The first time you start seeing data flowing in from your tracking software, it is really exciting. After all, these are real people that are interested in visiting your website. Depending on your purposes for tracking visitor activities, you may need to filter your data to get a clearer picture of what is happening. Things like internal traffic from an organization, web development activities or just data that you don’t need to see can clutter up your reports and give you an inaccurate or hard-to-sift through pile of numbers. Read on for some best practices on using Google Analytics filters to make customized reports.

STOP! Don’t Apply an Analytics Filter Yet!

Before you do anything, you need to make a duplicate of your profile in your account. This is a copy of the default profile in your account. At the time of this writing, you can make up to 50 duplicate profiles in one Analytics account for one property. The reason you need to make a duplicate is that you should always maintain an unfiltered profile with all of your data in it. Any analytics filter you apply to a profile throws data away. This data cannot be retrieved, and should you make a mistake or decide that you want the data later, it’s gone for good. By making a duplicate profile, you will always have at least one that has not been touched. If you already have a duplicate profile, skip to the next section. If you have never done this, follow the steps below:

1. Log into your Analytics account
2. Click the “Admin” link in the top right-hand corner of the account
3. Select the profile that you would like to duplicate
4. Click on the “Profile Settings” tab
5. Click the “Copy this profile” link in the bottom right corner of the screen
6. Confirm the copy

Now that you have a duplicate, you can do whatever you want to the copy of your original knowing that you still have the first profile should you screw things up.

Excluding Traffic Using Filters in Google Analytics

A popular filter to apply to a property is to exclude traffic. If you are running a company, you may want to exclude employee traffic from the website. If you are doing some web development activities or someone you have hired is about to, you may want to exclude them from data so that it isn’t skewed. Another reason you might exclude data is to only look at a certain subset of users. Whatever they case, there are a variety of ways to accomplish this.

Exclude Traffic by IP Address

You can exclude traffic from a site based on the visitor’s IP address or a range of IP addresses. To do this, log into your Analytics account and select your duplicate profile.

1. Click on the “Admin” link at the top of the screen
2. Click on the “Filters” tab
3. Click “New Filter”
4. Select the “Create new Filter” radio button
5. Give your filter a name (this can be anything)
6. If you are only excluding one IP address, you can select the “Predefined filter” option, then “Exclude,” then “Traffic from the IP addresses” and “That are equal to”
7. Next, enter the IP address

If you are excluding traffic from multiple or a range of IP addresses:

1.  Follow steps 1-3 above
2. This time select the “Custom Filter” option
3. Select the “exclude” radio button
4. For the filter field, select “IP address”
5. For the filter pattern, you will have to enter a regular expression for the range of IP addresses you want to exclude. Regular expressions are very difficult to write correctly; however, Google offers an IP address range tool that allows you to do this easily. Use the tool, then just copy and paste your regular expression into the filter pattern field
6. Make sure “Case Sensitive” is set to “No”

Excluding Visitors by Setting a Cookie

Sometime excluding traffic based on IP address is not practical because computer networks may be utilizing dynamic IP addresses for security. In these cases, you can set a user cookie on the browser to exclude traffic. Note that this method is not ideal because it requires actual people to visit a web page to set the cookie, and the cookie expires or can be erased when someone clears his or her browser cache. It also requires some programming knowledge. Use of this filtering method works best when there are small groups of users that need to be excluded.

The web page where the cookie will be set:

1.  Create a new html page (there does not have to be content, but you can add some if you like)
2. Add this snippet of Javascript code into the head section of your new page: <body onLoad=”javascript:pageTracker._setVar(‘exclude_visitor’);”>
3. Also insert your Google Analytics Tracking script into the head of your page (this can be obtained from your GA account) *Note: this must go after the first snippet above or else GA will record a visit
4. Save the page to your server (IMPORTANT: you should also exclude this page from search engines via robots.txt! Otherwise, regular visitors whom you do not intend to exclude could also visit the page)

Setting up the filter to exclude traffic:

1.  Log into your Analytics account
2. Click on the “Admin” button
3. Click the “Filters” tab
4. Create a new filter
5. Click the “Custom Filter” radio button
6. Select “Exclude”
7. For the filter pattern select User Defined”
8. For the filter pattern use “Exclude_Visitor”

After you have set up the filter and you are sure it is working, go ahead and let the user group that you want excluded visit the page on all the browsers that they commonly use. This will effectively exclude them from reports.

