So you’ve just gotten access to the shiny new version of Google Analytics? Here are the 27 essential features of the best analytics software money can buy (it’s free, of course), and how to utilize them to your advantage.
1. Setting Goals – Just like your guidance counselor told you about your career, if you don’t set goals, Google Analytics isn’t going to take you very far. If your business is e-commerce, your goal is probably a sale. If your business is newsletters, your goal is a registration. Once you have your business goals setup in Analytics, you are able to unleash vast amounts of data about what’s working and what’s not in your marketing efforts. Lot’s more about goals in the remaining 26 essentials …
2. Comparing Date Ranges – In the old Analytics, there was no easy way to compare how your site is doing relative to a different point in time. Today’s upgrade includes new capabilities that allow you to compare two different time periods and chart them immediately.
3. Deep Geographic Data – You can now see how your site is performing in a variety of metrics by city or country. For example, users on my site in Chicago spent 64.25% more time on my site last month, while the number of new visitors from San Francisco decreased by 9.33%.
4. Local Conversion Data - If you setup conversion goals, you can also see how well your site is converting in different locales. For e-commerce businesses, this means you can adjust your offers based on how they are performing geographically, much like brick and mortar retails have done for years. You can also of course buy geographically targeted AdWords for hot regions.
5. Funnel Visualization – This is a fancy way of saying “where do users bail out of the registration process?” By knowing this information, you can attempt to fix the parts that seem to be scaring users away.
6. Navigation Summary – This report shows how users maneuver through your site. For example, you can see where users go from the homepage, or how most of them get to your contact page. If people aren’t following your desired navigation, it means you probably need to re-arrange some things on your page to entice users click the right spots.
7. Complete AdWords Integration – If you advertise through AdWords, Analytics will provide you on data on each campaign, group, and keyword. Specifically, you can look at each of these areas and see the number of displays, clicks, the cost, conversion, and if it results in an e-commerce transaction or another defined goal. It will then calculate your margin (revenue versus the cost of acquiring the customer).
8. Customize Your Dashboard – The old “Executive Summary” has been replaced with a totally customizable Dashboard where any report can be added and arranged via drag and drop functionality. For example, if you want to see how a particular goal is converting each time you login, you can move this report to the Dashboard for quick access by clicking the “Add to Dashboard” link.
9. Site Overlay – This feature opens up your site and using data from Analytics, allows you to mouse over your links and see how much they are being clicked on and whether they ultimately lead to goal conversion. It’s quite useful if you’re more of the “visual learning” type 
10. Email Reports – If you work in marketing for a big company, chances are your superiors prefer to receive reports in email rather than login and track things down in your analytics program. One of the key new features of Analytics is the ability to setup reports, and schedule when and to whom they will automatically be sent.
11. Have Minions Do Your Work – However, if you’re lucky enough to have subordinates, you can set them up with read-only privileges so they can login to Analytics and run reports for you. You can also set colleagues up as Administrators if you want to share the power.
12. Let’s Bounce – The bounce rate tells you how many people come to your site and leave without going any further. Analytics will let you view your bounce rate over time, and see how it varies from page to page. For example, if you have multiple landing pages, those with a higher bounce rate should probably get the axe.
13. Keyword Source – Knowing how customers find you is one of the most important questions in sales and marketing. Google Analytics tells you what search keywords people are using to find your site. If certain keywords are proving hot, you might want to consider catering keyword buys, content, and offers to them. This feature can also alert you to totally bizarre news and trends; for example, the #3 keyword on my site last month was “pinoy sex scandal”. Go figure!
14. Referring Sites – This is a feature of any basic analytics program, but with Google Analytics you can not only see traffic, but goal conversion on the sites sending you traffic. Thus, you can get a read not only on the number of visitors a link partner is sending, but the quality of the traffic.
15. Browser Capabilities – Does your site not support Safari? Do your .pngs look crappy in IE? Better make sure you’re not alienating a bunch of your users. Analytic’s Browser Capabilities feature let’s you see what browsers people use to view your site, and again, let’s you drill down to see how well users of different browsers convert against your goals. If those 0.57% of remaining Netscape users are converting like girls at a James Blunt concert, better make sure your site supports them!
16. Connection Speeds Data – Similar to #15, connection speed data helps you determine how to prioritize your site’s design. If you still have a fair amount of people on dialup or isdn, you may want to make your site a little less load heavy than if your site is all broadband users.
17. Languages – Unfortunately, most sites don’t have the knowledge, resources, or time to publish in multiple languages, but this report will tell you the preferred language (as determined by computer settings) of your visitors.
18. Exclude Internal Traffic – Chances are you and your employees spend more time on your site than anyone else, which can skew your data if it’s not excluded. To make sure it’s not counted, Google lets you filter out traffic from IP addresses that you specify. For the unscrupulous, this filter can of course be turned off when talking to potential advertisers, investors, and the press
19. Visitor Loyalty – How often to your visitors come back? Reducing the percentage of people that only visit once should be one of your constant priorities, and Analytics let’s you track this piece of information over a specified date range.
20. Visitor Type Contribution – This nifty little dynamic pie chart tells you the contribution your returning visitors are making versus new ones. Not surprisingly, my testing showed that my return visitors load more pages and spend more time on my site, but they bounce less than new visitors. Again, data like this can be invaluable in helping you prioritize improvements around your site.
21. Search Engine Traffic – Knowing which search engines are sending the most traffic and how well its converting can help you optimize your spend and SEO efforts. While Google will likely provide you the most traffic, if Yahoo or Ask converts better, you might want to see how you can get more visitors from them.
22. Top Content – For each page on your site, Google Analytics will tell you how many times it has been viewed how much time the average visitor stays there, and how many people leave your site after visiting. If you have a popular page that everyone leaves after viewing, you should think about adding something attention grabbing on it.
23. Use the “About this Report” Link – Any analytics program takes a while to master, and Google’s offering is no different. Click the “About this Report” link on the sidebar of any page to learn more about how to use what you’re looking at.
24. Top Exit Pages – Knowing your trouble spots tells you where you need to improve, and Analytics lets you see your top exit points over a specified date range.
25. Network Location – If the day comes where you need to pay ISPs for the right to serve web content to their users (you can kiss 99% of web sites goodbye …), Analytics has a report to tell you whose palm you should grease first should you want to try and remain in business.
26. Report Finder – If you’ve been using the old Analytics, Google has setup the “Report Finder” to help you find old reports in the upgraded system. You can access it on the left hand nav under “Help Resources”.
27. Export to PDF – For a nice clean file with Analytics data, you are now able to export reports into Adobe PDF format.
Google Analytics is a powerful piece of software when used properly, and comes for the affordable price of $0. The goal for Google is of course to increase AdWords spending; a goal many of today’s enhancements will help them achieve.
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