10 Must Know Google Analytics Tips

Create goals
Goals will help you to determine the success of your website; use goals to measure how often users complete specific actions on your website that contribute to the success of your business. You also have the option of assigning a monetary amount to the conversions.

Implement event tracking
Add event tracking to collect data about interactions with your website content. Events are user interactions with content that can be tracked independently from a webpage or a screen load. This can be pages, external links, PDF downloads and form submissions.

Custom alerts
Google Analytics provides a way to automatically track variations in key metrics for your website. Custom alerts monitor traffic and goals and notify you of issues. For example, email or SMS alerts can be sent when triggers are activated, acting as your contingency to ensure action is taken should traffic drop

Demographics
Activate the demographics report to understand your audience composition in terms of gender, age and interests. This very powerful data at your fingertips will help you to understand the kind of creative content to develop, media buys to make, and audiences to develop.

Google Tag Manager
This free tool makes it easy for marketers to add and update website tags, including conversion tracking, site analytics and remarketing. With just a few clicks, and without needing to edit your website code, you are able to streamline your implementation.

Cross domain tracking
If you have a subdomain, don’t forget to implement cross-domain tracking to maintain the original source. This feature makes it possible for analytics to see sessions on two related sites (such as an eCommerce site and a separate shopping cart site) as a single session.

Filters
Filters can be used to include and exclude subsets of traffic, and set up your filters and self-referrals to limit and modify the data that is included in a view. For example, you can use filters to exclude traff ic from internal IP addresses, self-referrals payment gateways and referral spam.

404 pages
Tracking errors is also important to monitor the health of your site and keep track of signals indicating a negative user experience. Tracking 404 (missing) pages to identify them in a custom report and actively how many users experienced this is crucial to actively cleanse and redirect such pages.

Funnel tracking
Measuring conversions is crucial for any online brand. Simply measuring the final conversion point doesn’t tell the full story for many sites. Setting up funnel tracking highlights the steps a visitor needs to take before reaching the conversion. You can see where roadblocks are and optimise your funnel better

Ecommerce tracking
This allows you to measure the transactions and revenue your website generates. You typically implement it once the user has completed the checkout process. You can then correlate sales data with site usage data like sessions, bounce rate and traffic source/medium.

10 TOOLS TO HELP ACHIEVE SEO SUCCESS

GT Metrix

gtmetrix.com
Test your website’s speed and performance and review helpful recommendations to improve it. This completely free tool analyses your website’s performance and provides actionable recommendations on how to optimise it for both your users and its trustworthiness in search

Google Analytics

support.google.com/analytics
Analyse data from all touchpoints in one place, and measure your advertising ROI with deeper insights and understanding of your customer experience. Understanding your site and users will enable you to better evaluate the performance of your content, products and more.

Google AdWords

www.google.co.uk/adwords
Advertise locally – or globally – and attract customers with the products that they’re searching for by using the Google AdWords service. Free tools such as the keyword planner help you to build Search Network campaigns by finding keyword ideas and estimating how they may perform.

Optimizely

www.optimizely.com
The world’s leading experience optimisation platform provides website and mobile A/B testing and personalisation. The technology provides Optimizely with the ability to deliver continuous experimentation and personalisation across websites, mobile apps and connected devices.

Screaming Frog

www.screamingfrog.co.uk
Test your site’s crawlability and find errors with the Screaming Frog SEO Spider. This ingenious website crawler allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key onsite elements to analyse onsite SEO. The key elements include broken links, audit redirects, Metadata and duplications.

AHRefs

ahrefs.com
Ahrefs is a useful tool for SEO marketing and backlink research, with the biggest and most accurate database of live backlinks. Review your total number of backlinks, diff erent referring IPs, class C blocks, unique domains, and the types of backlinks your website has.

AWR Cloud

www.awrcloud.com
AWR Cloud is a web-based rank tracking and reporting service, capable of delivering localised rankings with pinpoint accuracy. The service is suitable for anyone who is looking for reliable and secure data, competitor rankings and comprehensive graphs over time.

Copyscape

 www.copyscape.com
 Ensuring that other people are not duplicating your content is crucial. Copyscape is a free plagiarism checker that helps you to source and review these potential issues. The software enables you to detect duplicate content and check if your own content is original.

Browser Stack

www.browserstack.com
Test your website for cross browser compatibility on real browsers with instant access to multiple desktop and mobile browsers. Browserstack off ers the ability to perform live, web-based browser testing in one place and review how they render the content on your site.

Survey Monkey

www.surveymonkey.co.uk
Ask qualitative questions to understand what users think of your site with Survey Monkey. This free tool enables you to publish online surveys in minutes, and turn instincts into insights. This means you will get the data you need, so you can skip the guesswork and make smarter decisions.