Do you know what is the most common question that I get every day on social media, forums or email?

"How to get insights about my Google Analytics data?" People approach me saying that they have a Google Analytics account for years, but they look only at page views or the number of visitors they get.

And this is wrong, this is so wrong when they have powerful free Web Analytics tools that they can leverage to learn more about their visitors and use those insights to better serve their visitors.

That is why in this article I am going to tell you some Google Analytics tricks that you should use for your website.

You can get the basics from my Google Analytics course, but right now I am going to take this one step further to help you get even more insights from Google Analytics.

Now, if you don’t use the latest version of Google Analytics, login into your account and click the [New Version] link from the top right corner of your screen before we get started.

This way I can be sure that you use the latest Google Analytics interface and you can follow this article along.

1. Setup Goals

Something that it’s quite a straight forward process, it’s actually neglected by the majority of people and this is the fact that after you install the tracking code on your website you need to setup goals.

The goals you setup for your website are the foundation of your website analysis because everything gravitates around your goals and conversion rates, the goals that are ultimately your business goals.

If you are wondering what goals you need to setup, start by asking yourself what is the purpose of your website. Is it an eCommerce site and you want to sells tangible goods, is it a blog where you want to make revenue from ads, do you sell eBooks or services? What is the main purpose of your site?

Then, once you figure this out you can go and start setting up goals base on your business objectives.

If this is still unclear for you, here are some examples that will give you traction:

• eCommerce site – enable eCommerce tracking and start checking the conversion rates for your products
• Engaged Visitors – people who spend more than one minute on your site
• Readers – people who visit at least two pages on your site
• Calls to action – use event tracking (see below in the article) to measure calls to action
• Best performing ads – again, use event tracking to measure your best performing ads
• Subscriptions – check how the visitors who subscribe to your list behave
• Purchases – if you sell eBooks or courses you can get insights about your buyers

Later, these goals will help you track conversion rates and get insights about what are the main traffic sources that send you visitors which convert, what are the keywords who send you customers, which page your visitor use most to signup for your newsletter, where are your customers from and examples can continue.

Use these examples to get started, but please note that every website is unique and it will have unique goals.

2. Connect your Google Webmaster Tools account

Google Webmaster Tools is another free product from Google which helps you see data about your website such as the number of impressions for your search queries and their position in Google, the number of links to your site or diagnosis information reported by Google after crawling your website.

Additionally, you can check +1 metrics, your site performance or submit a sitemap for Google to index.

But what the really interesting thing is the fact that you can connect your Google Webmaster Tools account with your Google Analytics account and get access to the new Search Engine Optimization reports.

Once you do that, you will be able to see three new reports in your Google Analytics account: Queries, Landing Pages and Geographical Summary. They will help you learn more about your top performing search queries (keywords) and landing pages.

Then, you can use that data to identify:

• Keywords with a low click through rate, but a good average position. Once you know them, you can change the meta title and description of your page to improve their click through rate.
• Landing pages with a good click through rate, but a low average position. These pages can be easily run through an on-page optimization process that will improve their rankings.
• What are the countries of your organic visitors and who your target market is.

To connect your site from Google Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics, go to the [Traffic Sources] section, select [Search Engine Optimization] and then one of the three reports.

At this stage you will see a page with the benefits of linking your accounts and a button where it says [Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing]. Click that button and then click [Edit] from the [Webmaster Tools Settings].

Then, you will be redirected to your Google Webmaster Tools where you can connect it with Google Analytics.

3. Enable Site Speed

Site speed is also a neat feature of Google Analytics that lets you see the load time of your pages. This will help you check what pages need your attention and determine you to look for ways of speeding up the load time of your pages.

If you wonder why this is important, I can tell you that the load speed of your pages can significantly improve your visitors experience on your site and it’s also a ranking factor in Google.

So a good load speed can make your visitors happy and can also increase your rankings.

Along with the number of Page Views and Bounce Rate, you can see the Average Page Load Time (in seconds) and the number of visits that have been used as a sample for every page on your website.

Additionally, if you click on the [Performance] tab, you can check different buckets of your page load time and see what is the average load speed of your pages.

The [Map Overlay] will show you what is the load speed for different countries or territories.

If before you needed to add an additional code to your Google Analytics tracking, now that is no longer required and Google Analytics will automatically add data to your reports.

4. Enable Site Search

It’s a fact that visitors who use the search box on your site are more likely to convert than the ones who don’t. The reason why this happens is because they are more engaged with your website, with your content or your products and services.

The beautiful thing about site search is that it lets you discover the exact keywords that people use to search for your products, so you can take this a step further and use them in your search engine optimization campaigns.

You can actually use the most important keywords that people use to search on your site to optimize your pages and drive more targeted traffic to your website.

Additionally, they might look for products or services that you do not have on your offer, but you can add them with little effort and increase your sales.

Or if you have a blog, site search is a great way to see what your readers are looking for and get a ton of article ideas out of them.

If you would like to enable site search on your website, first make sure that you have a search form on your site and then enable Site Search in Google Analytics.

