3 new Google Analytics features that you should be using already

Posted by Ian Howie on 16 December 2010

Analytics is “the science of analysis”. Website analytics tools like Google Analytics and Wordtracker Strategizer provide the ways and means to analyse your website data. However, somewhere along the line, some users and analytics vendors seem to have focused more on data and less on analysis. Ian Howie looks at some new Google Analytics features that are helping to re-address the balance.

In the past few months Google have relaunched three powerful analysis tools: Analytics Intelligence, In-Page Analytics,and Weighted Sort.

All three tools aid data analysis by cutting through the mass of stats, straight to the gold dust. By gold dust, I mean the key insights into how people are interacting with your website and how to use those insights to improve your web pages to increase conversion.

Let's look at all three tools in a bit more detail.

1. Analytics Intelligence

At Ad:Tech New York, Google announced the Major Contributors feature, a very useful upgrade to the Intelligence reports.

Google Analytics Intelligence reports provide both automatic and custom alerts when there are significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics over daily, weekly and monthly periods.

The new Major Contributors feature gives you a detailed report when a custom alert triggers. So rather than just seeing one metric for your custom alert, you’ll now see all the major traffic sources, landing pages, time on page and other metrics that contributed to the alert.

2. In-Page Analytics

In-Page Analytics replaces the Site Overlay report – a feature that never seemed to fully work. In-Page Analytics is perfect if you get a little intimidated when you see rows of data.

By putting the statistical information next to web pages and including information about where on the page visitors clicked, In-Page Analytics makes it much easier to gain insights on your site's design and usability.

3. Weighted Sort

This is a huge step forward for Google Analytics as they realize that website data needs to be weighted. For instance, a page with 10,000 visits and a high bounce rate is much more important to you than a page that has had ten visits but has the lowest overall bounce rate (low bounce rates are good). If you lower the bounce rate by 1% on the page with 10,000 visits, you’ll experience a big difference to your site. If you focus on fixing the page with ten visits, you will have spent a lot time for very little reward.

The Weighted Sort appears when you click on Bounce Rate on most reports. When you enable Weighted Sort it applies an algorithm, which takes into consideration the number of visits for each page, bringing to the forefront the items with the most visits and the highest Bounce Rates.

Expect to see more new Google Analytics Insight features soon.

Try Wordtracker Strategizer free for 7 days

Working with your Google Analytics account, Wordtracker Strategizer will help transform your search marketing from guesswork into science - from single keywords into keyword niches.

With Strategizer you can:

• Work at the scale required for profit by targeting keyword niches

• Target the keyword niches proven to deliver the best response to your site

• Target the keyword niches you know you can beat the competition for

• Target the keyword niches you know you can get more results for

• Discover the market size (the number of searches) for each target keyword niche

• Know how much effort each keyword niche should get (no niche is too small)

• Take the guesswork out of your search marketing

• Plan your action-led SEO strategies in minutes

• Track target keywords Google rankings

Please note that for Wordtracker's Strategizer to work you must have Google Analytics installed on a website that already receives organic non-paid traffic.

Take the free trial