Three New Google Analytics Features That You Should Be Using Right Now…
The definition of Analytics is “the science of analysis”. Website Analytics tools like Google Analytics, provide the ways and means to analyse your website data. However, somewhere along the line, both users and Analytics vendors seem to have focused more on the data and less on the analysis.
The folks at Google are starting to re-address the balance. In the past few months they have re-launched three powerful analysis tools: Analytics Intelligence, In-Page Analytics, and Weighted Sort.
All three tools aid data analysis by cutting through the mass of stats, straight to the gold dust. By gold dust, I mean the key Insights into how people are interacting with your website and how to use those insights to improve your web pages to increase conversion.
Lets look at all three tools in a bit more detail.
1. Analytics Intelligence
At Ad:Tech New York, Google announced the Major Contributors feature, a very useful upgrade to the Intelligence reports.
Google Analytics Intelligence reports provide both automatic and custom alerts when there are significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics over daily, weekly and monthly periods.
The new Major Contributors feature gives you a detailed report when a custom alert triggers. So rather than just seeing one metric for your custom alert, you’ll now see all the major traffic sources, landing pages, time on page and other metrics that contributed to the alert.
2. In-Page Analytics
In-Page Analytics replaces the Site Overlay report – a feature that never seemed to fully work. In-Page Analytics is perfect if you get a little intimidated when you see rows of data.
By putting the statistical information next to web pages and including information about where on the page visitors clicked, In-Page Analytics makes it much easier to gain Insights on your design and usability.
3. Weighted Sort
This is a huge step forward for Google Analytics as they realise that website data needs to be weighted. For instance, a page with 10,000 visits and a high bounce rate is much more important to you than a page that has had ten visits, but the highest overall bounce rate. If you lower the bounce rate by 1% on the page with 10,000 visits, you’ll experience a big difference to your site. If you focus on fixing the page with ten visits, you will have spent a lot time for very little reward.
Weighted Sort
The Weighted Sort appears when you click on Bounce Rate on most reports. When you enable Weighted Sort it applies an algorithm, which takes into consideration the number of visits for each page, bringing to the forefront the items with the most visits and the highest Bounce Rates.
Expect to see more new Google Analytics Insight features soon. In the meantime, check out the GA Apps gallery for more tools that will help you gain insight into your web traffic.
