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Effective Google Analytics Tips in 2021

Google Analytics Tips

Sometimes Google Analytics is challenging to learn. It’s so tricky that many people ignore it; that a big mistake. It’s effortless to log into Google Analytics.

With this, you can exactly see the number of visitors to your store, where they are coming from, which device they are using, and much more.

It’s a little bit tough to figure out how to analyze it by geo, traffic source, page category, etc.

This article will help you by adding additional value to your reporting by sharing a couple of tips and tricks.

Regex for Keyword Groups

Regex to match keywords, for example, the regex below will match “Gas” or “Electricity”,

Gas|Electricity

Regex to match exact keywords, for example the regex below will match “Gas” and “Electricity” exactly,

^Gas$|^Electricity$

Filter for Image Search

Used to see which keywords were used in image search and which keywords were used in the web search.

Follow these steps to get your filter up and running:

  1. Click “Add Filter”
  2. Enter your Filter Name, e.g “Images”
  3. Input your Filter Type as “Custom Filter” and select “Include”
  4. Set your Filter Field as “Referral”
  5. Finally insert the following your Filter Pattern, ^http:\/\/images\.google\..*$

Use ^http:\/\/www\.bing\.com\/images\/..*$ for Bing

Regex for keyword lengths

Depends on the nature of your site and how long-tail you go but useful to filter out keywords by their length. For this, you need a regex to count the number of spaces in the keyword.

For example the regex below searches for keywords that have between 3 and 40 spaces in them,

^([^ ]+ ){3,40}[^ ]+$

The regex below searches across a single number.  Searches for all keywords with 4 spaces between them (5 keywords),

^([^ ]+ ){6}[^ ]+$

Regex for page depth

This regex counts the number of slashes in a URL (works out how far it is from the root).

For example the regex below counts the URLs that have 4 slashes,

^/([^/]+/){3}[^/]*$

Useful to find pages which have very little traffic.

Regex to exclude traffic from a range of IP addresses?

This regex will discount any findings from certain IP addresses.  For example if we want to exclude the following IP address; 63.212.171.1 then we would use the following regex,

^63\.212\.171\.1$

Tracking Twitter campaigns

To track tweets you must first add campaign information to your URL before you shorten it.  This will track anyone visiting the site as a result of your tweet.

So paste this link into Bit.ly for example;

Home

Now you will get statistics in your Google Analytics reports.

Tracking keyword Rankings

These days with personalization, local results, etc ranking reports cannot provide you with the full value of your SEO campaign. But a ranking report from Google can show you the real results.  Well, it’s too bad Google doesn’t provide a section for this but you can use filters to help you.

Create the first filter,

  1. Give your filter a name e.g. “Organic Results
  2. Set your “Filter Type” as “Custom Filter” then choose “Include”
  3. Set the Filter Field as “Campaign Medium” and Filter Pattern as “Organic”

Create the second filter,

  1. Give your filter name e.g. “Google Results”
  2. Set your “Filter Type” as “Custom Filter” then choose “Include”
  3. Set the Filter Field as “Campaign Medium” and Filter Pattern as “Google

Create the third filter,

  1. Give your filter name e.g. “Google Referer”
  2. Set your “Filter Type” as “Custom Filter” then choose “Include”
  3. Set the Filter Field as “Referral” and Filter Pattern as google.co.uk/ (search|url) .*\bcd=\d*

Create the final filter (a little more complicated)

  1. Give your filter name e.g. “Ranking String”
  2. Set your “Filter Type” as “Custom Filter” then choose “Advanced”
  3. In Field A enter in “Referral” then \bq=([^&]*)
  4. In Field B enter “Referral” then \bcd=(\d*)
  5. To enter “User Defined” then $A1 (Rank: $B1) In Output

Don’t forget to change the dimension to “User Defined Value” and you should start getting the rank of the keyword in your report!

You also set up similar custom filters for Yahoo! and Bing.

Tracking social network traffic

This will allow you to add social networks as a separate traffic medium.

  1. Click “Advanced Segments”
  2. Create a new segment and drag the ‘source’ box which under ‘Traffic Sources’ to ‘dimension or metric’ window
  3. Open the ‘Condition’ drop down and paste the following sources –

digg|aim|econsultancy|wikipedia|stumbleupon|netvibe|linkedin|facebook|del\.icio\.uk|feedburner|twitter|technorati|myspace

List not exhaustive

You can apply the same logic to blog traffic.

Tracking universal traffic

Lets you know how many people were actually clicking on the blended results you see in the Universal Search.

Setup first filter (for organic traffic)

  1. Give your filter a name e.g. “Organic Traffic”
  2. Set your “Filter Type” as “Custom Filter” then choose “Include”
  3. Set the Filter Field as “Campaign Medium” and Filter Pattern as “Organic”

Setup first filter (for universal traffic)

  1. Give your filter a name e.g. “Universal Traffic
  2. Set your “Filter Type” as “Custom Filter” then choose “Advanced”
  3. In Field A enter in “Referral” then (.*)oi=([a-zA-Z_]+)&(.*)
  4. In Field B enter “Referral” then (\?|&)q=([^&]*)
  5. In Output To enter “User Defined” then $B2 : $A2

Additional filters – you create separate filters for some of the Universal Search items instead of all them:

  • Blog Search: blogsearch_group,  blog_result
  • Image Search: Image_result ,  image_result_group
  • Spelling corrections: spell
  • Sitelinks: smap
  • Definitions: glossary_definition
  • Suggestions (link to suggestions/revisions): revisions_inline, revisions_narrow

For example, a custom filter for images:

  1. Give your filter a name e.g. “Universal Image Search”
  2. Set your “Filter Type” as “Custom Filter” then choose “Advanced”
  3. In Field A enter in “Referral” then (.*)oi=image(.*)
  4. In Field B enter “Referral” then (\?|&)q=([^&]*)
  5. In Output To enter “User Defined” then $B2 : $A2

This data can help you figure out:

  • If the image or blog link was clicked on instead of the regular one
  • Do your videos get more/less clicks
  • Are uses more likely to click on the image result than the regular search result
  • If someone clicks on an image are they more likely to convert

Tracking traffic from partner sites

Building up partnership and backlinks from authoritative sites is great for SEO and you need to analyse how valuable a partner these sites actually are?

Also check your referring traffic report for potential new partners.

Add partners as a separate traffic medium.

  1. Click “Advanced Segments”
  2. Create a new segment and drag the ‘source’ box under ‘Traffic Sources’ to the ‘dimension or metric’ window
  3. Open the ‘Condition’ drop down and paste the list of partners e.g. goodpartner\.com|badpartner\.com

You also set up alerts to know when traffic dips, perhaps the link has been removed or they haven’t updated a new link etc.

Show more rows

To show more rows add &limit=<number> at the end of the URL, the rows on the page will remain at their limit, but when you export to CSV, you get your complete list.

That’s all the valuable tips and tricks of Google Analytics.

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