15+ Uses Of Google Analytics You Might Not Know

When someone mentions Google Analytics the only thing that comes to your mind is your blog “visits” or “views”. But there are more stuffs inside it which you may not have tried. Google Analytics is a life saver! Learn 15+ uses of Google Analytics which you might not know below.

1. Track Your RSS Feed Clicks

Do you want to know how many people are visiting your blog via RSS Feeds?

Go to your Feedburner Dashboard, now select the title of your RSS feed.

Then choose the option “Configure Stats” under the Analyze Tab.

Tick the options that say “Item views”, “Item click” and “Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics” and save it.

Now this tip will help you to analyze the click counts and the exact source from where that click may be originated. You can also find whether Google Reader subscribers are more engaged than your My Yahoo! Subscribers.

Use the “All Traffic Sources” and “Campaigns” sections to track the traffic from clicks inside your RSS feed.

2. Display Google Analytics Stats On Your Website

If you want to make your blog’s traffic public you can make use of Google Analytics to display it. You just need to make your Google Analytics Report “Public” in order to proceed.

We are going to use a service called SeeTheStats to access your Google Analytics account. Then choose a profile of the blog/site you want to make the data public.

This service will automatically update your site’s traffic based on your current statistics.

Check Tutorial: Display Google Analytics Stats On Your Website

3. Track all the Missing Pages on your Site

You should not entertain 404 error pages as they are a burden to your site’s reputation. You should track them real-time and fix it as soon as possible. Having many 404 error pages or Not Found pages would reduce your site’s value.

By using Google Analytics you can easily tweak the JavaScript code to enable tracking of missing pages so that it can generate a virtual pageview in your Analytics reports that will not provide you with the URL of the missing page and the URL of the referring site.

Check Tutorial: Track 404 Errors on your Website as they Happen!

Also Check : Google Analytics Help – Troubleshooting tracking

4. Track Your Gmail Messages

Google has a cool feature for Gmail called “Analytics for Gmail usage”. Using this you can easily see the basic visitor stats, length of visits, geographic location, browser details and so on.

Check Tutorial : Google Analytics For Gmail Usage

5. Google Analytics “Visitor Counter” Badge

There is a WordPress plugin called Google Analyticator. This is similar to the Feedburner count badge, this one displays the number of visitors or number of pageviews for the blog.

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

Google Analyticator uses the Google Analytics API to prepare a stats widget that shows unique visits and views about yesterday’s visitors on your site.

6. See Your AdSense Earnings Data

You can integrate your Google AdSense account with Google Analytics. You should really try this so that you can know where the users who are making you the most money are coming from.

How this combination can actually benefit you?

• Discover untapped markets. You can make use of the geographies reports to determine which regions are under-represented in your site’s user base. Optimize your site’s content to attract more of these under-represented users.
• Drive high-earning traffic to your site. Using the ‘Referring sites’ report, you can determine where the users who are making you the most money are coming from. Focus your efforts on getting traffic from these sources.
• Delve deeper into AdSense reports. Use the visualization feature to look at trends in your site’s AdSense performance over time, or by time of day.

Source : Inside Adsense Blog

7. Tracking Clicks in Emails

Now we are going to see the “click tracking” features of Google Analytics. Using this you can track the clicks in emails. Using this you can also track clicks on links that points to external websites and track document downloads like MS Word, PPT, MP3 files, etc.

You can try the Google Analytics URL Builder for this. Type your Website URL (or blog post URL), Campaign source as your blog name, Campaign Medium as Email, and Campaign Name as your Blog Post Title.

This is the sample URL after tagging :

https://hellboundbloggers.com/?utm_source=HellBound-Bloggers&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=protect-webcam

To see how this will work, go to Traffic Sources | Campaign and select the campaign name which you have generated before.

Check Tutorial: Tracking Clicks in Emails Using Google Analytics

8. Check Your Site Loading Speed

Google Analytics quite recently added a new feature for checking your site speed and page loading time, awesome isn’t it? It is not an automatic upgrade, so you need to tweak your Google Analytics default tracking code to enable this feature. Now it will be easy to improve your site’s loading speed.

