might have an issue is if it takes 37 pages to convert.This isn’t high user engagement if you have a 0.02 conversion rate.
- Should you go responsive?
- Look at Device Category > Landing Page
- You can check the bounce rate, revenue and conversion rate per device
- For blogs add a time event to make sure that the bounce rate is more accurate because someone could be spending 10 minutes reading your blog
- Are you tagging your emails?
- If you don’t tag emails, they are reported as direct
- Outloook and desktop application don’t pass referral information.
- Make sure you are tagging all your emails
- Find the top performing product categories
- In your ecommerce setup, make sure you pass data properly so you can see the different performance of your product categories.
- Should your site go multi-lingual?
- Check visitor countries and browser language – https://bit.ly/language-codes
- Which competitors are stalking you?
- Large organizations show up with their own IPs
- You can check for gov/edu visits
- Group them with a segment, then stalk your stalker
- Are they scraping your site?
- Hostname report. Shows you all domains that have your GA tracking code. If they don’t remove it, you’ll see it there.
Read notes of all the other talks on the Microconf 2014 Hub page.