I have used Google Analytics with mixed success over the past 3 years. I keep switching between it and Site Meter, which is another great site monitoring tool. Anyway, I decided this week to make an aim and learn more about Google Analytics. Like many products, it is so feature rich, it can be hard to know where to start. Here’s what I found this week.
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Increase the date range

When you open Google Analytics, it shows the default date range, usually by day. You can change this to by month and year if you’re inclined.

What I didn’t know was that you can click on the actual date range and then select to view across a timeline or across different months.

This lets you check your site across holidays, seasons and other time periods.

Compare to the past

Next, you can select the Compare to Past checkbox, which lets you see how you’re doing now against your past performance.

This adds new fields to the graph, so you can see you’re making sense of things.

Sort the keywords
Ok, I know you know this but I didn’t. You can click on the headings in this pane and resort the results.

Notice the $Index column on the far right?

Use this to see how you’re pages are doing from a financial perspective – you can set goals and targets and even link into your Google Adsense account. Nice!

Advanced Segments

You can refine/filter your report by adding more segments.

What you mean?

Add things like new visitors, paid traffic, search traffic to your report, so you can see how your site is really performing.

These are all color-coded to make the chart more readable.

Oh yeah, you can also export it and open the file in Excel.

Click on the Add to Dashboard button and it will automatically be added to your GA dashboard next time you open it.

But, did it work?

No!

I managed to add the code no problem to my blogs BUT it doesn’t work on my software templates site. For whatever reason, even though I added it to the footer, it doesn’t pick up.

So, blogs work fine but sites with file includes don’t work.

Just me!

If you have any ideas, please drop me a line.

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