Google Analytics offers a wide range of features and reports that can help monitor any website with relative ease. However, you need to ensure that you customize Analytics to suit your specific website and business needs.
Here are a few tips that should help you customize Google Analytics for customized monitoring of your website.
Many marketers just look at last touch attribution, which in turn does not provide the complete picture. Your customers may arrive at your website through several channels such as through display advertising, social media sites, and organic search. However, Google Analytics will soon solve this problem with the release of attribution modeling tools and multi channel funnels reporting.
On your part, you need to actually copy the default channel and then work on customizing the website that you plan to analyze. You can customize your channels based on branded and non-branded ones. You can create an affiliate channel as well as extract partner websites or create a separate group for special relationships. You can also separate all social network channels, especially ones that you are actively using.
You can then view assisted conversion reports of these custom channels. You can find out channels that have assisted significantly in conversions rather than focusing only on last touch attribution.
Creating customized Regular Expressions is another step to find out visitors arrive at your website by way of non branded keywords. This feature can prove to be very helpful to increase traffic that arrives from search by visitors that are not yet aware of your brand. You can use the Advanced section in Keywords Reports and enter your brand name to get the desired reports. You can then compare visitor behavior as well as conversion data for branded and non-branded organic search.
You can also customize data alerts based on your specific needs. You will only need to indicate triggers that alert you through text messages or emails once a threshold has been breached. You can set triggers that warn you of a decrease in visits, conversions, and revenues, and even due to any problem during the checkout process, among many other customized alerts. These alerts could indicate a decrease in visits from search, decrease in impressions from pay per click, and several others based on your customized settings.
In addition, you should also create custom dashboards, especially if you have different sub-departments that need customized reports based on different or overlapping metrics. For example, you could create a dashboard that displays statistics on revenue, total website traffic, and time per visit while another dashboard could depict entrance keywords, bounce rates, and best landing pages.
There are several other features in Google Analytics that should be customized for your specific needs. You should try them out as well as engage in continuous fine-tuning to extract reports that can help in customized monitoring of your website.
