Unique Visitors

The first one is one of the most talked about metric: “Unique Visitors”. Unique visitor has been called by various names in different analytics package. Some call it absolute unique visitor and others like to call it hourly/daily/yearly/decade/centuries unique visitors (see below you guessed it right . Quite honestly, it does not matter what you call it by definition a unique visitor is a “statistic describing a unit of traffic to a Web site, counting each visitor only once in the time frame of the report.” (courtesy: wikipedia.com)

Key benefits

This metric helps building rapport with your field sales team (because it is so common no kidding).

The second benefit is it allows building cool reports like hourly/daily/weekly visitors that you might rarely use.

Third benefit is your websites unique visitor number could change if you change the date range. You will have a different unique visitor value for day/week/month/yearly unique visitor. What is the point of using a metric that creates confusion instead of providing insights?

My advice is to use visits metric report with new and returning visitor segment instead. This will provide you more information than any form of unique visitor report can.

Overall bounce rate report

Bounce rate can be the coolest metric only when you apply it to the right report. Overall site bounce rate report is total waste of time because it will not give you any directional data. It might be a good metric to tweet about if you have nothing else to say.

You could be getting a low bounce on your worst performing pages / campaigns and high bounce on the high converting pages.

Bounce rate can be super charged if you apply it to the right reports. Most Google Analytics reports have bounce rate as one of the default metric.

Apply bounce rate to get most actionable data from the following reports-

1. Keywords report – Keywords report provide insights on what keywords are driving targeted traffic to your website. Our goal is to identify the keywords with higher conversion and high bounce rate (40% or more). The default view of the keywords report in Google Analytics will not provide both the bounce rate and the goal conversion rate metric in the same screen. The trick is to export the excel version of the keywords report. This report will provide the conversion and the bounce rate data side by side. Find out the landing pages for these keywords and test multiple landing pages.

2. Top Landing page – The top landing pages report can be segmented into paid vs non paid search traffic. High bounce paid search landing pages are low hanging fruits. Find out all the high bounce pages for paid search campaign and divert the traffic to more relevant pages after successful split testing. Similarly, identify the organic search landing pages with high bounce rate and add relevant content.

Time on Page

Time on page metric could have been the best metric to measure content effectiveness only if the time on page calculation was done correctly. The time on page can only be calculated if the web site visitor navigates to another page on the same website. What this means is you will never be able to figure out how much time a web visitor spent on the last page of the website.

So, what should be the most productive and insightful way to measure time on site related data? Quite honestly, just stop being obsessive about the time on page metric and focus on the conversions instead.

Here are some questions that you need to ask yourself -

1. Does this page have a high bounce / exit rate?

Yes

Identify the paid search keywords with high bounce and divert this traffic more relevant pages.

No

Great

2. Is the page a key driver to the path to conversion?

Yes

Great. Drive more traffic to this page.

No

Identify the paid search traffic landing on this page and divert it to better performing pages. Optimize the page by addding relevant content to this page. Drive relevant paid search traffic to this page.

3. Is the page located at the right place in the site architecture?

Yes

Great.

No

Move it to a better location on the website and 301 the old url to the new page.

Do you agree that these three reports / metrics are the worst metric? Please share your thoughts, insights and comments below.

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Although most of the features and reports in Google Analytics are accesible directly, there are many hidden uses and hacks that can help you get advanced analysis, better results or results in the format you want.

Here are some of the coolest tips, tricks and hacks that you can apply to your GA code right now-

1. Error Page Tracking: Error pages are those pages that throw up an error when the visitor searches for a nonexistent URL. These are the 404 error pages or the “Page not found” error pages. Tracking the visitors on it can prove to be very useful for knowing what exactly they were searching for. This hack is obtained from the Google Analytics help page -

Please follow the steps below to obtain reporting on missing or error pages:

1. Add the Google Analytics tracking code to a custom 404 error page.

2. Modify the tracking code on the 404 page as follows:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
var gaJsHost = ((“https:” = = document.location.protocol) ? ” https://ssl .” : “http://www.”);
document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src=’” + gaJsHost + ” google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”));
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxx-x”);
pageTracker._trackPageview(“/404.html?page=” + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + “&from=” + document.referrer);
} catch(err) {}
</script>

This code sends a virtual pageview of”/404.html?page=[pagename.html?queryparameter]&from=[referrer]” to your account, where [pagename.html?queryparameters] is the missing page name and referrer is the page URL from where the user reached the 404 page.

3. Look for /404.html in your Top Content report.

2. Track Outgoing Links: Tracking outgoing links is useful to identify the links that are clicked the most and also to find out if certain links on your site are leading to excessive bail out. [Tip: I highly recommend that you always customize your out going links to open in seperate window.]

With this code hack you can optimize your website to reduce visitor bounce and increase visitor engagement.

Format the outgoing links by adding the onClick Javascript attribute:-

<a href=”http://www.example.com” onClick=”javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview(’/outgoing/example.com’);”>

3. Exclude Internal Traffic: By default, Google Analytics will not filter the internal traffic data. Each visit from you or people from your organization to your website will be added to GA data set and this can result in inflated numbers.

To exclude internal traffic from the web analytics reports follow these steps:

1. Go to Analytics Settings -> Edit -> Add Filter.
2. Enter a filter name such as “Test Filter” and filter type as “Exclude all traffic from an IP address.”
3. In the IP address column, enter the IP address of the website.

4. Track Successful Ecommerce Transactions: If you are an analytics ninja and want to track your customer data separately from visitor data then this code can do the job for you. Tracking customer data separately not only helps you in finding new up sell/cross sell opportunities for existing customers but also allows you to design new capture mechanism for your visitors.

By using this small Javascript snippet, you can easily track only paid customers under an entirely new heading.

On the body tag of the successful transaction page, just add -onload=”pageTracker._setVar(“Customer”);”

And all customers will be tracked under a new custom segment called “Customer”.

5. User Group Tracking: By attaching a small piece of code to the landing page of the website, you can track where a definite user group “splits” into. This is especially useful for a test market survey.

Add

onLoad=”javascript:pageTracker._setVar(‘Segment/Subgroup’);”

to the landing page to see the users to have a segment subgroup for tracking.

Hope you enjoyed this post. Now go do it!

Please share your thoughts, insights and comments because it really helps me write more effectively.

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