How To: 5 Little Known Tools of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is by far the most powerful free tool available to track website statistics. Once the tracking code is added to your content, you have a wealth of information at your fingertips including common statistics such as visits, page views and bounce rates. However, it’s some of the lesser-known features that provide the most useful information.

1. Filtering Your IP Address
   It’s very important for your data to be accurate. This means filtering data from internal traffic coming from your staff. To do this, you need to find your static IP address and then create a filter. This allows Google to differentiate between internal visits from your staff and outside traffic from your community.
   
   Since city and county websites often act as an information hub for employees, filtering out your static IP address is crucial to acquiring accurate and relevant statistics on how the community is using your website.
   
   
2. Viewing Internal Site Search Statistics
   Some of the most relevant information available on your website is knowing what visitors are searching for when using your website’s internal site search. Understanding your user’s search behavior allows you to provide them with relevant content that will help them easily achieve their end goal. In addition, this data allows you to determine keywords - and their variations – that can be included in your main navigation structure.
   
   
3. Tracking Clicks on Links and Document Downloads
   To enhance your site user’s experience you must first understand where they are going and how they are getting there. To track the links that your visitors click on, you just need to add a small piece of JavaScript to the link. These instructions refer to outbound links, but they work equally as well to track internal links.
   
   To track the specific files being downloaded for your website, you once again add a short piece of JavaScript to the download link the enables Google Analytics to track that specific file.
   
   By tracking individual links and downloads you will be able to better map your site visitor’s course of action. This information is essential for optimizing your site’s navigation structure and making it faster for users to find the information they need.
   
   
4. Making Site Overlay Work for You
   Currently, the results displayed on the Site Overlay tool only show static pages that have unique links. If the page has numerous links, the total number of clicks will be displayed, not the amount for each individual link. You can get around this by adding “&location=x to” the end of each additional link (where x is the number of the link, so the first link would be 1, the second would be 2 and so on).
   
   
5. Exporting your Data
   While this may seem trivial to some, it’s a very handy feature. I have actually spoken with very experienced and technical Google Analytic users that were copying data out of Google Analytics and pasting it into Excel. With the export feature you can easily create PDF, CSV, TSV or XML reports. You can even set-up your account to e-mail your report daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly in your preferred format. Just click on the “E-mail” button located to the right of the “Export” button to schedule the delivery of your reports.

If you have any other tips, tricks or suggestions, share your knowledge and leave a comment!