Google Analytics offers three Social reports within the Standard Reporting>Audience>Social section.  These three reports are:

• Social Engagement
• Social Action
• Social Pages

The Social Engagement Report located under the Standard Reporting>Audience>Engagement section breaks down visitor traffic into two buckets: Not Socially Engaged and Socially Engaged.  Clicking on the Socially Engaged Social Type will break down the visits by Social Source and Action pairings, for example Facebook : View, Google+ : View, and Google : +1.  This deeper breakdown is similar to the Social Action Report.

The Social Action Report located under the Standard Reporting>Audience>Action visually displays the different Social Source and Action pairings by a percentage of total social actions.  You can modify the data to display the number of Social Actions, Unique Social Actions, or Actions Per Social Visit for each Social Source and Action pairing.

The Social Pages Report located under the Standard Reporting>Audience>Pages shows a list of pages (under the headline Social Entity) and which Social Source and Action pairings are delivering Social Actions to each page.

The three reports above are only a few of the ways with which you can view your data through Google Analytics to learn more about the visitors coming to your site.  If you would like more information about how Google Analytics can help your business, please contact us or sign up for a free analytics consultation.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics solution designed to help website owners, marketers, and other business professionals measure and track their website’s traffic, on-site content interaction, conversions (including Goals and Ecommerce), and more!  Google Analytics also integrates with other Google products such as AdSense, AdWords, and Google Webmaster Tools to help provide the most comprehensive collection of data possible, as well as to help track return on investment of advertising spend.

What Traffic Is My Website Receiving?

If you are wondering what websites are sending people to your site, check out the Referral Traffic Report, located under Traffic Sources>Sources>Referrals in the left hand navigation of the Standard Reporting section of the New Version of Google Analytics.  This report includes referring sites in categories such as social (twitter.com, linkedin.com, etc.), blogs (blogspot.com, wordpress.com, etc.), and a variety of other sites.

Check out the All Traffic Report under Traffic Sources>Sources>All Traffic to see how many visits each Source/Medium pairing is delivering to your site.  By learning more about your website’s visitors and adjusting your strategy to include ways to improve their future experiences you can improve the performance of your website. Additionally you can refine this report to answer a myriad of other questions such as, “what Operating Systems are visitors using?” (select Operating System as a Secondary Dimension), or “what screen resolution are visitors using to view my website?” (select Screen Resolution as a Secondary Dimension), or even “what cities are driving the most traffic to my website?” (select City as a Secondary Dimension).  Of course you could also select any of these dimensions from the “Other” dropdown menu to make them the primary Dimensions used in this report.

What About ____ – Can Google Analytics Track That?

The examples above are only a few of the thousands of questions Google Analytics can help answer.  If you have a specific question, please contact us or sign up for a free analytics consultation.

Google Analytics’ Conversion University will be updated this week to reflect the new Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) lessons, currently hosted on the Google Analytics IQ Lessons page of the Google Analytics site.

As of December 22, 2011, these are the presentations currently available on Conversion University:

http://conversionuniversity.com/

As of December 22, 2011, these are the presentations currently available on Google Analytics IQ Lessons page:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/iq.html

Please note that a few of the new presentations are not currently available:

• Campaign Tracking and AdWords Integration: (404)
• Analysis Focus – AdWords: (YouTube Video – Not Available)
• Analytics Intelligence: (YouTube Video – Not Available)

If you are currently studying for the exam – good luck.  If you need advanced help or a full Google Analytics audit, please contact us.

Google announced a revision to Google Analytics with regard to Site Speed on Friday, November 18, 2011.  The speed at which the pages of your website load has been a talking point for a while, with Google working on tools to gauge the performance of your pages in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.  Ideally, a page with a high average page load time could be analyzed and possible factors increasing load time addressed.  As a matter of foreshadowing, Matt Cutts wrote a blog post on April 9, 2010 entitled, “Google incorporating site speed in search rankings,” which stated that Google had incorporated Site Speed amongst the signals used to determine search rankings.

Previous to this Google Analytics Site Speed announcement, website owners who wanted to track their Site Speed in Google Analytics had to add an additional line of tracking code into their GATC to gather the data for the Site Speed report:

_gaq.push(['_trackPageLoadTime']);
 
This is no longer necessary.

The _trackPageview method (_gaq.push(['_trackPageview']);) controls the data collection, which feeds the Site Speed report.

If you have a firm foundation in Statistics and wish to be able to control the sample size collected by Google Analytics – currently, Google Analytics collects 1% of visitors or 10K hits per day – you can use the _setSiteSpeedSampleRate() method (_gaq.push(['_setSiteSpeedSampleRate', 5]);) which should be added before the _trackPageview method in the GATC.

Have you been looking through your Google Analytics account trying to make sense of Metrics and Dimensions?  Or are you beginning to create your own custom reports and figuring out which metrics and which dimensions you want to include?

• The following are a few basic points about Google Analytics’ Metrics:
• Metrics are shown with dark blue text on a light blue background.
• The data associated with a Metric is displayed below the Metric name in a column.
• Metrics focus around numbers.  This includes numbers (metric examples: visits, entrances, and clicks), time (metric examples: Time on Site, Time on Page, and Time after Search), and percentages (metric examples: % Exit, Bounce Rate, and CTR).

The following are a few basic points about Google Analytics’ Dimensions:

• Dimensions are shown with white text on a light green background.
• The data associated with a Dimension is displayed in a row, with each box corresponding to a Metric’s column.
• Dimensions need to be paired with Metrics for meaningful data analysis to occur.
• A few common Dimensions are: Keyword, Medium, Time On Site, Exit Page, and Request URI.
• This includes numbers (metric examples: visits, entrances, and clicks), time (metric examples: Time on Site, Time on Page, and Time after Search), and percentages (metric examples: % Exit, Bounce Rate, and CTR).

Dimensions are shown in green and metrics in blue, as shown in the following image.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Now that you understand the difference between Metrics and Dimensions, enjoy using Google Analytics to the fullest with custom reporting.