B2B Marketing Insights by Ironpaper

Use advanced features from Google Analytics

Written by Ironpaper | December 23, 2010

Even though Google Analytics is a free web analytics program, it is considered to be enterprise level due to it's cross segmentation capabilities along with other features.

Using some of the "advanced" features in Google Analytics can greater improve your understanding of website performance, traffic analysis, and how specific marketing campaigns perform against one another (etc, etc).

Analytics data segmentation
You can customize reports to better understand core drivers of traffic, visitor behavior and determine whether your campaigns achieved your desired outcome. Essentially, segmentation allows you to classify data based on a range of indicators. There can be a broad range of approaches to segmentation, but one very popular approach would be to group together all your social media web traffic referrers and compare social media marketing efforts against paid advertising (for example). Since you can customize reports using a basic logic construction like: 1. Show me all visits from Google 2. that contain the keywords "html web tools" OR "html5 font creator." From there you can display a chart of that segmented data against alone or against another segment if desired.

In-page analytics
The in-page analytics feature has replaced an older technology titled Site Overlay report, which didn't always work as desired. This newly improved feature is great for those who need a more visual approach to page analysis. You can measure on page performance visually by seeing click throughs (for example) as percentages.

Weighted Sort
Google Analytics is becoming a smarter tool as time goes on. The Weighted Sort feature allows for a webmaster to quickly track website data that needs attention. If you had a high value page ( a web page with a lot of traffic ) but with a very high bounce rate. Rather than having to sift through rows of data looking for critical issues, you can use the Weighted Sort feature to jump to more critical rows. The feature can be activated from the Bounce Rate tab in your reports.

Analytics Intelligence
Intelligence reports for web analytics can be extremely valuable for tracking both gains and critical issues in the performance of your campaigns. The feature allows for custom or automatic alerts when there are major changes to data patterns over time. The units of time are increments of days, weeks and monthly periods.