5. Track Events

Event tracking is a powerful feature in Google Analytics that can help you track among others:

• How many people download your eBook
• What ads are performing better and who clicks on your ads
• Which signup form converts better (sidebar, below the post, about page)
• Who pauses, fast forward or stops a video
• What errors a visitor encounters during the checkout

But that is not all. Using the latest version of Google Analytics, you are also able to set these events as goals which can help you see the performance of your events based on different metrics.

Enabling event tracking it’s not a hard process. All you have to do is just add the code below next to your URL, before you replace the default values.

onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'category', 'action', 'opt_label', 'opt_value']);"

These default values will help you identify your events and here’s what they represent:

• Category – You can use this element to identify what you want to track: eBook, video, signup form, ads.
• Action – This element can be used to define the interaction of your visitor and can be: click, button, play, stop. Personally, I use it to specify the place of my button/signup form/ad.
• Label – Use this to identify the type of event that is tracked.
• Value – This element helps you specify a value for you event that can be used when you setup a goal for your event.

If you would like to see a working example, here’s what I used to track a link to my new product, where "Ads" is the category of my link, "Sidebar" the place where I added the link and "WAB" the label.

<a href="http://www.webanalyticsblueprint.com/" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Ads', 'Sidebar', 'WAB']);">

Then once you setup your links, all you have to do is just setup that event as a goal, using the Category, Action, Label, and Value conditions you have setup for your event.

6. Real-Time Reporting

Google has taken analytics one step further recently and introduced Real-Time Reporting, which displays information about visitors that are on your website in a specific moment.

Your are able to see how many visitors are on your website in that moment, where they are on your website, from where they come (keywords and referrals) and where they live.

Additionally, you have access to another 3 reports with more insights about their location, how they arrived on your website and what pages they visit.

To access the real-time reports you need to go to the [Home] menu > [REAL-TIME (BETA)].

The [Locations] report will provide you information about the number of your visitors and the countries where they are located. You can also check their location on a map.

[Traffic Sources] will display information about where they come from. You will see the medium and source along with the total number of your visitors.

The [Content] report will show you what are the active pages that your visitors read and how many active visitors are on each of the pages displayed on your report.

7. Multi-Channel Funnels

With Multi-Channel Funnels Google Analytics provides even more value for users who are passionate about conversion rates.

If before you were able to track the last source that the visitor used to convert, with Multi-Channel Funnels you are able to also track other sources (ads, referrals, social media, organic) that the visitor used to reach your website from.

Let’s say for example that your visitor (Cindy) landed for the first time on your website from Twitter and subscribed to your RSS feed.

Next time, Cindy used the feed reader to come and read your new articles. Ultimately she was looking for advice on blogging and found your eBook using a search engine.

Now, because she knows your site already, she will buy it and become a customer.

Using this example, in the old version of Google Analytics the search engine was used to be credited for the conversion, but now, with Multi-Channel Funnels you can see the whole path that Cindy took to convert: Social Network > Referral > Search engine.

To check the Multi-Channel Funnels reports, go to the [Conversions] section.

Watch this video to learn more about Multi-Channel Funnels:

8. Use Campaign Tracking

Tracking online marketing campaigns will help you get past that large number of direct visits that come from URL shorteners like bit.ly or clients like tweetdeck.

Additionally, it will help you track more accurately links from other websites and links that you use to promote your content or campaigns.

In order to use Campaign tracking in Google Analytics, you need to tag your URLs with special parameters. Those parameters can be added to your links using the URL Builder tool from Google.

Once you tag your URLs with the mandatory parameters, use them as they are or use an URL shortener when sharing them.

Then, check the [Campaigns] report, under [Traffic Sources] > [Sources] to get insights about your online marketing campaigns.

To see step by step instructions and how to check Google Analytics Campaign Tracking reports, read more in this article.

9. Plot Rows

Plot Rows allows you to create instant segments of your data in tabular reports. If you usually look at standard reports, you can use Plot Rows to get more insights from your metrics.

To use this feature, you need to select two rows from any tabular report and then click the [Plot Rows] button from the bottom of the table.

Once you do that, you will see that the chart has changed and you are able to see additional information there about the items that you have selected.

In other words it instantly creates a segment with two of your items compared with the total metrics.

Use this feature to check how your main keywords, referrals or pages compare with each other and with the overall metrics of the site.

But make sure that you select items that do not have a big difference between their metrics (i.e. compare a keyword with 2340 visits with one that has 154).

10. Custom Dashboards

In the old version of Google Analytics you used to have available only one dashboard. However, right now you can create up to 20 dashboards customized to your needs.

To create a custom dashboard, go to the [Home] menu > [Dashboards] and select [+New Dashboard].

Once you do that, you will need to choose whether you will want to start from scratch with a blank canvas or get some pointers with the [Starter Dashboard].

Then you can use slick widgets to create custom metrics, pie charts, timelines or tables.

To get started with custom dashboards, have a look at my screenshot above and try to duplicate it or check out 5 Insightful Google Analytics Dashboards.

Then, you will be able to customize it and add the metrics that are relevant to your business.

11. Flow Visualization

Flow Visualization definitely deserves a separate article to present it, but in the meantime I will outline it’s benefits.