Separating Domains Using Google Analytics Filters

When you have a blog, a web store or some other web property that has a different purpose than your main website, it is best for SEO to keep them all on the same or a sub domain. When looking at this data in reports, however, it can be an arduous process to sort through everything to evaluate activity. For instance, you may want to track activity on your blog separately from that of your main website. Using filters, you can separate these.

Including Traffic to a Sub Directory:

1.  Log into your Analytics account
2. Click the “Admin” link in the top right corner of the screen
3. Select the profile you want to apply the filter to
4. Click the “Filters” tab
5.  Select “Create new Filter”
6. Name your filter
7. Select “Predefined Filter”
8. Select “Include only,”  “traffic from the subdirectories” and “that begin with.” Note: if you were to select “that are equal to,” any sub directory past the first would also be excluded.
9. Enter your subdirectory (i.e. /blog)

There are over 50 different options for your  filter field, and out of those there are almost limitless combinations of how you can exclude or include data. The main purpose of filters is to only keep the data that you want in order to make your reports easier to decipher. Remember that you can create up to 50 different profiles and apply all sorts of filters to your data. Some of the most common are to exclude internal traffic or to separate properties, but you can also create filters based on user location, ISP, browser, campaign, page title and lots of e-commerce related characteristics.

What filters are you using on your data? How do they help you get a clearer picture of your data?

Measuring your activities as an online marketer is arguably one of your most important tasks. As the old saying goes, if you don’t know where you are headed, how will you know when you get there? Google Analytics is a very popular and robust platform; however, it is not the only option for tracking out there. We would like to point out some of the alternatives (both free and paid) that are available on the market for tracking your website and other marketing activities.

HiStats

A pretty good package that I have come across (and that is also completely free) is HiStats. It touts itself as a 100% free web-based tracking platform, and from what I have seen, that is completely true. You won’t find a lot of tracking platforms like Google that are completely free and also pretty effective. HiStats uses JavaScript to record page views just like GA does, and it features many of the same standard reporting features.

Pros

• Free (up to 10 million hits a day – if you surpass that, you can afford to pay for tracking)
• Data-rich basic reports like time on site, page views, bounce and exit rates, geo-location and pretty much any other basic reporting you can think of
• Custom date range with comparison
• Log analyzer
• Multilingual reports
• Live data feed

Cons

• Tons of ads in reports pages and elsewhere on the site (I guess they have to make money somehow)
• No apparent support for customizable tracking
• Terms of service says you cannot change the code snippet used to count page views

If you are looking for an alternative to Google, but don’t want to miss out on all the great data, give this one a try. It’s pretty easy to set up — you just have to provide your name, email and website URL, then embed their code on your site and you are good to go.

Clicky

If you are looking for a low-priced and feature-rich tracking platform, Clicky has a pretty good offering. They have a free limited version; however, the paid one is about 20 bucks a month and worth the cost for some of the features you get. The free plan allows you to track one website and up to 3,000 page views per month. If you are a heavy user, this won’t be adequate for you. The pro plan gets you three websites per month and up to a million page views per day. Custom pricing is also available.

Pros

• Free (good for small sites with low traffic)
• Heat maps
• Engagement reports
• Custom reporting
• Easy setup

Cons

• You pretty much have to pay if you have a site with any kind of high traffic
• An annoying Clicky Analytics button shows up on your website by default, although it can be removed.
• Even for paid accounts, some historic data is purged once a year (Why, Clicky! Why!)

Click Tale

Normally, I like to point out platforms that are of high quality and also free, but sometimes that isn’t possible. If you are interested in something more comprehensive than GA, but can’t afford their premium package, you may want to check out Click Tale. Don’t get me wrong — at almost 1,000 dollars per month to start, this is not something that novices or those with tight budgets should consider. It does offer a lot of compelling features, though, and for businesses heavily immersed in activity online, it has some great tools.

Pros

• Heat map suite: a full suite of visual reports that track mouse movements, clicks and scrolling. Keep in mind that this isn’t a traditional heat map that tracks eye movements, but it’s pretty cool stuff
• Captures keystrokes, as well
• Link analytics:  You can view reports on how visitors respond to and interact with the hyperlinks on your site. You can even track mouse hovers, hesitations and hovers that resulted in a conversion (sweet!)
• Form reports:  I don’t think I have seen more in-depth form tracking functionality. You can see where users abandoned a funnel, what fields are tripping them up or are too ambiguous, as well as a refill report, which gives data on how often users have to go back and refill form data
• Lots of other basic data reporting features

