This is an article ‘Google Analytics Features You Should Be Using Right Now’ by Marc Primo
No professional digital marketer can deny how Google Analytics has been the leading tool to measure and improve their respective websites. When the pandemic emerged and businesses had to resort to unorthodox solutions to reach their customers through online marketing, it became an essential to over 29 million websites that needed analytical insights.
However, despite its long-time presence in the digital sphere and perhaps its continuing evolution, many are still unaware of the platform's best-kept secret features that can further improve website performance.
From custom alerts to e-commerce tracking, here are some helpful features that elite marketers should familiarize themselves with when using Google Analytics:
Keep tabs on website performance and changes via Custom Alerts
Users who log into their reports and access the customization tab on the drop-down menu can easily set up this helpful feature. Its primary function is to give you timely alerts via your assigned email when Google Analytics tracks changes in web traffic or even behavior that has manifested on your pages.
Settings vary from daily, weekly, or monthly alerts. One thing to note here is that the more you monitor these changes, the better you can improve your traffic and conversions while keeping tabs on your data trends and website events. Once you see changes affecting your performance, you can quickly address them in real-time and avoid suffering costly consequences on your ranking.
Manage your traffic source via channel grouping
Google Analytics offers its channel grouping feature when handling different channels, say, a couple of social media platforms for your ad campaigns. This default feature allows you to easily organize and manage your common source traffic for each platform.
The advantage of using this feature is discovering which ad sets and corresponding social media channels work best-regarding website traffic. You can compare data and numbers to develop more insights that can significantly help you in your future ad developments and campaigns. Though set in default on the analytics reports page, you can select your settings once you master the featured functions for better reporting.
Access the channel grouping feature on the admin tab on your interface's bottom left and view results via your data display.
Monitor how visitors navigate your page with the Behavior Flow feature
Tracking where your visitors go within the subpages of your website is one great way to know what they are looking for within your website. Some might bounce from one subpage to an event, while others are simply browsing your content.
The Behavior Flow feature gives you a visual guide on how each visitor on your website interacts with its pages. This feature is one way to determine which pages or content works for most of your visitors and creates corresponding customer journeys for each.It can also give you a good pulse on your bounce rates by displaying the nodes a visitor takes while spending time on your website.
The e-commerce tracking feature helps you manage your business more efficiently
One helpful feature Google Analytics users who are into online businesses cannot do without is the platform's e-commerce feature that helps determine and identify the top customers on your website. Whether you use Shopify or BigCommerce, this feature shows you a classroom path of how they behave while checking out your products in your online store.
Aside from this, the tracker shows you which products are your best-selling ones in terms of conversion, as well as which locations these purchases are coming from. Knowing these details can give you an advantage on specific locations, user profiles, and preferences while you come up with more ad campaigns and featured products.
To set up your e-commerce tracker on Google Analytics, sign in and proceed to reports; click the Admin button, then on the window prompt, click e-commerce settings. Take note that you should always enable the Ecommerce and Enhanced Ecommerce reporting features so you can start setting up your tracking code.
You can control which data you want to view and add code on your website, permitting Google Analytics to collect data from it. Ask help from someone well-versed at coding via HTML or JavaScript if you need some assistance with the codes and you'll be good to go.
UTM parameters
Elite marketers already know how Urchin Tracking Modules (UTM) work on Google Analytics. For those who are not very familiar with the feature, these codes are added to the end of your website URL to enable the platform to collect data for your ad campaigns, web pages, and business performance.
You can apply this whether you run your campaigns on the various social media platforms to determine which channel gives you the best or worst performance. By adding these supplementing parameters to your URL, your analytics report can show how many users engaged with your ads, how many new users interacted with your campaigns, visitors' average session duration, traffic, and your accumulated revenue.
Take advantage of every useful feature
There are plenty of features on Google Analytics, but not all of them are for everyone. In choosing which features are suitable for your business and ad campaigns, you need to determine how to improve your tracking and measuring capabilities that help you develop valuable insights. The five features discussed above are just some of the less utilized features which can further assist you in improving your website's performance.
Of course, you should continuously optimize your other-page factors for your websites, such as site speed and buyer personas you are trying to pull in. A good grasp of who you are talking to is the first thing to determine before you tweak your Google Analytics settings.
Only when you accomplish your set goals and familiarize yourself with how each of these functions work can you expect further boosts in your traffic, spend time, and conversion values. Whether you are managing a blog, eCommerce, or any other content platform, these features are probably the ones your competitors are not using right now, which you can turn into an advantage. After all, it doesn't help to explore what trends you should be keeping an eye on to ensure you won't get buried in your overcrowded niche market.