Must Known Google Analytics Features

Most web marketers' experiences with Google Analytics start and end with its basic Audience and Acquisitions features, but the truly successful know that Google Analytics offers so much more to help maximize a site's performance. Of course, some of these tools are more useful than others; while some are just indispensable. Among this latter plethora of must known Google Analytics features are the following three:

Funnel Visualization

This tool gives you a picture of the paths your visitors take through your site, from the moment they land on a page of your site until the moment they leave. From these paths, you can determine how effectively your site is organized to direct your visitors down your desired funnels. You can see which links are most popular and which aren't getting the hits you'd hoped for. You can see from which pages people are leaving your site rather than continuing to click a call to action or, best yet, make a conversion. Then with this information you can readjust your site's layout accordingly. Since Funnel Visualization reports are built on your conversion goals, you can find these reports listed under the Conversions dropdown in the Goals category.

Weighted Sort

Simply sorting your performance table by bounce rate or page views alone gives you an incomplete picture of your website's performance. To fully understand how dynamic your pages are at engaging visitors and eliciting your desired call to action, you want to compare traffic and bounce rates to one another. In this way, you'll discover which pages are receiving the most traffic right before customers leave your site. From here you can analyze why visitors are leaving the site from this page and make any adjustments necessary to redirect them to where you want them to go instead. To use the Google Analytics Weighted Sorting feature, just click on the Sort Type drop-down menu and selected Weighted. Then look at the Bounce Rate table and you'll see listed first those pages with both the highest bounce rates and page views, thereby showing you where your attention can serve you the best.

Trackbacks

We all know that one of the fundamental sources of traffic for a website these days is social media. Google Analytics Trackbacks feature allows you to analyze your social media marketing effectiveness by seeing how many links to your pages are out there in cyberspace. More, you can see how much traffic each of these inbound links is driving to your site. This information can help you identify which websites and individuals are likely targets of future campaigns. Your site's Trackbacks can be found in the Acquisitions drop-down menu under the Social heading.

Adding these three must know Google Analytics features alone to your arsenal of the web marketing optimization tools can go a long way toward helping you maximize your efforts at reaching conversions from each and every page of your website.

Charles Atkin is a blogger, He currently writes for a boutique search engine marketing company called Saba Seo, A trusted San Diego Seo Company.