Google Analytics Best Practices: Plan Ahead

Editor’s Note: This is a guest blog post I wrote for Michael Q Todd's The 7 Pillars Book on June 27, 2013. Officially out of beta, Google’s new Universal Analytics should be used instead of the old tracking code. All old analytics tracking code should be removed and the new code should be placed just above the tag in your site’s HTML code. For WordPress, you should uninstall analytics plugins, remove old code if it was inserted manually, and place the new code in the header.php file of your WordPress theme, just above the tag.

Google Analytics

For many business owners, bloggers and social media marketers, analytics and other measurement tools are almost an afterthought and often forgotten entirely until they are faced with a situation in which they need to produce tangible results – and in order to do that, you need tangible data.

When setup correctly, Google's new Universal Analytics can not only provide you with metrics such as the number of visits and page views, it can help you identify conversion problems on your website, assign dollar values to various social platforms, and allow you measure the impact of your brand’s social relationships over time. The most exciting feature is the ability to identify and track visitors across browsers, networks, devices, and believe it or not offline activity from systems such as call centers systems and loyalty cards.

Analytics Intelligence

Google Analytics' Intelligence Reports and Custom Alerts can help you become aware of variations in your website's traffic or other anomalies that you might otherwise have missed. These can be set up and aggregated by day, week and month and can be customized to send you an alert when traffic patterns reach a specific threshold that you specify.

Annotations

Annotations let you leave a shared note right on the graph of your reports. These are extremely valuable to explain spikes in traffic and can act as a logbook for your marketing efforts and website changes. A launch of a new product, a website redesign, an email campaign and offline marketing are all examples of business activities that should be annotated so can later understand events that caused an increase or decrease in visits or conversions.

Webmaster Tools

Each of your properties should have a corresponding verified website in Webmaster Tools and be connected with your Google Analytics account so additional data can be available in your reports and can help with your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. The queries report is especially useful as it shows you the number of impressions your site showed in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for a given query, the number of clicks it received, the average position, and the Click Thru Rate (CTR).

Webmaster Tools will also allow you to check the "health" of your site by viewing crawl errors, index status and will help you optimize your site for search.

Custom Reporting

Custom Dashboards allow you to get a quick, organized, specific view of your data by grouping together info that is most relevant to your goals as well as providing each of your business groups with reports that are most useful for their needs. For example, a sales and marketing team may want reports showing leads, sales and conversion activity; a content marketing team may want to see content reports, SEO and social activity reports; while a tech team may be most interested in site performance and real-time reports.

Thank you to Marketworks Media for sharing seven custom dashboards that are easily customizable to meet most business needs.

Conclusion

By implementing Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools correctly and by determining your reporting needs in advance, you can define your business goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to ensure that you have the reports you need, when you need them.

I recommend subscribing to the Google Analytics YouTube Channel as well as watch their June 7, 2013 webinar (below) "Measuring Success in a Multi-Device World" that discusses strategies and best practices.

9 Sources of Analytics You May Have Forgotten

If you think the only place to view analytics is Google (or Facebook) then think again! Here are 9 sources of analytics you may not be using (plus a bonus source) that can help you get an even more complete picture of your web presence. Please feel free to comment with additional sources that you use!

1) YouTube

If most of your videos are embedded on your website or a client's site and you haven't spent time developing your channel, you may have forgotten the terrific stats that are available to you on YouTube. In addition to estimated minutes watched and average view duration, you can see whether your video was viewed from an embedded player on your website or another website; from the YouTube watch page or directly on your channel; or on a mobile device. You can also find stats on audience demographics, geographic location and engagement, including likes, dislikes, shares, comments, favorites, etc.

Videos found via a Google or YouTube search will give you access to see which keywords used to find it (I would assume that this would be true if a search was performed on Google+ as well); and, if you have monetized your account, you can also see ad performance and estimated earnings. By comparing metrics such as estimated earnings based on audience engagement, you can quickly see how useful these metrics really are to a marketer.

