Once you have Google Analytics tracking code installed on your site and data is starting to populate, there are few more steps that you should take to get the most out of your analytics account. Adding filters to your account will help you include and exclude information that will refine the analytics data and reports that you need.

Preferably, you should set up at least one profile in your account that does not contain any filters. Once you create a filter on any profile, Google Analytics does not have a method to go back and track the data that was filtered out.

Yet, on the other hand, if you wanted to filter out certain data points from being tracked e.g. all employee traffic or traffic from a sub-domain, then having at least one unfiltered profile is not necessary in this instance. You have 50 profiles at your disposal to set up filtering in as many different ways as you consider necessary.

To begin filtering site data, click on the Gear icon on the right side of the Google Analytics menu. Then you will see the screen above. Then click on +New Filter.

There are two types of filters available: Predefined or Custom. Predefined filters are limited to Excluding or Including traffic from IP addresses, domains, and traffic to subdirectories.

Why would you use these filters? Use these filters to eliminate unwanted hits such as internal site traffic or traffic from a particular IP range, collect data from certain directories of your site or track subdomain traffic separately.

 

The custom filters are more robust and give you a multitude of choices. You are able to Include and Exclude data patterns or set URLs to Lowercase or Uppercase. Setting the case type is essential due to Google Analytics being case sensitive and capturing data exactly as it appears in the location bar of the browser. This way all of your reports will be unified.

Within custom filters there is a Search and Replace filter, which is used to replace a matched expression with another string. This comes in handy when using page ids e.g. id=100 or id=200, as you can set a readable name for the numbers, 100=Tires, 200=Fuel Filters.

 

Past the Search & Replace filter is the Advanced filter which is used to reorder URLs. Running the Advanced filter will take the use of Regular Expressions. These expressions can use complete or partial text matches and include wildcards, which are a special symbols that stand for one or more characters.

 

Using the Advanced filter will change a longer URL
From:http://www.mysite.com/shopping?qsrc=43&o=0&x=ref&stf=FL:BR&q=red+chair
To: /shopping/o=0/qsrc=43/q=red+chair

For more information on filtering:
Clean up your Google Analytics data with these 5 filters

Watch our video tutorial on Filters: YouTube Link

We are going to explain what Goals & Goal Values are in Google Analytics, why they are important and how to gauge the value that you can assign to them. These Goals are for non-e-commerce actions, such as Time on Site. If tracking e-commerce transactions are needed, there are tools available in Google Analytics for those actions as well.

Goals are a way to measure actions performed on a website. These actions can be, but are not limited to how many pages per visit visitors are going to, whether they are downloading PDF documents or filling out forms.

Setting up Goals can be found in two places in Google Analytics.

*Please Note, all screen images are from newest version of Google Analytics

The first is in the Google Analytics menu under CONVERSIONS>GOALS

 

The second place is clicking on the gear icon in the menu.

 

If your goals are not set up, you will see this screen:

 

Each Goal set (there are 4) allows 5 Goals to be set for a total of 20 Goals. The first step is to set the name for your Goal, its best to give the Goal a straight forward name i.e. Newsletter Sign-Ups. After you set the Goal Name, the next step is to choose the goal type.

 

There are four goal types to choose from.

1. URL Destination, which can be a Thank You page for a form, a newsletter sign-up or a white paper request.

• When setting up a URL Destination, you are able to gather more data by adding a Goal Funnel. A funnel is the path of pages leading up to the goal you set up. i.e. Contact Form>Thank You Page

2. Time on Site can be set for a greater than or less than value. There is availability for hours, minutes and even seconds to be set for this action.

3. Page/Visit can also be set for a greater than or less than value with the number of pages as the variable.

4. The Event Goal allows the most sets of variables to track. The event Goal would be used to track interaction with AJAX or dynamic sites, PDF downloads or interaction with Flash on your site.

 

While setting up new Goals, one of the optional fields is Goal Value.

 

Setting a Goal Value is not the same as making a sale from a product. It is the value you feel that particular measureable action on your site is worth.

Not setting the value correctly can give you an inflated or decreased Goal Value.

If you look at the image above and view the Goal Completions and the Goal Value, you will see that all the Goals were set at a $100 price point. Is every Goal you set worth $100?