Cons

• It’s expensive for solo marketers: There is a free plan, but it is only good up until 400 page views per month, which even a brand new site would blow through easily. Premium plans start at around 950 dollars and go up from there
• There have been questions raised elsewhere on the web as to the reliability of the tracking software. For example, one user reported using a form built with AJAX that gave users helpful feedback while filling in form fields. In the video made by Click Tale to report user behavior, the AJAX generated suggestions were not visible. These would be important in determining why users are having trouble with certain fields

If you search the web, you will find dozens of other self-hosted and web-based tracking platforms. I picked out these three because they were moderately comparable to Google Analytics, and had some pretty compelling features. If you are in the market for tracking software, look for something that will fulfill your goals. Your goals may be specific if you are looking for a platform just for your business, and they may be more general if you are planning on using tracking on others’ websites.

What platforms do you use to track your website activity? What benefits do they bring to the table? What are their drawbacks?

In our previous post, we talked about mining data from Google Analytics. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to do next once you have gleaned data from your website. As web marketers with access to loads of useful data, we still spend much of our time guessing about exactly what will please our visitors. This post will offer some tips on what to do with data once you are done analyzing it.

Engaging Your Visitors

Forming deep connections with visitors to your website is an important part of building a brand online. Identify pages where users are spending the most time. What is it about those pages that keeps people on your site? Mimic these characteristics on other parts of your website. You can also look at your keywords report to see which keywords are correlated with long stays on your website. This clues you in to similar key terms that may be useful to target on other pages of your site in a search marketing campaign.

Top Entrance Pages from Search Referrals

Take a look at Traffic Sources -> Search -> Overview, and then add a secondary metric of landing pages. These are the pages that visitors are finding and clicking on in searches. Your most visited page may be your home page (which is fairly common), but take a look at other pages that are ranked highly in the number of visits. These pages are doing very well in search engine results pages, and you can compare them to pages that may not be showing up so high in the reports to help you improve their rankings.

Real Time

At first, the real time feature in Analytics is cool to look at, but you might consider it to be a novel addition, at best, after a short time. There are actually a couple of cool uses for this feature. It’s not wise to make programming or content changes to a live site, but it can happen sometimes. You can use the real-time report to see if anyone is looking at the page you plan on changing before you take action. Other uses for the report include checking initial progress of a campaign like an email blast, sharing content on social media that involves a link to your site or any other activities that involve sending traffic to your property. You should always have some other, more recordable method of tracking for a campaign, but the real-time report can give you a good initial picture of how your campaign is shaping up.

Site Speed

Having a slow website can increase bounce rates and, in general, promote a poor user experience. The site speed report is one that gets little fanfare, but it’s pretty useful. You can see the speed of your site’s average load times in most major browsers and mobile operating systems. You can also look at load times on the page level. If you see that load times are too high, you can take proper action. Google provides a site speed analysis for free, and it will tell you exactly what may be causing your site to move slowly.

Observe, Hypothesize, Test, Repeat

In any post about how to use data in Analytics, testing should always be mentioned. Sometimes there are small tweaks that can be made to a website, but often our assumptions must be validated by a series of tests to ensure that we are making the right decisions.

A/B/n and Multivariate Testing

After data has been analyzed and conclusions drawn, don’t just start changing things around on your website or individual pages. Not only will this confuse you down the road, but you will not be able to determine if your educated guess about what to change was, in fact, correct. Instead, you can set up carefully administered tests. Two of the most common forms are A/B/n tests (also known as A/B testing or split testing) and multivariate testing.

A/B/n testing

• This is a very common form of testing used in web design and web usability. It involves making two versions of a page and sometimes three. Traffic is then divided among the pages to see which variation has the best results in terms of a goal. The goal could vary, and some examples might be increasing time one page, increasing conversions, decreasing bounce rate or getting visitors to perform some kind of action. The benefit to this type of testing is that it’s easy to set up and implement.

Multivariate testing

• This is similar to A/B testing; however, it involves testing multiple variables on a webpage. Another way to think of this kind of testing is many A/B tests happening on the same page at the same time. The main purpose for this kind of testing is to determine which combination of variables produces the desired result based on the goal of the test. Multivariate tests can be very difficult, time consuming and expensive to undertake. It is best to start out with A/B/n testing first, especially for smaller tasks.

Testing your changes is very important. Keep a log of how each variation of a page performed when you set up your tests. For an A/B test, narrow down your best guesses as to how you could better accomplish your goal with the layout and elements of a page. Then, pick the two best configurations (or three if you have that many), and start your test. Here is a great resource on setting up an A/B test for your website.

