What Makes Google Analytics Different ?
Data analysis is essential to any business and with the help of Google Analytics you can get a real insight into how your visitors interact with your site and what sources are sending you traffic. The reason why so many business use Google Analytics as their preferred web analytics software is because of its power, advanced features and best of all, it’s free!
With increasing competition being introduced into the market, Google are always looking for new features to improve their web analytics and over the years they have come up with some absolute gems. Below are just some of the features that make Google Analytics stand out from its rivals.
Intelligence Alerts
Analytics intelligence analyses your sites stats and metrics so that it can detect any significant changes in your data followed by an automatic alert if any signals are triggered. These alerts are called events. An example of this would be if you have an increase in traffic from an organic source then an alert will be triggered. You can filter your events daily, weekly or monthly to give you a better insight.
There are two parts to intelligence alerts, automatic alerts and custom alerts.
An automatic alert is the process where your historic data is used to calculate expected results by analytics. If your ‘fresh’ or new data has changed significantly compared to your expected results then an automatic alert will be triggered and classed as an event.
A custom alert is where you configure the conditions, so for example you could have something like:
If bounce rate is higher than 60% on all traffic sources.
If this event ever happens then your custom alert will be triggered. Custom alerts can be set in the admin section of Google Analytics.
Visitor Flow
In my opinion this is one of the best features that Google Analytics has to offer as you can visualise how visitors interact and ‘flow’ through your site.
This provides visual flow charts to illustrate visitor’s journey through your site. It shows which page visitors started on (landing page); followed by the next page in the journey or the page they exited your site from (dropped off).
Google Analytics also offers other flow charts for events and goals but these are not set by default and you have to assign your goals and events before you can use the feature.
Multi-Channel Funnels
In standard reports of Google Analytics, conversions and transactions credit the last traffic source that referred the visitor to your site. With the introduction of multi-channels funnels, you can now see what traffic source was the first interaction if applicable. So for example a visitor may have gone through organic in the first instance but then went through paid in the second instance. The multi-channel funnel helps you better understand how traffic sources assist each other and how much of an impact they have on your site even though they aren’t the last interaction.
Under the multi – channel funnel section of analytics you have 5 reports, which are:
Overview – This gives you general details such as number of conversions, assisted conversions and a great little Venn diagram that shows you the percentage of conversion paths that included combinations of certain channels.
Assisted conversions – Shows you which channels have assisted conversions or have been the first or last interaction in a conversion. You also get a general overview of how many conversions in total a channel was an interaction at some stage of the conversion.
Top conversion path – Shows which group of channels have influenced the most conversions.
Time lag – Shows how many days it took from when the visitor first interacted with your site to the final day when the visitor converted (made a transaction).
Path Length – Shows how many conversion paths that contained 1 -12+ channel interactions.
Custom Reporting
Just because the report doesn’t exist, doesn’t mean you can’t create it!
The custom report does exactly what it says on the tin. You can create reports that may not be created by default in analytics. A word of warning on this though, some metrics and dimensions cannot be combined together so make sure you check out Google Analytics help centre to see what can and what can’t be combined.
Conclusion
Google Analytics offers other great things such as real time and customisable dashboards which to be honest you can find in other web analytics programs, but what I like about analytics is that Google are always looking for ways to improve it and achieve a better user experience by uploading videos and help guides. If you haven’t already, checkout Google Analytics and see what you think.
Daniel Whittaker is the website content administrator at CartridgeMonkey.com, one of the UK’s major suppliers of Cheap Ink Cartridges. Daniel is a keen writer on SEO, Data Analysis and Website Optimisation.
