Remarketing via Google Adwords offers a powerful opportunity to retarget people who have visited your site. With the introduction of Google Analytics audience lists retargeting has become even more powerful.
For example, someone may have visited your site and not completed a purchase or some other interaction you were hoping for and so targeting them with a tailored ad may encourage them to return.
Troubleshooting Google Analytics installations just became a little easier thanks to an enhancement rolled out to Google Tag Assistant - available as a Google Chrome extension.
In a number of previous articles we've talked about the problem of spam referrals appearing within Google Analytics data. This problem now appears to be growing exponentially and without taking steps to exclude this data from your reports (changing your tracking / configuration within Google Analytics or using advanced segments to remove this data) your reports and any insights derived from them could become meaningless - or worse still highly misleading.
If your site uses a site search facility you will probably want to know what your users are looking for.
This kind of information can be particularly helpful in two areas:
Bounce rate is a key engagement level statistic that many website owners rightly pay a lot of attention to. If you are unfamiliar with the concept then a bounce occurs if someone lands on your website and then leaves without any further interaction (e.g. clicking through to another page). The bounce rate is simply the percentage of visitors that leave.
"Out of the box" Google Analytics captures a wide range of visitor activity on your site. By default data is collected for each page view generated.
Sometimes however you’ll need to track additional interactions – for example visitors playing videos, downloading files, progress through complex forms where URLs don’t change or clicking onto outbound links. To do so Google Analytics offers two tracking options – to either capture such interactions as “events” or “virtual page views”. Tracking can be configured programmatically on your site or using customisable ‘tags’ within Google Tag Manager. So which should you choose and what’s the difference between them?
Seeing a sudden, unexpected and potentially dramatic rise in your traffic or other unexplained changes in patterns of traffic or engagement within Google Analytics? Even if nothing appears untoward we'd advise you to check your referrals and hostname reports to see whether you've been affected by either spam or ghost referrals.
Treemap reports allow you to visualise your data with a primary metric denoted by area (the larger the area occupied the higher the metric value) and a secondary value shown via colour coding (with green good and red poor).
With the remarkable rise in online retail competition is now tougher than ever. On top of this, consumers are becoming increasingly savvy and demanding so retailers have to work extra hard to adapt their services to ever changing online shopping patterns.
With new features regularly popping up within Google Analytics it can sometimes be hard to keep up to date with all the new tools and options available.
Anders Analytics Limited
31–35 Kirby Street
London EC1N 8TE
United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)207 788 7798
Email: [email protected]