What you do with your data will largely depend on what it is telling you. High bounce rates, low visit durations, low numbers of pages viewed and scant referrals or conversions will all have their own solutions. Make sure you are analyzing your data with the context in mind. For instance, a high bounce rate on a single page blog may not be an indication of copy that isn’t engaging or interesting. Low conversion rates could be attributed to other factors like a long or confusing sales process.

What decisions have you made for your website based on Analytics data? Did you find that further testing helped identify what you needed to change on your website?

One of the greatest things about the analytical platforms available for websites is the sheer abundance of data. There is so much data, in fact, that it’s easy to get paralyzed and not really know which direction to take. In this post, we’ll explore several options for mining your data from Google Analytics and how to make practical use of it in your everyday activities.

Keyword Traffic Sources

The keywords you use on your website are some of the most important text. Analytics provides keyword reports that show you exactly which terms visitors used to find you. At the time of this writing, the keyword traffic sources report can be found by navigating to Traffic Sources -> Overview. The keyword report should be the default report view. If it isn’t, simply click on “view full report” in the bottom right-hand corner of the summary report, and select from one of the primary dimensions listed above the report view.

The keywords report has a variety of purposes. It can be used to track progress in on- and off-site SEO campaigns, as a tool to optimize for keywords that you may not be targeting but that people are using to find your site, and the level of engagement visitors have with your site in relation to the keyword they used to find it.

Tracking SEO campaigns:

• The presence of targeted keywords in the keyword report gives a good indication that SEO efforts are paying off. Adding a secondary dimension like referral source can give you further verification that the site is ranking for a particular keyword phrase in searches.

Going after keywords:

• With all the keyword research tools and software programs out there for determining the best phrases, we still miss the mark sometimes. Keyword data in analytics tells us exactly the terms people are using to find our website. Sometimes, you may find terms that your site is ranking for, but that you aren’t targeting specifically. If you can tell from low bounce rates and high visit durations that these unexpected keywords are beneficial, you can then optimize certain pages of your site to be more relevant for those terms.

Tweaking your Content:

• On the other side of the coin, there may be words or phrases you are trying to rank for, but data may suggest that visitors don’t find your pages relevant. High bounce rates and low visit durations compared with a high percentage of new visits on a particular phrase may suggest that you are succeeding in ranking for that term, but that your content on the page is not that useful or relevant for visitors using that term to find your site.

Note that you can also associate a Google Analytics account with a web master tools account to view lots of useful SEO data. You can see additional keyword terms that were used to find the property, click through rates, landing pages, impressions and more.

Campaigns

Tracking advertising campaigns online is far more fruitful than tracking more traditional marketing such as direct mail. Using Google’s URL builder, advertisers can put uniqe URLs in their ads so that data can be tracked easily in campaign referral reports provided by analytics. Once you have a campaign and tracking set up for it, other metics in analytics can tell you how successful your efforts have been. The campaigns report can be found by going to Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Campaigns. Basic metrics like bounce rate, visit duration and the number of visits can tell you if your campaigns are doing well or if they need attention.

Bounce Rate:

• A high bounce rate for a campaign can tell you things about your ad(s). The most obvious problem may be that your landing page is not relevant to your ad. If your value proposition stated in the ad, keywords or other elements aren’t consistent with your landing page, people will leave right away.

Visit Duration:

• Analytics tells you how long a visitor stayed on your site after clicking an ad. Visit duration can be especially revealing for sites that are sending visitors through a conversion funnel. A low overall visit duration for a campaign where visitors are prompted to go through a conversion funnel may indicate that the process is too long or ambiguous in some way. A short visit duration on a single page in a conversion funnel may also suggest that the process is confusing in some way, or that the pages are poorly designed.

Number of Visitors:

• The number of visitors from a campaign gives you direct evidence as to the success of your ad in terms of driving traffic. You can use this metric to determine if it’s worth advertising on a specific property.

Audience

There are a variety of metrics in the audience reports that can help you make decisions about your website. Some notable reports like Technology and Mobile can help you make decisions about design and programming tasks for your site. Using data in the Browser & OS report, you can make programming decisions about your website. This report can be found under Audience -> Technology -> Browser & OS. Data from mobile overview and devices reports can help you make decisions about whether mobile content is something you should be thinking about if you haven’t already. These reports can be found under Audience -> Mobile -> Overview or Devices.

