A Powerful New Filters from Google Analytics

For the legions of fans who use it, Google Analytics is an indispensable tool that allows site owners to segment their audience in a granular fashion, learning what works best for each slice. Data can be segmented in a multitude of ways, from geo-targeted traits to specific applications, screens, and custom dimensions.
It’s common sense that aggregate data is meaningless in its raw form; to find the value, you must see the stories that the data is attempting to tell. Thanks to recent filter additions and updates, Google Analytics now gives site owners the ability to slice and dice their audience metrics all the more. The more you fully grasp how, when, where, and why your users are engaging with your content, the more you can grow your business and give the people what they want. Take a little time to get up to speed on the new Google Analytics features and amp up your site-building know-how.

General Instructions on How to Use Google Analytics
In order to unleash the power of this free tool, you’ll first need to set up the service on any site you manage. To do so, set up an account specifically for the site you wish to track, and paste the generated commands into your site’s code. Then re-access the Google Analytics dashboard, and from then on, traffic data will be tracked.
Your main dashboard shows a summary of the data trafficked via your site. This dashboard is fully customizable, so as you browse around the various report types, just hit the “Add to Dashboard” option for any data you’d like to see on your main analytics page. Go deeper into the metrics by clicking “View Report” for any particular data segment, or adjust your date range to compare results for specific chunks of time. Reports are all shareable, and can be imported into visual charts and graphs, so you can layout the data in a manner that best suits your comprehension needs.

Let’s Get Granular
Google Analytics recently beefed-up their filter offerings, giving a higher level of granularity to many of their metrics. This empowers site owners and marketers all the more, because to truly see the success of your inbound marketing strategies, you must analyze segments of data to see where there are strengths and weaknesses. You’ll also want to divide these site segments into meaningful groups, based on certain demographic parameters. This will aid you in fully grasping the behaviors of your audience.
The new filter additions allow site owners to segment their audience to even more micromanaging degrees. Keep in mind that these changes only impact the actual filters, and not advanced segments. Filters and advanced segments are two separate ways to look at data in Google Analytics. Filters work on the profile level, so when a filter is activated, Analytics won’t gather any visitor data if they do not match. Advanced segments, however, collects all data, and then data is included or excluded once a report is generated.

Big News for Mobile Developers
There are many new ways to filter profiles. The old set-up grouped all aspects of “Mobile” users into one segment, but the new filters let us go a bit more hog wild.
The following fields are now available for segmenting:

• Is a mobile device and “Is a tablet” – these now let users distinguish between screen sizes.
• Mobile brand name – gives the ability to search by mobile brands like HTC, Samsung, etc. Devices may also be branded by their carriers, like Apple or Verizon.
• Mobile model name – now marketers can understand specific behaviors based on the exact phone users are on, like iPhone versions and HTC Evo versus Samsung Epic, etc.
• Mobile marketing name – some phones have different marketing names versus their actual hardware names. As an example, the Galaxy S3 is the marketing name of a device that has two totally separate models.
• Mobile pointing method – some phones come equipped with an actual physical keyboard, so this filter lets you see users accessing keyboards versus the onscreen keyboard.
• Mobile has QWERTY keyboard? – this answers the question of whether or not the device has a physical keyboard.
• Mobile is NFC supported? – differentiates between phones that have NFC, or “Near Field Communication”, and those that don’t.
• Mobile has cellular radio? and “Mobile has Wi-Fi?”- same as above, for their respective technologies.

It’s no longer necessary for marketers to know the nuances of the various mobile devices, as the analytics will highlight differences in technologies. For those developing and maintaining mobile apps, this level of granularity is a goldmine.
Additional New Filters
There are loads more new filters to play with outside of the mobile space.
Some highlights include:
Social filters

• Social network – lists the social network where the highlighted event has occurred (Facebook, Google+, etc.)
• Social action – outlines the specific social engagement that occurred during the event, which includes a Facebook Like, Google +1, etc.
• Social action target – specifically names the content that triggered the social action above, such as the URL or text that was Liked.

Content & Traffic

• Hit type – defines the type of hit that occurred, such as appview, page, transaction, social, event, etc.
• Internal search term – shows the search terms used in the given property’s internal search engine.
• Internal search type – displays searches that were specific to a category or area of a property (like “Menswear”)

Audience / Users

• Browser size – reveals the pixel dimensions of the browser display.
• IP version – shows the user’s IP version (IPV4, etc.)

E-commerce:

• Local currency code – lists a currency code used for the given transaction.

For more information on how to use every single filter available in Google Analytics (and there are oodles!), see the Google Analytics Documentation site. And enjoy the new power the additional filters bring to your marketing prowess!
A Post from SPN
A Powerful New Filters from Google Analytics 

Content Marketing Metrics Fun With Google Analytics

The phrase “content marketing” seems to be the latest buzzword in online marketing circles. Every SEO consultant and agency is talking about it and writing about it. The SMX West Conference being held this week in San Jose even has a whole day devoted to learning about content marketing. While it’s new to many, content marketing is how I built my own business since the turn of the century when I started writing my first newsletter. (Does that make me a dinosaur? More recently, I talked about what content marketing is and how it relates to SEO in this interview for ContentEqualsMoney.com.
Why SEOs Are Embracing Content Marketing
The bottom line is that when you add great content to your website on a regular basis and get the word out about it to your target audience, you’ll gain more rankings, traffic, conversions, leads and sales.
The key, of course, is that word “great.” Adding just any content won’t provide the results you’re looking for. But how do you know if your content is great? That’s where having some definitive content marketing metrics in place will help. And we’re lucky today to have gazillions of tools to help with this. You’ll know if your content is resonating with your target market by reviewing some very specific metrics on a regular basis.

