3 Google Analytics Customizations You Shouldn't Have to Live Without

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Basic Google Analytics

Google Analytics is just one of those tools that every business with an online presence should use, regardless whether they’re large or small. It provides you with powerful web analytics that you can use to measure your marketing efforts, identify online trends and increase your ROI. You can get an amazing amount of insights just from implementing the basic tracking code properly, but its real value comes from how customisable it is. Here are just three customisations that you shouldn’t have to live without.

1) Exclude Internal Visits from Google Analytics

Exclude IP Address from Google Analytics Reports

A 1,000 visits a day becomes less valuable when you find out that more than half of that comes from your own office (or ours). One of the first things you’ll have to do when you set up Google Analytics is to exclude such traffic so as not to skew your results. This is especially useful when your site is new and not attracting much traffic (you know, when you’re still obsessing over the 50 visits you got today).

We do this by filtering out traffic that comes from selected IP addresses. To find out your own IP address, you can use a free tool such as www.whatismyip.com.

2) Build a Branded RegEx

Branded v Non-Branded Keywords

Regular Expressions (or RegEx, as they like to call it) are ‘special characters that match or capture portions of a field, as well as the rules that govern all characters‘. The whole affair might sound a bit complicated at first but it’s not that bad once you go into it.

A branded RegEx is an advanced segment that tracks the number of visits occurring from branded searches (those that search for you by your company name in the search engines). This allows you to analyse the number of branded searches against the number of non-branded searches (those that reach your website using natural keywords) and provides a good indication of how well your online marketing efforts are at capturing organic traffic.

To help us more quickly build your branded RegEx, think of the ways your customers might spell or misspell your company name when searching for you. For example, we might get branded keywords such as:

  • cloudrock
  • cloud rock
  • clodrock
  • cloudrock malaysia

3) Create Custom Alerts for Intelligence Events

Custom Alerts

Google Analytics’ Intelligence Events are a great way to keep track of the major changes that’s happening on your website. For smaller companies that don’t check their analytics program daily, these alerts can help avert possible disaster. For example, if your website traffic experienced a huge dip in traffic from last week, Google Analytics will send you an email (or SMS, if it’s set up) and you can take corrective action fast.

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Fairuze Shahari

Fairuze Shahari is a principal consultant at CloudRock. When he's not furiously downing G&T's, Fairuze Shahari writes for CloudRock, an inbound marketing agency.