Google Analytics Intelligence – An Introduction

Google Analytics Intelligence was introduced few months back and this has turned out be something handy for those who keep a close watch on their website’s traffic. Google Analytic Intelligence is a feature which helps to create alerts based on certain criteria. Google Analytics Intelligence consist of two types of alerts and they are Automatic Alerts and Custom Alerts.

Automatic Alert create alert based on any unusual behavior in your website’s traffic. For example if on a particular day the average time spend on the website is too high or low than the expected average time, then Google Analytics would create an Automatic alert. You can also set Custom Alert based on the criteria that you specify. You can also have the option get these alerts via mail and these alerts are send daily, weekly or monthly.
[Read more…]

Track 404 Error Pages Effectively with Google Analytics

404 Error Pages are created inorder to notify visitors that they have landed on a page which does not exist. This can happen when either the visitor have typed the wrong URL or the user have reached a broken link from an external or internal link. Like we use Google Analytics to track traffic for different pages of a website by pasting the Google Analytics code on every pages of a website, we can also track the number of visitors coming to the 404 error page.
[Read more…]

Creating Advanced Segment for a Geographical Region with Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful and free web analytics tool available and is much better than many other free web analytics softwares available. Google analytics is not a hosted web analytics tool, but is just a compatible javascript code which needs to be included between the tag of an HTML page.

Google Analytics is so flexible and user friendly Internet analytics tool and comes with a variety of customized report options. In this post I would like to write about how to create an Advanced Segment for a particular geographical region with Google website analytics tool.

Consider that you have a website and have installed Google Analytics code to track the traffic details. You need to know the top landing pages or top content from the city “Kuala Lumpur”. In this case you can take the advantages of advanced segments in Google Analytics. The steps for setting up an advanced segment for a particular geographical region in this cases is given below.
[Read more…]

Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. Is it good or bad?

Google Analytics is one of the most used and user friendly website analytics software around and it totally free of cost. Google has just released the  Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on for web browsers. The main objective of the add on is to tell Google Analytics Javascript (ga.js), not to send any information to Google Analytics. When this add on is enabled, data would not be sent from your computer to Google when you open a website which uses Google Analytics code in it.
[Read more…]

Exclude IP Address in Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best free web analytics tool available and is the most used web analytics tool. Google Analytics (GA) has a lot of advanced features which makes the web analytics more interesting. Moreover it is simple to use and you don’t need to use any software to run this, instead you just need to paste a simple script on to you web pages. In this post, I would like to explain how we can exclude a particular IP address while using Google Analytics.

1) Log on to your Google Analytics account. If you use more than one websites for tracking, the list of those sites would be displayed on the first page you enter after logging in.  This page is known as the account overview page and lists all the websites that are using Google Analytics code with this account.

2) Click on the name of the website account, of which you need to exclude a particular IP address.

3)Now You would be taken to the profile overview page for that particular website, where you can see a table in which the website that you need to filter the IP is seen.

4) There is an Edit link on the right side of the table, corresponding to the website name. Click on this link.

5) Now you will enter the Profile Settings page of that website. Here you can see a table with the title Filters Applied to Profile. Click on the “Add Filter” link on the top right of that table.

6) Now you will enter the page named Create New Filter. Select the Add new Filter for Profile radio button for new filters.  Enter a suitable filter name under the Filter Name field.

7) Select the Exclude all traffic from an IP address drop down option from the Filter Type menu.

8 ) Enter the IP address to be excluded in the box provided below. e.g if you IP address is 123.249.21.162, then it should be typed as 123\.249\.21\.162.

9) Then click on the Save Changes button.

10) Now you have completed the process of filtering this particular IP address from tracking by the Google Analytics code.

Filter IP Address

Hope this would work for you better.

Site Overlay Feature in Google Analytics

Site overlay is another interesting feature of Google Analytics, which enables us to get a view of the overall visitor navigation stats on your site. It gives an idea on how the visitors interact and navigate once they enter your website. The site overlay  option is available under the “Content” section of you Google Analytics dashboard. When you click on the the ‘Site Overlay’ link you would be taken to a new page which display the home page of your website. In this page you can see small progress bar over every link in your home page. The progress bar also shows the percentage of the number of clicks over that link. The more clicks a link recieves, the percentage on the progress bar increases and that percentage is reppresented by a blue shade. The more click a link receives, the more percentage on the link and hence a long blue shade would be seen on the progress bar.

Site OverlayThis feature is an integral part in going forward with web analytics and optimizing the website for better traffic.

This feature is an integral part in going forward with web analytics and optimizing the website for better traffic. When you move you mouse over the progress bar, you can also know about the number of clicks that links have received. You can also get information on the goal value for the pages in your site. Goal value is the value of the conversions your site has received over time, and for this you must have to set the goals. With this feature you can determine the most popular page on your website and also the least popular link on your website. It helps you to figure out whether your text links are being clicked more than your image links and vice versa.

The one shortcoming of this site overlay feature is the inablity to show indivitual click ratio for 2 or more links which points to the same page on the website. For example if you have 2 links on your home page which points to your ‘Products’ page and they get 4% clicks and 9% clicks respectively, both will show 13%. Google Analytics cannot show the separete click for the links. Google is working on this issue to get it resolved, but till then we have to presist with the current version.