Google Analytics Stuff

I’m here at PubCon learning about Google Analytics. Below is everything that I’ve learned!  Special thanks to Ashish Vij from Google for the demonstration on everything Google Analytics.  He’s really the king of this.  Keep in mind that implementation is king.  You need to make sure that you implement your data correctly.  You can’t make good decisions on bad data.  Re-directs can invoke havac.  If you see your own site as a big referral to your site, something is wrong.  You need to track where people are from.   Everyone has the same problems so don’t think that you’re the only one.  Mom and Pop shops have the same problems as Inc 500 customers.  Make sure that you take the time to set everything up properly.
Make sure you take the time to understand what you want and what answers you’re looking for.  Why implement Google Analytics if you really don’t know what you want.  Take the time to understand what it is you want to measure.  Tag and track everything.  Us URL builder to tag everything that you want to track.  You can tag everything.  You’re data is a whole lot more fun when you know what’s going on.  You can attribute your Facebook ads to this and track conversions.
Note: If you don’t tag your Facebook, Bing, or Yahoo ads. It will classify it as Facebook Organic, Bing Organic, Yahoo Organic.
Intelligence Events – you can use this to start knowing what changed in your website.  It will show you everything you need to know about changes in what happened yesterday vs what happened today.  You can create custom alerts to see and email you daily changes that are going on with what you’re doing.  This can help you also to know what searches and things are coming in that aren’t available on your site.  Google realized that people wanted a pacman shirt after 1000’s of people came to the store looking for a pacman shirt right after they put up the pacman on the main page.
Annotations are very powerful but easy to miss.  When you notice something on your account, you should annotate the change or what’s going on to save you time and grief in the future.
Goals are a cool concept in your Google Analytics, you can have events or clicking on a newsletter button. You can set a goal for time on site, or email submitted, basically anything you want.  You can set a goal funnel with where people came from and defined what and where they did.  You can actually see the before and after step for every step along the way.  You can see where in the funnel that people fell off.    Flow visualization helps with this.  It will show which sources they came from.  It will show them the path they came from to give you a visual view in the shopping cart or goal process.  It will tell you which browsers are best to convert from, mobile, tablet or anything you want.  This will help you understand the flow of traffic to a goal or conversion.  This will help you to optimize the computer vs a  mobile goal..
The visits flow will show you the data from where people came from.  You can tell which path they are taking.  In the future Google will show you when it’s going to convert and when the best time to connect and sell to a customer.
Use top exit pages to figure out where to start testing.  You know where they are leaving, if they have a 95% exit rate, you are wasting your money.  Google will show you your top 15 pages where people are exiting for.  Use this to your advantage and change those pages up so that people will stay on your site.
Implement site search to see if you’re missing content.  This will help you to see content that you’re missing.
Make sure that you are using the newest version of Google Analytics, they will be taking out and moonlighting the oldest versions into the newest version.  If you need help or have something that you need in Google Analytics you can go and suggest them at  http://goo.gl/5BjQS  Make sure that you mention that you were here at PubCon and they’ll try and get them up asap!