YouTube Analytics

2) Content Curation Tools

Most content curators are using bookmarklets or other browser extensions for sites such as Scoop.it!, RebelMouse, Paper.li, Listly, etc. in order to easily "scoop" or share content from around the web. These extensions are so convenient that you may rarely even visit many of these sites after you initially set them up – and that means you probably have forgotten about the analytics that many of these sites are gathering for you. (To be honest however, and rather surprisingly, most of these sites are seriously lacking in useful or detailed statistics.)

RebelMouse Analytics

3) Social and URL Sharing Tools

Another easily forgotten source of statistics are social sharing tools such as Markerly, AddThis and ShareThis. Once embedded on a website or blog, the aggregate count shown to the public are what we tend to check as well; however, there is a lot more great info that we could be using to help us learn more about our audience, how they like to share and what content they find most valuable.

AddThis Analytics

We can even see information about overall social value compared to other sites, categories, trends and clickbacks.

ShareThis Analytics

4) Twitter's Ad Tools

Ok, this one isn't really fair to include as one you "forgot" as Twitter just opened up Tweet Performance Analytics to all on June 13th; however, unless they put a link to it in your Twitter dashboard, or if you use Twitter management tools, you will forgot soon enough. Found in the Ads dashboard, these analytics are available for free and allows you to download your info as a CSV file. To access, go to ads.twitter.com and sign in with your Twitter credentials. You don't need to complete the advertising sign-up process unless you want to advertise.

In addition to showing you how many favorites, retweets and replies each of your recent tweets had, you can also learn a little bit about your community including their top interests and who your followers also follow by percentage.

Twitter's Analytics

5) URL Shorteners

Link shorteners are a necessity if you are a Twitter user; however, even if you are not, it makes sense to use them and many marketers do. One of the best things about using shorteners such as goo.gl and bitly are the analytics (of course). I prefer bitly for its interface, including having a "profile" page to feature your shared "bitmarks."

Some of the great features of bitly include:

• a "bundles" feature which are shareable collections of your bitmarks; 
• the ability to curate bundles and invite other users to add to it; 
• the ability to make links private; 
• the ability to customize links; 
• the chrome extension; 
• the ability on mobile devices to email links to save in your bitmarks or to share on Facebook and Twitter. 

As far as analytics, in addition to what you would expect, you can also see who in "your network" (Facebook friends and anyone you follow on Twitter) has shared a URL via bitly; how many total clicks the link received as well as how many were via your shortlink; and which other bitly users shared the same link.

Bitly's Analytics

6) QR Codes

If you were thinking ahead when you generated your QR codes, you probably used SmartyTags or another trackable service; however, after a few days or weeks, the excitement wore off and you stopped checking the stats. Info about the types of devices, GPS location, city, state, postal code, etc. are all waiting for you to log back in and download.

7) Slideshare

Unfortunately, you aren't going to get much from slideshare unless you go pro; however, you can still see the number of views on slideshare vs. embedded views, likes and downloads.

8) Identity Pages

Social identity pages like about.me, XeeMe, etc. are another than can be setup and then forgotten even though they can provide a great deal of information about the people who are interested in learning more about you. You can learn how many visitors clicked on one of your social media links to learn more about you; how they found your profile, your network relevance, search terms used and whether they shared or favorited your page and possibly even whether or not they "think you are cool;" even better, you can usually see exactly WHO viewed you and how they interacted with your profile.

9) Scheduling Tools

Buffer is a terrific little app for scheduling tweets on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more that works well with lots of other apps and extensions such as IFTTT (If This Then That), Feedly, Scoop.it, Commun.it, SocialBro, Digg, Twylah and many many more. Besides ensuring that your posts are spread out nicely, you can find the optimal times to post, learn what topics your audience responds to best and see the potential exposure of your posts. To make the most out of Buffer's analytics, turn on campaign tracking and integrate it with your Google Analytics account.

Bonus Source: Empire Avenue

Empire Avenue provides a surprising amount of analytics as well as an at-a-glance look at how you are doing across various networks. Definitely worth a look!

Empire Avenue's Analytics

Please feel free to comment with additional sources of analytics that you use!

Note: This post was originally shared on July 1, 2013 as a guest post that I wrote for The 7 Pillars Book by Michael Q Todd.