GA Checklist: Spicy Implementations

One of the coolest feature in Google Analytics is Site Search tracking. If your website provides a search functionality than people are using it.

By activating it you get to see a lot of great data about what people are searching, not to say a lot of ideas of keywords which you can use for your SEO campaign. So my advice is to go and set it up now.

Filters

Since the launch of Advanced Segments Filters haven’t been used so much, but they can still be valuable. What’s really important about them is that the technical difference between segments and filters is that the first are applied on visit level while the second at pageview level (more differences between the two). Ok, ok, being real time and working on historical data makes segments the best ever. . Here are the most common filters I’ve met and I still recommend as advanced segments can’t help you here:

• exclude your own traffic out from the reports of the website;
• view full referrer links from the sites that send you traffic;
• view subdomains data full paths in your reports;
• get the keywords users searched when clicking on your AdWords ads

Custom Variables

On a recent platform update Google introduced the possibility of defining up to 5 custom variables. Why would you want to do that? Well, do you think it’s right to treat the same returning customers with new visitors? If not, than custom variables are here to help you. All you need to know is to identify the returning customers (when they login, based on cookies, etc) and apply a custom var for them. Google Analytics will allow to create advanced segments for the custom vars. Most likely for using custom variables you will need a technical friend to help with the implementation. I highly recommend them.

Tracking outbound links and other hacks. Stephane Hamel and friends decided to offer open source code for helping website owners in tracking outbound links, pdf or trial download. You can find details about it on his blog.

Real Bounce Rate

My last bonus suggestion comes as shameless self promotion for the Real Bounce Rate hack for Google Analytics. It will allow you to get reports on the real bounce rate, that is of users spending less than 10 seconds on your website. All the users who get to spend more, even if they don’t visit another page, they will not be considered as bouncing.

I guess this is it for the series on Google Analytics Implementation Checklist. Is there anything else you would like me to add to it?

This article is part of the Google Analytics Implementation Checklist series. Here are the articles from the rest of the series:

• Implement the right tracking code and make sure you track your whole website
• Accuracy in tracking traffic sources
• Setting up goals, funnels and ecommerce tracking