A proficient technique to ascertain the value of a Goal would be to set the value by a percentage of what you feel the ROI of your goal should be. If a user downloads a White Paper and the average transaction for users downloading White Papers is $250 then you could set the value at 10%, then the Goal Completion will be valued at $25. On the other hand if a user fills out your contact form and the average transaction is only $20, you can set the Goal Value to 1% or $2 per Goal Completion.

Another method to calculate Goal Value is to use the total revenue generated by the measureable action divided by the number of goal completions. Not all of your Goals will be worth the same to you monetarily or business-wise.

Is someone downloading a White Paper more or less valuable than someone filling out your contact form? Is a user that stays on your site for longer than 5 minutes more valuable than the user that clicked through 10 pages of your site?

Once you take the time to set your Goals and Goal Values, you will be able to start tracking your Goal Conversion Rate.

 

Revisiting your Goals and Goal Values every quarter is a valid method to distinguish if the Goals you have set are still providing valuable insights and are converting at the rate you set.

We asked in a previous blog Are Your Website Visitors Socially Engaged? If the answer is yes, then you need to make sure you are correctly setting up your site to track these valuable metrics in Google Analytics. If the answer is no, then you should still know how to set up your site to track social media interaction for when you establish your social media campaigns.
 
Google Analytics has created three new reports to track social media interaction. The Social Engagement report tracks behavior changes for social media actions i.e. Facebook Like or Google +1. The Social Actions report tracks the number of social media sharing actions from your site. The Social Pages report tracks which pages are being creating the most social media traffic.

Before you implement any of the coding necessary to track social media interaction, you will need to start by adding this code snippet before the </head> tag.

<!– Google Analytics Social Button Tracking –>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.yoursite.com/_js/ga_social_tracking.js”></script>

Google +1 social engagement interactions are tracked by default in Google Analytics, but to track other valuable metrics such as Facebook,  Twitter or LinkedIn you will have to use the  _trackSocial method.

Here is a description of the _trackSocial method:

_gaq.push(['_trackSocial', network, socialAction, opt_target, opt_pagePath]);

Where the parameters represent:

network
Required. A string representing the social network being tracked (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn)

socialAction
Required. A string representing the social action being tracked (e.g. Like, Share, Tweet)

opt_target
Optional. A string representing the URL (or resource) which receives the action. For example, if a user clicks the Like button on a page, the the opt_target might be set to the title of the page, or an ID used to identify the page in a content management system. In many cases, the page you Like is the same page you are on. So if this parameter is undefined, or omitted, the tracking code defaults to using document.location.href.

opt_pagePath
Optional. A string representing the page by path (including parameters) from which the action occurred. For example, if you click a Like button on http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/index.html, then opt_pagePath should be set to /apis/analytics/docs/index.html. Almost always, the path of the page is the source of the social action. So if this parameter is undefined or omitted, the tracking code defaults to using location.pathname plus location.search. You generally only need to set this if you are tracking virtual pageviews by modifying the optional page path parameter with the Google Analytics _trackPageview method.

Once you have the _trackSocial set up, there are methods used to track Facebook Likes, Facebook Unlikes and Shares.

Facebook  LIKES
  
FB.Event.subscribe(’edge.create’, function(targetUrl) {
  _gaq.push(['_trackSocial', 'facebook', 'like', targetUrl]);
});

Facebook UNLIKES

FB.Event.subscribe(’edge.remove’, function(targetUrl) {
  _gaq.push(['_trackSocial', 'facebook', 'unlike', targetUrl]);
});

Facebook SHARES

FB.Event.subscribe(’message.send’, function(targetUrl) {
  _gaq.push(['_trackSocial', 'facebook', 'send', targetUrl]);
});

View a demo of this in action:
http://analytics-api-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/tracking/javascript/v5/social/facebook_js_async.html

Facebook also has buttons available from the Facebook Developers page found here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/

If you use the buttons from Facebook, you will have to add this code to get tracking numbers from Google Analytics:

 <script type=”text/javascript”>_ga.trackFacebook();</script>

This is Twitter’s _trackSocial set up.

