10/07/17 // Written by Emma Phillips

5 Top Things You Didn’t Know About Analytics

Google Analytics is constantly being tweaked, changed, updated and improved. It seems like every week a new feature or insight is released – and yet – a lot of the smaller things go completely unnoticed. In this post, I aim to provide a bit of insight into some features of Analytics that most people completely overlook.

Identifying YOY Difference in Analytics

If you’re doing any form of comparison within traffic on Google Analytics, you’ll know that when you order the results, it will order by % difference. While that can be useful, it often won’t help you easily identify a page that has seen huge growth (or drops) very easily. For example, a page that’s gone from 1 to 2 sessions (100% growth) will appear in the list before that of a page that’s gone from 1000 to 1500 sessions.

So, Analytics has a little “Sort Type” button that lets you change this.  Clicking “Sort Type” and changing it to “Absolute Change” will enable you to sort by pages that have the biggest (or smallest) traffic difference.

Quick Fix to Sampling in Google Analytics

One of the biggest issues we see across clients is sampling. Sampling occurs when GA is performing an advanced query or modification of data, and such, doing it across the date or dataset you’ve requested is just too intensive.

So, GA looks at a small part of your data – and then extrapolates the trends over the full date range that you’ve requested. Naturally, this can lead to wildly inaccurate data.

There are multiple ways to counter sampling, however one way that people very often overlook is the “Faster Response / Greater Precision” toggle.

Running a basic 45-day query with a secondary dimension of country on “Faster Response”, resulted in the below sampling level:

However, simply switching this from “Faster Response” to “Greater Precision” improves this up to 90% – a level of sampling that is far more trusted and believable.

So, if you’re seeing sampling – give this toggle a try first.

Connecting Google Analytics and Search Console

As anyone who uses Search Analytics via Search Console regularly will know, the filtering and narrowing of data within Search Analytics is very limiting.

Fortunately, Google Analytics can suck in the Search Analytics data. From there, you’re able to perform regex filters – which is incredibly useful when analysing brand/non-brand split, as you can include multiple variations of a brand name,

Other similar pivots and modifications of data can be performed – so next time you want to use Search Analytics, try Search Console in GA instead.

Why Use Site Search

Site search is an often-overlooked function within GA. However, if your website has any form of textual search function, it can be incredibly useful.

It takes just a few moments to set up Site Search tracking within Google Analytics admin section – and from there – it will begin collating:

  • What people search for
  • How often they refine their search
  • How many sessions contain a search
  • Plenty more…

So, what’s useful about this? It gives you direct insight into what people are currently interested in on your site, but cannot easily find, enabling you to improve your website’s navigation.

We’ve used it to great success in several campaigns – including on a national jewellery supplier’s website. Through analysing their Site Search information, we discovered that people were often searching for a certain type of ring – but it wasn’t within the website’s main navigation. Adding this product as an item with the site’s navigation saw sales for this product increase dramatically.

Providing Internal Insight

Dashboards enable you to create views of your data, tailored to different people in the business. For example, a revenue dashboard could be created for executive level members of the company – detailing how revenue is looking YOY, and transaction amount too.

Developers can have their own dashboard that focuses on information such as site speed, domain look up time, page speed per device and browser. Whereas, someone within an acquisition position can have one tailored towards how each channel is performing and the amount of conversions per channel over time.

While nothing can replace a report that has detailed, in-depth commentary, being able to provide people within your business the ability to get the data that they want on demand is invaluable.

Summary

Google Analytics is an incredibly powerful and useful tool – and as such it often has many unknown and undiscovered little features, and hopefully this post has introduced you to just a few of these!

If you need help with your analytics, get in touch today!