Add Site Speed Code in Google Analytics

To get the new site speed report, add the following line to your analytics code

_gaq.push([‘_trackPageLoadTime’]);

Now this is how your code will look like this [sample code] :

This will be really useful for webmasters and bloggers to detect which landing pages are slow. Also you can find the cause and fix it earlier since Google considers site loading speed as a key factor in SERPs.

9. Negotiate Your Salary

If you are a SEO guy and you deserve a salary increase then you can use check this following salary negotiation tip for for getting a raise. You should have access to your company’s Google Analytics account and you should have done a good job. 😛

Check Tutorial : Pitstop Media

10. Understanding Users’ Navigation Pattern

You can also use Google Analytics for understanding users’ navigation patterns. You can easily analyze how visitors arrived at a particular web page, and also it shows where visitors went from that particular web page. This will be really useful when you want to do site navigation optimization for a particular page.

Check Tutorial: How to Use the Google Analytics Navigation Summary Report

11. Track Visitors to Your Facebook Fan Page

For this you need to use FBGAT – Facebook Google Analytics tracker. It is a free and opensource tool created by Webdigi to work around Facebook’s Javascript restriction on Facebook fan pages which prevents Google Analytics from working correctly.

After generating the code, use Static FBML Facebook application for adding HTML codes to your Facebok fan pages.

Check Tutorial : Social Media Examiner

12. Optimize your AdWords investment even more effectively

Google Analytics and Google Adwords can do wonders. Regardless of any investment situation, you can always count on this optimization trick. Google Analytics specializes in providing you with the metrics you need to make informed advertising decisions.

By linking your Google AdWords and Analytics accounts, you can optimize your AdWords investment even more effectively with increased trackability and customized reporting. Check out this short video and learn more about the benefits of linking your accounts.

13. Track Your Blog Comments

Tracking comments in Google Analytics will let you know what drives people to comment on your blog. Google Analytics can become one of the useful tools to track comments.

You need to setup a goal in Analytics for doing this. Login to your account, click “Edit” beside your profile and “Add new goal”. You want to use URL destination as your goal type and in the goal URL, use exact match for “/tracking/comment-submit” (without quotation marks).

Check Tutorial : Optimisation Beacon

14. Track When People Print Your Webpages

Ok, so you have enabled “Print this article” option but you are not confused whether readers are actually printing the articles? Now here is another simple tweak to identify whether they are. Normally you can add an invisible tracking image only in the printed version of your blog articles. So whenever a user prints it through any method, the tracking image will be downloaded on their computer. By this you can easily track whether they have printed or not.

By using Google Analytics you can track easily. Just tweak the normal Google Analytics tracking code. After tweaking the tracking code, log in to your Google Analytics dashboard, go to Content –> Site Content –> Pages and set /print/ as the search filter. Now you can see the reports.

Check Tutorial: Use Google Analytics to Track When People Print your Web Pages

15. Use Google Analytics to track a Nonprofit goal

If you are running a Non-profit organization then you can use Google Analytics to track your Nonprofit goal easily. Conversions you can track:

How many people are hearing and reacting to your message?
• How many people are visiting your site when you post something on Facebook, and what do they do on your site?
• How much information do they read?
• Are there better ways to get your message out?

Check: How a Nonprofit Can Best Use Google Analytics

16. Specific Event Tracking

Created fancy buttons and call-to-action stuffs? Ever wonder people clicked on it? Try Event Tracking then.

With “Event Tracking” feature you can do the following :

• When someone clicks on a particular image or link.
• When the visitor starts to fill out a form but doesn’t complete it.
• When your visitor plays and pauses a video.
• What people are typing into the search box of your website.

Reference: 3 Google Analytics Features You’re Not Using (yet)

Have you tried any of these cool uses? Do you know any other use of Google Analytics not mentioned here? Kindly share them in the comments below.