To add a Twitter button:

  <script src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
  <a href=”http://code.google.com/apis/analytics”
     data-url=”http://code.google.com/apis/analytics”
    >Tweet</a>

Another option is to use buttons provided by Twitter. Those are accessible at:
http://twitter.com/about/resources/buttons#tweet

To track the Tweet Button you will have to add this code to the Tweet event.

twttr.events.bind(’tweet’, function(event) {
  if (event) {
    var targetUrl;
    if (event.target && event.target.nodeName == ‘IFRAME’) {
      targetUrl = extractParamFromUri(event.target.src, ‘url’);
    }
    _gaq.push(['_trackSocial', 'twitter', 'tweet', targetUrl]);
  }
});

To track LinkedIn, you first need to get the code for the LinkedIn Share button from the LinkedIn Site:

https://developer.linkedin.com/plugins/share-button

Then add this code to your site:

<script src=”http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”IN/Share” data-counter=”right”></script>

You can set the data-counter to left or right. If you do not want to have a LinkedIn number, you can leave that portion out of the code.

With social media continuing to grow, being used every minute of the day and driving traffic to you site, it is an invaluable metric that should be tracked and reviewed.

Google introduced Multi-Channel Funnels to all Google Analytics users on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 in a blog post entitled Introducing Multi-Channel Funnels: discover untapped opportunities in your conversion path.  This blog post explained the five new reports: Overview, Assisted Conversions, Top Conversion Paths, Time Lag, and Path Length to eager marketers looking to track conversion paths with Google Analytics.

If you have not already taken a look at the Assisted Conversions Multi-Channel Funnels Report, we highly suggest it.  The following company can see that 45 percent of their Direct traffic was first assisted by another channel.  You can access this report by the following path: Standard Reporting>Conversions>Multi-Channel Funnels>Assisted Conversions.

 

Let’s say that the marketing manager, upon seeing this report, wants to see a breakdown of what channels are assisting Direct conversions.  By navigating to the Top Conversion Paths report (Standard Reporting>Conversions>Multi-Channel Funnels>Top Conversion Paths), they can see this data, an example screen shot is included below and has been sorted to collect only paths that involve Direct traffic.

 

This report shows that the Basic Channel Grouping Path delivering the most conversions during this date range is Organic Search followed by a Direct Visit.  The marketing manager can now show that Search Engine Optimization helps to bring people to the website who then visit the website again to convert.

Are you interested in learning more about the Multi-Channel Funnels reports?  Visit our Google Analytics Consulting page to sign up for a free analytics consultation and continue reading the MoreVisibility Analytics Blog.

Announced in early October last year, Flow Visualization brings an update to traditional path analysis. Now what does that mean for you? It means that you will be able to acquire a better understanding on how to track a visitor’s progression on your site. Flow Visualization lets the Google Analytics user view web site traffic with a graphical representation on how your users are accessing your web site and how it converts traffic into visits.

There are two types of flow visualization that you are able to access to view the data you need to determine how your site is driving traffic and the path that traffic is taking. Traffic is not the only thing that is key, knowing where the traffic is going will give you a better understanding of the functionality of your web site.

The two reports are only available in the new, beta version of Google Analytics.

The first flow visualization is the visitor flow, which is used to show how your users move and flow through your web site.  Visitor flow visualizes the user’s traffic flow, drop-off point and bounce rate. Using the visitor flow you will be able to determine what is working on your site and what you might need to change and or update to increase traffic. Increased traffic will hopefully increase leads and sales.

 

The Visitors Flow is found in the left navigation under Audience tab > Visitors Flow within the Standard Reporting Tab. The report is shown with specific nodes and connections. Nodes are a single metric that you are filtering; while connections are the path the user took while visiting your site. This is the perfect way to see how your users are using a specific portion of your site.

 

The second flow visualization is the Goal Flow which is how users flow through the goal steps you establish and where they drop-off. The focus of Goal Flow is tracking conversions for goals and multi-step funnels.

 

The Goal Flow is found under Conversions > Goals > Goal Flow within the Standard Reporting Tab.

With Goal Flow you will be able to better understand where visitors navigate through your goal steps, the rate at which they abandon the site during the goal process, where the traffic is coming from and how the user interacted with the web site.

“Reverse Paths” may also be set up so you can visualize the site in a “backwards” path to see where the traffic came from in the goal path.

At the beginning, only URL Goals will be tracked in Goal Flow.