Google Analytics can provide great support to understand and improve your website and channel performance. Taking advantage of the best Google Analytics features will put you ahead of the competition.
Some of these features are relevant to Google Analytics and are about collecting reliable data; others are more about collecting meaningful analytics and insights for business, but which ones are more useful for you and your business? Depending on what you do, there are a few that should definitely be at the top of your list! In this blog post, we describe the 25 best Google Analytics features we use for our clients;
Table of Contents
- Regular Expressions
- Filters
- Targets
- Target Value
- Calculated Metrics
- Campaign Monitoring
- Channel Grouping
- Content Grouping
- Site Search
- Event Monitoring
- Segments
- Secondary Dimensions
- Customized Dimensions
- Special Measurements
- Real Time Reporting
- Google Analytics Plugins
- Google Analytics Integrations
- Special Reports
- Google Analytics API
- Annotations
- Special Warnings
- Analytics Reports
- Shortcuts
- Enhanced E-Commerce
- Citations
1. Regular Expressions
I believe every analyst and marketer should have at least a basic understanding of how and why to use regular expressions.
Regular expressions are incredibly useful in the following situations:
- Set up Google Analytics (and Google Tag Manager).
- Analyzing data in the GA reporting interface.
- Optimizing your website and channel performance.
2. Filters
If you want better control over reporting and data, Google Analytics filters will be your best friend in this process.
The following examples are used to configure filters in Analytics:
- Exclude IP addresses of known visitors.
- Remove all query parameters at once (for example, technical query parameters on e-commerce sites).
- Make sure that UTM (traffic source parameters) parameters are shown in lower case in Google Analytics (no repetition).
3. Google Analytics Goals
What would you like to achieve and develop? Setting a clear measurement plan and targets is crucial for your business. Goals belong to the most important Google Analytics features.
In Google Analytics you have the option to set 20 targets per reporting view (five targets per target), but you don’t have to use all 20 fields. I generally recommend setting at least three goals.
I recommend using the following definitions:
- Macro goal(s): the most important goals for your business.
- Micro-goal(s): secondary goals that can help you achieve your most important goals.
4. Target Value
Especially for websites that are not e-commerce sites, it is very important to define a goal value for one or more of your goals.
By doing this:
- We make your data analysis more meaningful.
- We get approval from your customer or boss for a specific transaction more quickly.
- We get access to much more than digital analytics.
One exception is if you run an e-commerce site and/or have enabled e-commerce on your site, you don’t want to set a target value in the e-commerce view. This value skews and inflates your metrics.
5. Calculated Metrics
Google Analytics offers you the opportunity to create your own set of metrics.
- An additional five calculated metrics can be created in the free version of Google Analytics.
This metric is calculated per reporting view. In theory, you can create different views to work with a ton of calculated metrics.
The calculated metrics are incredibly powerful for analysis and optimization. The biggest disadvantage is that it cannot (yet) be used directly through the Google Analytics API.
6. Campaign Monitoring
You are most likely spending a lot of money to generate traffic through channels like AdWords, Paid Social, Affiliate Marketing, or Email.
This is fine as long as you know how each of these resources performs. The acquisition, behavior, and conversion (ABC) metrics in Google Analytics must be accurate.
In addition to the default recognized ones, you need to correctly tag all your Google Analytics campaigns.
7. Channel Grouping
There are two key ways to view, analyze, and optimize your traffic;
- Resource definitions and
- Channel group definitions.
For a comprehensive overview of channel performance, I recommend using both default and custom channel grouping features.
Then, you can examine specific “source” definitions for more information.
Note that you can only use the default channel groups when using the Google Analytics API. As you can see, default channel group definitions are created from source and medium parameters.
Configuring your channel grouping settings correctly is not a one-time task; it is advisable to regularly review the setup of your Google Analytics account to ensure continued reliable data collection.
8. Content Grouping
Do you know exactly how your website’s pages are performing?
Content Groupings offer powerful solutions to structure and analyze your performance more intelligently.
By default, Google Analytics will show you the impressions and percentages for each page that has received views within the selected range of dates. (an impression will be sufficient if it receives at least one view.)
For websites with many pages, creating content groups in Google Analytics will be highly beneficial.
The following will help you achieve better performance:
- In-depth, collective browsing behavior analysis.
- Preliminary research for Conversion Optimization.
- Content and page value analysis.
All your needs will depend on your website and type of business. In general, I can suggest creating a content group across the entire site.
A site-wide content group covers at least 98% of all page views on your website and segments all page views into logical areas for bulk navigation, performance analysis, and optimization.
9. Site Search
Most websites have a site search module.
In my Google Analytics audits, I have seen many websites either not using site search at all or not implementing it correctly.
You have many reasons to use Google Analytics features.
- Discover profitable keywords for SEO.
- Discover profitable keywords for PPC.
- Expand your product range or services.
- Optimize the experience/performance of Site Search visitors.
- Optimize Technical Site Search performance.
Bonus You can use this feature if your website does not include site search functionality. Most websites contain specific query parameters, and instead of or in addition to segments, you can use site search to analyze the performance of a specific visitor sub-group. Instead, you can add one or more site search external query parameters to this field.
10. Event Tracking
Two common ways to track user interactions are page views and events. Page views are great and form the basis of many reports in Google Analytics; however, if you want to measure and learn about what happens on a page, you should use event tracking.
I have encountered many Google Analytics setups where events occur:
- Not configured in GA / results are not coming.
- It is misconfigured.
