Seven underrated Google Analytics features that boost performance

Google Analytics is an important web analytics tool from Google used in digital marketing.

Many digital marketers and website owners use it to track and measure the performance of their websites. There are a lot of Google Analytics features that perform different functions but are not used or known by many marketers.

Let’s have a look at seven underrated Google Analytics features that boost performance.

1. Custom alert

When you’re just starting out and have very little traffic or conversion volume, it’s easy to keep your eye. But when you’re scaling and testing many different acquisition channels and tracking many different events and goals, it gets a bit harder to remain notified of big changes. Custom alerts play their part here by helping you automatically get notified of any notable trends in your data. 

This Google Analytics feature can be located when you log into your report and tap on the ‘customization’ drop-down menu. When set up, you will be alerted through emails when there is a change in your traffic or behavior of your website.

This could be on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. For a beginner who is curious to grow his traffic or conversion, it is simple to keep your eye on it. Another crucial function of a custom alert is to automatically notify you of trends in your data.

Moreover, custom alerts track and inform you in real-time about the events on your website which can be positive or negative. The advantage here is that you can fix any negative development before it becomes obvious. To create a custom alert:

1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. Navigate to your view.
3. Open Reports.
4. Click CUSTOMIZATION > Custom Alerts.
5. Then Click Manage custom alerts.
6. Click + NEW ALERT.
7. Alert name: Enter a name for the alert.

2. Channel groupings

It is the super underrated feature of Google Analytics. Channel Groupings are rule-based groupings of your traffic sources.  Thi feature makes it easy to manage the traffic source to your website. This feature is on default on your analytics report and it organizes and groups your common source of traffic. 

For instance, you launched an ad campaign on Facebook, and Instagram as social media tactics to grow your small business, the channels grouping will allow you to compare and analyze the performance of each of the traffic channels. This is best for a marketer to want to be more specific with his traffic channel, you can create custom channels grouping and apply it to your report.

Its effect will be seen in how your data displays but won’t change the data itself. To make use of channels grouping on your Google Analytics, when you sign in to your report and locate admin at the bottom left. Click on it and you will list the features which channel groupings are one of.

The channels in the Default Channel Grouping meet the needs of most Analytics users, but if you have specific analysis requirements and want to label your traffic in other ways, you can:

• Create a Custom Channel Grouping (user level).
• Create a new Channel Grouping (view level).
• Edit the Default Channel Grouping (view level).

When you create a Custom Channel Grouping at the user level or create a new Channel Grouping in a view, you:

• Can immediately select it in reports.
• Can apply it retroactively and see historical data classified by your new channel definitions.
• Change how reports display your data, without changing the data itself.

When you edit the Default Channel Grouping for a view, you:

• Permanently change the raw data for new sessions by altering how Analytics labels incoming traffic. All sessions that occur after you edit the Default Channel Grouping are labelled according to your updated channel definitions.
• Can’t apply your new channel definitions retroactively, so the historical Channel Grouping of traffic won’t change.

3. Behavior flow

When an user visits a site they navigate through different pages to find their desired product or information. The Behavior Flow report visualizes the path users traveled from one page or Event to the next. This report can help you discover what content keeps users engaged with your site. The Behavior Flow report can also help identify potential content issues.

The behavior flow of your site simply displays the node, the connections to pages on your website, and exit. After consuming your content, do your audiences click on another link to learn more? Or do they bounce because they aren’t satisfied? This increases your bounce rate and a clear indication that you need to work on that particular content.

Use the Behavior Flow report to investigate how engaged users are with your content and to identify potential content issues. The Behavior Flow can answer questions like:

• Did users go right from product pages to checkout without any additional shopping?
• Is there an event that is always triggered first? Does it lead users to more events or more pages?
• Are there paths through your site that are more popular than others, and if so, are those the paths that you want users to follow?

To access the Behavior Flow report:

1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. Navigate to your view.
3. Open Reports.
4. Select Behavior > Behavior Flow.

4. Ecommerce tracking

To make life easy for ecommerce business owners Google Analytics has this amazing feature which is known as Ecommerce tracking. Google Analytics ecommerce tracking is a feature through which you can track ecommerce data (like sales amount, number of orders, billing location, average order value, etc) of a website/mobile app in Google Analytics.

