How do you properly end five days straight of SXSW Interactive fun? With a full day of Google Analytics action! That's right. Last month, I attended an Analytics training session and learned more about the extended capabilities of tracking with Google Analytics. As some of you know, I am already certified as a Google AdWords consultant for Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and plan on adding Analytics certification in the near future.
If you don't have tracking in place, get Google Analytics. Why? Well…
- It's free and easy to use.
- It's important to understand your visitors.
- And it's a powerful tool with any and all information about your website traffic.
Google Analytics lets you delve into where visitors are coming from, how often they come, if they are interacting with the site or not, and so much more. For starters, set up goals to measure newsletter sign ups, account registrations, or purchases. This will give you more insight as to how many visitors are converting and a measurement in terms of ROI.
If you already have tracking in place, then try your hand at regular expressions. This basically gives you more control over data through the use of wildcards, anchors and other special characters; you can filter, specify, and match any data that you are tracking. More information about regular expressions can be found here.
Going back to setting goals, say you have 3 pages that needs to be tied together into one goal but have other pages that you don’t need:
Need
www.example.com/documents/red
www.example.com/documents/blue
www.example.com/documents/yellow
Don't Need
www.example.com/documents/orange
www.example.com/documents/green
This is where regular expressions come in to play. In order to measure the 3 URLs above as one goal while excluding the others, we would use the expression below:
/documents/(red|blue|yellow)
This expression is saying "get me data that just matches red, blue, or yellow in the documents directory." You can also test and make sure the regular expression works by going to Content > Top Content in your Analytics account and pasting the expression into the 'Find Page' search box at the bottom.
If you have any questions about how we're using analytics to make our clients smarter feel free to drop me a line at vtran at vmfoundry.com.