- Incompletely structured (due to the lack of a concise measurement plan)
You need to learn and implement activity tracking on your website to help your visitors achieve their goals and research its positive impact on your business and increase ROI.
11. Segments
Data analysis and optimization insights are hidden in segments. Aggregated data analysis is a good start, but make sure you drill down further. This is a case where Google Analytics segments are extremely important. You can define your own segments or use one of the pre-defined segments in Google Analytics.
12. Secondary Dimensions
As mentioned earlier, putting your aggregated data in the field of view and further refining it is a way to get better insights for your business. A simple but very effective way to gain a better perspective is to apply secondary dimensions.
Most Google Analytics reports include this extra dimension, the table below is an example. The report above contains two dimensions:
- Primary Dimension: Default Channel Grouping.
- Secondary dimension: Landing Page.
13. Custom Dimensions
Secondary dimensions can be applied without changing your application or configuration, but this is a limited solution because you can only select from predefined dimensions.
Custom dimensions allow you to add useful, additional information to hit, session, user, and product data sent to Google Analytics.
This is very beneficial for most businesses, but the drawback is that you need solid technical support (or someone who can help) to properly implement this feature.
You can make them useful in many ways:
- Create custom reports with your custom dimension as the primary dimension.
- Apply them as secondary dimensions to your standard/custom reports.
- Search for them via the Google Analytics API.
14. Google Analytics Custom Metrics
Custom metrics are among the most commonly used features in Google Analytics.
There are three types of measurements in Google Analytics:
- Predefined measurements.
- Calculated measurements.
- Special measurements.
Similar to custom dimensions, custom metrics can have different scopes, such as hit-level and product-level.
They are incredibly powerful as you can add them to any report or dashboard. Additionally, input functions can be used for calculated metrics.
15. Real Time Reporting
The real-time report section in Google Analytics is very effective for many reasons:
- Directly track the impact of one-day campaigns.
- Monitor goal completions as you make changes to your site.
- Verify that your tracking code is working properly.
- Verify UTM link tracking.
16. Google Analytics Plugins
Google Analytics can do a lot for your business, but you should go further by using all the plugins/tools available. These plugins will be great for improving your data quality and efficiency. Plugins also explain popular debugging as well as reporting/analysis tools.
17. Google Analytics Integrations
In addition, you can integrate Google Analytics with dozens of Google and non-Google products:
- AdWords
- AdSense
- Search Console
- Youtube
- Qualaroo
At the very least, I recommend integrating Google Analytics with AdWords and Search Console.
18. Special Reports
Every business is different and should use Google Analytics data to their advantage. In my experience, you will have the most flexibility when building your reports and dashboards outside of Google Analytics. Google Data Studio is a good option in most cases.
However, for quick (internal) needs you want to use the Google Analytics interface in the best possible way. This is a situation where custom reports can be really useful.
They are easily accessible and can be shared with other people who have access to GA. I have commonly used this feature in Google Analytics to help my clients access their most important data whenever they need it.
19. Google Analytics API
Using the Google Analytics API is one of the smartest ways to work efficiently with your data. You can use the Google Analytics API to bring data to or retrieve data from Google Analytics. It’s that simple!
Every business can benefit greatly from using the Google Analytics API. So if you haven’t used it yet, start using it today!
20. Annotations
Do you document or record when a new campaign starts or when you change a goal in Google Analytics?
It is crucial to keep track of the most important activities that can impact your data; only then can you put it in perspective, analyze it in the right context and draw relevant conclusions. Google Analytics has a feature called Google Analytics annotations which can be very helpful.
21. Custom Alerts
You can’t keep track of everything that happens in your account by manually monitoring it. Even if you could, you shouldn’t do it. A much more effective solution is to use tools that will alert you when something unexpected happens or when things go wrong. Alerts in Google Analytics and beyond are truly very useful.
You can automatically keep track of specific changes in your data that are important for taking action. These alerts are deployed in the admin section of Google Analytics.
22. Google Analytics Reports
Machine learning is growing day by day and finding its place in many different forms and sectors. Google Analytics introduced the “Analytics Reporting” feature a long time ago.
Unlike custom alerts, where you define your own events, analytics reporting takes it a step further by providing reports on significant changes or opportunities you should be aware of while navigating through your data.
This reporting tool may already be useful for some and I expect this feature to become more useful in Google Analytics in the near future. Make sure you’re informed and try these new tools now and as they evolve over time.
23. Google Analytics Shortcuts
Segmenting by date range or time period can bring a lot of information. How is my website or a specific channel performing compared to last month?
The Google Analytics shortcuts feature is very useful in this case: press SHIFT + ‘?’ on your keyboard.
Go ahead and try! I have met many people who don’t know anything about this feature yet.
24. Enhanced E Commerce
In the past, the e-commerce module and reports in Google Analytics were quite limited, but with Enhanced E-commerce, this has changed fundamentally.
The best part is that you can remove this module from E-commerce sites!
25. Attribution
Last but not least, it is as important as the other items. I deliberately wanted to talk about it as the last thing in this article. This is because many companies I have come across start with attribution without getting the fundamentals right. Attribution is complex and requires advanced Analytics knowledge. There should never be a starting point in your organization.
As many of us know, Google Analytics’ conversion model is based on last-click/cookie performance, and this is far from optimal since you will see this approach in most current reports.
I encourage you to go one step further – if you are ready – by moving beyond the last-click performance model. Here are 25 Google Analytics features you should leverage for your business!
