Finding out more about your website - Who are your users - what pages are they visiting - What devices are they using - where are they from.
This information can save you money, help you spend your budget in the right areas and earn you more money from your website.
So how can we get this information.
Actually theres a FREE website statistics software that's more than capable of giving you an insight into these questions and much more. In fact you are probably already using it but will almost definatly be under using it. That tool is Google Analytics
Yep it's a tool I under use aswell so I'm going to have a look at some methods of getting more from it
Google Analytics TIPS
CREATE CUSTOM REPORTS
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Here they create a report listing cities and bounce rates ! Not something I'd of thought was particularly useful. SO let's take a look to see if we can find some useful applications of creating custom Google Analytics reports.
To start with I've decided to run a couple of reports that will give me an insight into what mobile use we have on the website.
In the metrics I have chosen - Unique Visitors, Pageviews, Avg. Time on Site, Bounce Rate, % Exit, % New Visits
Dimensions - Mobile
Sub Dimensions - Browser, connection speed, Flash Version, Java Support.
The idea of this Custom report is to see how many people are using the website from a mobile device and how much of the content we're giving them can they actually see.
SETTING UP GOAL CONVERSIONS
For example the Surf Mag I work for would like people to see they're Surf Magazine Subscriptions.
I've made a list of the goals of the website a prioritised them, adding them all as goals and monitoring the urls that sending people to represents an achievement.
* Selling Surf Mag Subscriptions
* Users clicking on Adverts
* Views of the monthly Surf Guide
You can also set goals of 'time spent on site' and 'pages per visit' - to monitor how many users you can persuade to stay on the site beyond the article that has got them there.
MAKE AN ALERT
These two videos give a good insight into this feature.
Custom Alerts - Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site
Automatice Alerts Dim lights Embed Embed this video on your site
Again I've gone for a custom alert that will give me some insight into mobile use.
ALERT NAME: 'Mobile users too Quick to leave !!'
PERIOD: 'Day'
ALERT CONDITIONS:
This applies to 'Mobile' - Condition 'matches exactly' - Value 'Yes'
Alert me when 'Bounce Rate' - Condition 'is greater than' - Value '50%'
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This alert should make me aware if the site isn't providing what it should do to the end user.
I'll be making another blog on this next month to see how we got on and suggest some more ways to use Google Analytics