Browser & OS:

• There are tons of technologies available that make the web more beautiful. Flash, HTML5, CSS3 and other programming languages and software enable web designers to make visually appealing pages with advanced functionality. Unfortunately, there are few standards when it comes to browsers, and not all features work the same in all browsers. In fact, it can be extremely time consuming and tedious to ensure that a single effect can be viewed consistently across all devices. Using the Browser & OS reports, you can determine if these programming challenges need to be undertaken or not. For example, you may find that 95% of your visitors don’t have the most current version of Flash and haven’t for the past 7 months. Knowing that, you may hold off on relying on the technology for a web redesign.

Mobile:

• Mobile is growing by leaps and bounds. The number of mobile devices accessing the web now outnumbers more traditional devices. Businesses often ask, “Should I have a mobile website?” The answer isn’t always clear, and as a business, you don’t want to spend a lot of time and money making your site mobile-friendly if you don’t have to. Mobile reports in analytics can give you an idea if users are demanding mobile-friendly content from you. If you have the traffic volumes, it can also tell you which devices are used most often to access your site. Using this information, you can make decisions about whether having mobile-ready content is worth the investment, and if it is, which devices are most important for optimization.

Referring Websites

This is one of my favorite reports because you can see the other websites that are sending traffic to yours. There are a couple of cool things you can learn by looking at data from these reports. If you are involved in backlink building or commenting on forums or blogs, you can see the websites where your time has been well spent building links or being active. You can also use it as a collaboration tool for reaching out to other webmasters in your niche.

Forum Commenting:

• Forum commenting is a great way to build awareness of a brand, generate links to your site and, in general, position yourself as a thought leader. You can determine if your overall activities are effective by seeing the number of visitors referred, how long they stayed on your site, how many pages they looked at and the percentage of new visits. An example of where you could use data is if you are active on a forum for the purposes of marketing. If you have a link to your website or one of its pages in a signature on the forum, you will be able to see referrals coming from that link. Say you post to the forum three times per day, five days per week over a three month period. If you see that you are only receiving a handful of referrals from those links, this could be an indication that other visitors to the forum aren’t responding well to your product/service, or that the forum isn’t a good place to be spending your time. On the other hand, if you see that your time spent posting has brought you many dozens of referrals, perhaps it would be wise to increase activity on the same forum or similar sites.

Link Building:

• The referring websites report not only allows you to check on the progress of a link building campaign, it can help you identify sites that probably shouldn’t be connected to yours. By clicking on a referring site in reports, you can see the path where the referral came from. This is the exact page that sent a visitor to your site and also the location of a backlink. By visiting the URLs specified in analytics, you can see if your backlinks are placed in appropriate areas such as within copy and with anchor text that is favorable to you. Viewing these URLs will also give you a good idea if the site linking to yours is of good quality or not. For instance, if you see that the site’s content has nothing to do with yours, or if it is spammy or poorly designed, its links should be removed. The same is true if a site links from blog networks, disproportionate anchor text links, or is generally untrustworthy. Referring website reports will not identify these links for you, but they will show you pages that are referring traffic, which allows you to decide for yourself if the links need to be removed.

Visitors Flow

The visitors flow report is a neat visual representation of how people move throughout your site. Using this report, you can identify where visitors enter your site and which pages they travel to afterwards. Using the data, you can determine if your site is easy to navigate. Looking at this report as a whole can be confusing because there may be many different pages with many different connections. The whole thing can look like a spider web. In other words, it’s impressive, but useless.

Interpreting Visitor Flow:

• Instead of looking at the visitor flow report as a whole, identify single connections among one, two or three pages. Perhaps you have a conversion funnel or a series of pages that you want visitors to follow. By isolating the pages in the report, you can see where visitors are traveling among those few pages and make assumptions as to why. For example, you may want visitors to travel deeper into your site from the home page. If looking at the visitor flow report reveals that a majority of visitors are bouncing after seeing the home page, this could be an indication that your content is not engaging, your navigation may be confusing, or perhaps some other mechanism in place to drive traffic to the site is misleading.

Google Analytics is a great tool for measuring activity on a website. It’s important to develop specific goals and questions rather than looking at the data passively with no real objective. The amount of data can be overwhelming, but if you have a narrow set of concerns, the data can be very insightful and easy to understand. You can find even more information on how to gather your data and make actionable decisions on the official Google Analytics Blog.

How do you mine data in Analytics? Have you ever found yourself paralyzed by the amount of information presented to you by the platform?