As a merchant, you’ll want to know where your high-paying customers come from, how they interact with the products you have in your store, and which product converts more.

With the knowledge of this, you can identify the location of customers that make you smile when you remember the number of sales you have made, the products they like, and things to fix to continue to be ahead of your competitors. To see Ecommerce data in your Analytics reports, you need to:

• Enable Ecommerce for each view in which you want to see data.
• Add code to your site to collect the ecommerce data and send it to Analytics. To complete this task, you need to be comfortable editing HTML and coding in JavaScript, or have help from an experienced web developer.

To enable this feature, You need to enable Ecommerce for each view in which you want to see the data.

1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. Click Admin, and navigate to the view you want.
3. In the VIEW column, click Ecommerce Settings.
4. Set Enable Ecommerce to ON.
5. Click Save.

5. Demographic

Most of the marketers don’t realize the importance of analyzing the demography of users who visit their websites. Demographics and interests data provides information about the age and gender of your users, along with the interests they express through their online travel and purchasing activities. Before you can see or work with Demographics and Interests data in Analytics, you need to:

1. Enable Advertising Reporting Features for your property
2. Enable the Demographics and Interests reports for the property

You can use them to make decisions that can improve the performance of your website. Take, for instance, you run a small business website on women’s clothing, and your demography metrics show that 80% of your visitors in the last month were male within the age range of 18 and 24.

Demographics and interests data may only be available for a subset of your users, and may not represent the overall composition of your traffic: Analytics cannot collect the demographics and interests information if the DoubleClick cookie or the Device Advertising ID is not present, or if no activity profile is included.

6. Site speed report

Speed is one of the key factors Google considers when ranking your website. It even became more obvious with the introduction of Accelerated Mobile Page, AMP. Not paying attention to this one of the SEO mistakes you make. Google Analytics tracks the load time of your web pages.

The aim is to give you reasons to learn how to improve the speed of your website. A web page that loads slowly is a turn off for your audiences. Nobody wants to wait for a long time for a page to load when there are many web pages competing for their attention.

It can increase the bounce rate of your website or even cost you sales if you sell online. Site speed is an indicator of a healthy site. The Site Speed reports show how quickly users are able to see and interact with content. You can identify areas that need improvement, and then track the extent of those improvements. The Site Speed reports measure three aspects of latency:

• Page-load time for a sample of pageviews on your site. You can view the data across different dimensions to see how quickly your pages loaded from a variety of perspectives (e.g., in different browsers, in different countries). Data is available in the Page Timings report.
• Execution speed or load time of any discrete hit, event, or user interaction that you want to track (e.g., how quickly images load, response time to button clicks). Data is available in the User Timings report.
• How quickly the browser parses the document and makes it available for user interaction. No additional configuration is required to see this data. Data is available in the Page Timings report, on the DOM Timings subtabs.

To see Site Speed data no changes to the tracking code are necessary to see data in the Page Timings and Speed Suggestions reports. The User Timings report requires additional setup. To see the Site Speed reports:

1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. Navigate to your view.
3. Open Reports.
4. Select Behavior > Site Speed.

7. UTM parameters

UTM simply stands for Urchin Tracking Modules. They are codes you add at the end of your URL. This is crucial if you run ad campaigns for your business. By adding campaign parameters to the destination URLs you use in your ad campaigns, you can collect information about the overall efficacy of those campaigns, and also understand where the campaigns are more effective. 

For example, your Summer Sale campaign might be generating lots of revenue, but if you’re running the campaign in several different social apps, you want to know which of them is sending you the customers who generate the most revenue. Or if you’re running different versions of the campaign via email, video ads, and in-app ads, you can compare the results to see where your marketing is most effective.

For every user who clicked on the URL, the parameter is sent to Google  Analytics. The goal is to identify the platform in which the campaign performed better and intensify your strategy on it to make more sales next time. To see the Campaigns reports:

1. Sign in to Google Analytics.
2. Navigate to your view.
3. Open Reports.
4. Select Acquisition > Campaigns.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is a great tool for making analysis easy and intuitive. But it turns out there are many important features lurking beneath the surface that are incredibly valuable and barely used.

The performance of your website should be of utmost importance to you as a digital marketer,  small business or someone who earns passive income online. Google Analytics has all it takes to keep your site healthy all the time.