I recently learned Google Analytics tools that literally changed the way I see the popularity of a website. At first, I was barely scratching the surface and leave with only a vague idea of what was going on with traffic on our client’s webpages. But needless to say, I am now much knowledgeable of this tool and starting to get a better idea of who our typical visitor is, track against goals and understand the conversion paths to let the site visitors behave the way we want them to.
It’s important to keep a close eye on our site’s performance on a regular basis, but chances are good that we wont’s see huge deviations from one day to the next. The Intelligence Events features allowing us to set custom parameters to monitor for unusual site activity and send alerts to designed account managers. For instance, a big increase or drop in traffic on a given day would be considered unusual, and as such Google Analytics would send alert to you. The managers are able to dig out the reasons and take the corresponding measures in a timely manner.
In addition, by using the Compare to Previous Period tool in the data range dialog box, we could gain valuable insights through identifying patterns based on previous traffic. It is crucial that we couldn’t only concern ourselves with traffic trends. We might notice the disparities in the days of the week specified when comparing recent traffic data against a previous date range. It is interesting to have this finding and allow managers to think the reasons why this week view doesn’t mirror the previous period exactly.
These are two useful tools I recently found with Google Analytics to let us gain instantly actionable insight beyond traffic.
http://blog.templatemonster.com/2014/05/27/google-analytics-tutorials-videos/