5) Create Custom URLs for easy tracking of campaigns. Google offers free custom URL creation tool – to enable you to track various campaigns , specifically email or SMS marketing campaigns.
Use this tool to create your customer campaign URLs, make sure to give your campaign a unique name so that you can easily identify the source on your GA account. You can monitor campaign performance, behavior flow and conversion rates of traffic coming from these sources on GA.
a) Create Goals. Its important that you set up your goals on Google Analytics. Often ignore and neglected.
Path : Admin > Goals > New Goal to set up your first goal.
Choose from many templates to define goals for your business. You may choose from options like thank you page URL or time spent on specific pages and so on. Make sure you chose a goal very specific to your business. Once you fix your goals, its easy for you to comeback anytime and glance through the report to say how many goals (Conversions or download or events) been achieved.
b) Customize your Dashboards. : Important because a customized dashboard will save a lot of your time every time you visit GA to see data and generate a consistent report which you can compare. A customized dashboard will present data specific to your business. Hence spend little time in the beginning to set up your custom dashboard and save lot of your time.
Select your opening template, you can add as many widgets as you would like, but keep in mind not to clutter and be specific for the parameters you would like to see in the dashboard.
c) Set Custom Alerts. We are too busy to check our GA account regularly for any unusual activities. But don’t let them go unseen. Custom alerts come as your savior.
You can apply the alert to All Traffic or for few segments of your traffic, and set the alert to go off when a certain metric rises or falls dramatically within a given period of time. The alert will send you an email or text message when the condition is met.
Segmenting your audiences is a good practice as it will help you analyze how your individual target segment is behaving. You might have multiple target audiences coming to your website, and it’s important to distinguish between them.
Path: Admin and select Segments to build customized segment.
Give unique names to your segments. Create segments using age group, gender, language, location, technology used to access your site, traffic sources, and user behavior.
e) Stop Tracking Yourself:- As a marketer you keep on visiting your site/pages more often that your actual visitors. This is great, but your visits could potentially skew your traffic information on Google Analytics. Especially when your site is new and you are testing various traffic generation methods. Hence you need to exclude yourself. To do that set up a filter under the “Admin” panel.
Path : Admin- All Filters – Add New Filter and exclude traffic from your IP address. Google your IP address if you don’t have it handy.
Contributor – This article is contributed by Prativa Satpathy .