Google Analytics to the Rescue!
You all know by now that I’m a Google Analytics junky. I’ve showed you in the past the bare minimum metrics you should be looking at when doing any sort of SEO for a website. Today I’m going to take you one step further by showing you the metrics you should be looking at for each individual piece of content that you publish on your website. (And if you stick with me, I’ll provide you with a bonus Content Marketing Metrics Dashboard that you can use for your own measurements.)
PageViews
I’m typically not a big fan of PageViews as a measure of success. But with content marketing, especially when any piece is newly published, it’s worth a look. Don’t be surprised if a lot of your PageView data for your content looks like this:

PageViews
It’s normal to get a spike in PageViews when the content is new and being promoted via various channels, and then for it to die down. It’s worth looking at because you want to find the content that continues to be viewed after the initial spike.

PageViews
When you see consistent PageViews month after month, you know you’re on to something! You can use that information when deciding on future content topics.
Organic Keywords and Rankings
Ha! I bet you’re surprised to see me mention rankings given that I recently wrote that running ranking reports is a fool’s errand. They still are, BUT…as I stated in that article, there’s an obvious correlation between rankings and getting organic search traffic to your site. So knowing which keywords bring traffic and where your content ranked when someone clicked on it in Google provides you with interesting and useful data. Unfortunately, there are no out-of-the-box ranking reports within Google Analytics. But if you can add a bit of code to the pages of your site, there is a new method of gaining this valuable insight within Google Analytics.
See GA Evangelist Justin Cutroni’s post on how to set the Rank Tracker up here.
I’ve had the Rank Tracker code on my site since the middle of January this year and am excited by the information it provides. To finally have a way to know the approximate rankings for phrases that actually bring traffic to my site is pretty amazing! For instance, I now know that the average ranking for ALL organic keyword traffic to my site is 5.34.
But even more exciting is to see the average ranking for any new (or old) piece of content:

Average Ranking
I now know that my Meta Description article (which is the most visited landing page of my site) is generally ranked between position 2 and 3 (2.65 average ranking) when it’s clicked on from Google. And if I want, I can see the average rankings for each of the 500+ different keyword phrases that brought traffic in for that article.

While not every piece of content on your site will (or should) bring organic traffic, it’s certainly something you want to look at.
Referring Traffic
Beyond search engines, you’ll definitely want to keep track of where each piece of content is getting referral traffic from. This will show you the important sites that are linking to it — that is, those that bring you visitors.

Referring Traffic
For purposes of seeing where your content is linked to, you’ll need to filter out all the referrals that come from web-based email programs, as well as social media referrals (which we’ll look at next).
Social Networks
Google Analytics has added a lot of social data over the past year. While you might get better information from your own social media tools, it’s still worth taking a look at what you’ll find in GA.
You can see which content is getting shared the most:

Social Networks
And you can click on the shared URLs to see which social networks bring the most visits and PageViews:

Conversions
Last but not least is the holy grail of your content marketing efforts — conversions. First, remember that you should have a variety of conversion points on your website. Also note that content marketing doesn’t always lead directly to conversions.

Measuring Conversions
That said, you can pretty much assume that if some of your content is leading directly to conversions, you’re on the right track (but it is going to depend on what you’re counting as a conversion).
Your Content Marketing Metrics Dashboard
While you can look up all of the above separately in your Google Analytics, I’ve found it most helpful to have a specific content dashboard for each URL. In other words, every time I publish something to my website, I create a dashboard which shows me all of the information I talked about above (and more) all in one place.

Content Marketing Metrics Dashboard
The above image shows only a portion of the dashboard, but you get the idea.
Want your own Content Marketing Metrics Dashboard? You’re welcome to use mine! Here’s how:
While logged into your Google Analytics, click this link, and then choose the profile you want to associate it with. The dashboard will automatically be created for you. But wait — it won’t work yet because you have to assign some content to it.
Here are the steps to make it work with each of your own articles:
1. Make a copy of the generic dashboard so that you can keep that one handy when you create new content.
2. Hover over the top right corner of each widget on the dashboard to find the Edit button.

3. Replace “/your-article-url” and “Your Article Name” with your own, and do this for every widget on the dashboard. While this sounds like a lot of work, it should take less than 5 minutes. Be careful not to change anything else unless you know what you’re doing. The filters should all be set to work with almost everyone’s content. (However, the RankTracking widgets will work only if you’ve installed the additional code on your site.)

That’s it! You can use the same dashboard template and change it accordingly for each piece of content. Unfortunately, you can only have 20 dashboards per profile. After you use yours up you can delete old dashboards that you no longer use or better yet, just create additional profiles.

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A post by Jill Whalen in http://www.sitepronews.com
Content Marketing Metrics Fun With Google Analytics