Google Analytics rolled out two reports, [Visitors Flow], under the Audience section and [Goal Flow], under the Conversion section.

Visitors Flow

The Visitors Flow will display the path that your visitors have taken to navigate through your website.

You will be able to see, based on a selected dimension, such as country source or keyword, the exact path of your visitors and where they stopped to read your content.

On hover, the report displays for each page additional details, like the total number of visits, how many visitors moved to a different page and how many of them dropped the funnel and left.

If you click on a page, you will be able to highlight the traffic that went through that page, explore traffic through that page or display in a popup even more details.

Goal Flow

The Goal Flow report is essentially a better representation of the Funnel Visualization report and contains the same dimensions as the Visitors Flow report.

But the main difference between this and the Visitors Flow is the fact that the Goal Flow report doesn’t uses all pages, but the steps you configured in the conversion funnel.

Additionally, you can also use advanced segments to filter your data and get additional insights from the Visitors Flow and Goal Flow reports.

Google Analytics launched a series of enhancements to the Flow Visualization reports. The enhancements include the ability to do a date comparison of the Flow Visualization report and the ability to use other types of goals in the goal flow report. You can read the announcement on the Google Analytics blog.

But the biggest news, and the subject of this post, is the introduction of a new Event Flow report to track users through a series of events.

NEW! Google Analytics Event Flow Reports

When the world was focused on web analytics a common analysis technique was path analysis. The goal was to find the “magic path” through the website that lead to the most conversions and then force everyone through that process.

We almost never found the “magic path.” But there are some uses for path analysis, like looking at a defined path, for example a checkout process, and identifying where people leave the process.

But things have changed.

In the new world of digital analytics we collect more than just pageviews. We also collect events, which we use to track the minute details of how people interact with a website or app.

Until now we had no way to understand the sequence, or flow of these events. The Google Analytics Event Flow report provides a visualize of the user path between events.

If you’ve used the Flow Visualization reprots in Google Analytics then the Event Flow reports will look very familiar. It’s the same report. The only difference is that the event flows reports show events.

The event flow report can really be used for anything. It’s really up to you, and how you use events. A few that come to mind:

• If you’re an automotive site, you might use it to track people using a vehicle configuration tool
• If you’re a financial site, you might use it to track how people use a mortgage calculator
• If you’re tracking an app with Google Analytics, you might use this to track interactions
• If you’re tracking video streams with Google Analytics, you might use this to track how people flow from one stream to another

Before we get into an example, I should point out that this is all based on event data. If you don’t use event tracking this report will be useless. Or, if you have really bad events, this report will not work for you.

Make sure you have great events!

Overview

As is the case with the standard Flow Visualization report, the new Event Flow report consists of segments, nodes and paths. You can view the flow of a specific segment through the report using the segments on the left side. Or you can segment the entire flow using the drop down at the top of the report.

You can view various segments of traffic through the Event Flow or segment the entire flow.

Nodes represent either an event category, an event category/event action combination or a category/action/label combination.

Example

Last month I wrote about a new way to track content engagement with events. Using some custom code to can generate events as people scroll through a page and read content.

The data generates a model of the reading process. Events are generated at the following times:

• When an article is loaded in the browser
• When a visitor starts reading (by tracking scrolling)
• When a visitor gets to the bottom of the content
• When a visitor gets to the bottom of the page

We can now visualize the above process with the Event Flow report. I not only want to visualize the above process, but I want to see how people might jump steps in the process.

You can choose to view a different combination of events in the Event Flow.

Here’s a tip, the size of the nodes change depending on the event combination you choose to view. If you choose to only view the event categories, you’ll have a few, large nodes. But, if you choose to view the categories/actions/labels you’ll have LOTS of nodes.

I find that starting with the category/action combination is usually sufficient.

There are a lot of events here, so I’m going to click on a node and choose Highlight. This shows the traffic through the chosen node, which in this case is the category/action of Reading/ArticleLoad. Now I can see the path of all the traffic that loaded an article.

You can highlight traffic through a specific event node in Google Analytics.

The visualization shows traffic that came to the site, loaded an articles, read the article, hit the content bottom and hit the bottom of the page.

Using the Google Analytics Event Flow to visualize a series of event. In this case how people read content on a website.

I was able to see the percentages of traffic that move from step to step in the tabular data. But a visualization makes it easier to identify drop-offs.

Here’s something interesting. Using tabular data I learned that 67% of those that start reading get to the bottom of the content and 9% get to the bottom of the page.

Very few people read all the way to the bottom of the page. What happens after people get to the bottom of the content? Do they leave the site?

Using the flow I can easily get the answer.

I can literally see four actions when people hit the bottom of the content:

• Some people exit the site (the RED comments below
• Some move on to a new article (the BLACK comment below)
• Some read to the bottom of the page (the BLUE comment below)
• Some convert at a goal (the YELLOW comment below)

Analyzing what happens during a series of events.

You’re probably wondering how I can get more detail, perhaps view this flow on an article-by-article basis. Well, if I was tracking the article name in the event label I’d be able to see that! But I’m not doing that. Yet.

So there you have it. One application of the Event Flow reports.