It's hard to get things right the first time. You may come up with a brilliant plan for your Google Analytics setup and think that you've thought of everything, only to have the data start coming in and realize that things are not looking quite like you hoped they would. Or perhaps your analytics just need a modification and you need to change your goal steps or create new ones. When these kinds of things happen, you may need to alter your Google Analytics profile settings.

And that's OK. While we recommend setting up a "sandbox" profile where you can test what effect changes to your profile might have on your data before editing your main profile, at some point you'll have to make those changes live in order to reap the benefits of cleaner, better data. When this happens, you will want to record those changes.

Continue reading "Keep Track of Changes to Your Profiles" »

You've probably played around with the Default Page setting in Google Analytics. In many cases, this is definitely the way to go, as it will prevent your home page from showing up in different ways in your Google Analytics reports (as / and /index.html for example).

But you need to be careful when you set the default page, as it will not only affect your home page, but any page that ends with a forward slash ('/').

What do I mean by this? It's pretty simple - if you set the default page to index.html, it will not only change any future / entries into /index.html, but if you have another page ending in /, say /blog/, it will change that to /blog/index.html too. But what if your blog's default page is actually /blog/index.php? Well, then you have a problem.

If you have several such subdirectories or pages, then you have several problems. The good news is that there is a simple way to create a simple filter that only replaces the home page.

Continue reading "Default Page vs. Home Page" »

If you've done research on excluding internal traffic from your Google Analytics reports, then you've probably heard words like "user defined variable", "dynamic or static IP address", and "orphaned web page." While you may want to become familiar with these terms someday, the truth is that not everyone is a webmaster.

What's my point? Well, I'm not sure if anyone's come up with this before, and quite frankly I wouldn't be surprised as this method is very easy, but here's a quick and easy way to exclude any kind of internal traffic from your reports, regardless of IP-whats-its. All you have to know is how to write an email.

Here's how:

Continue reading "Excluding Internal Traffic the Easy Way" »

One of the great things about Google Analytics is the ability to view overall trends for your website. You can, for example, see how well all visitors who come from AdWords are reaching one of your goals. You can see how valuable the average visit from an email campaign is to your ecommerce business. You can see total transactions and revenue, and see what percentage of transactions are coming from a specific marketing source.

But what if you want to see where a specific transaction came from? What if you get a very large order and you want to see what the marketing source for that specific order is? Well, now you can, with a set of three custom filters that work together.

Here are the details:

Continue reading "Matching Specific Transactions to Specific Keywords" »

Back in November, Amit Agarwal wrote about preventing Google Analytics from tracking visits via an edit to the Windows Host file. This is an effective work-around for excluding traffic from internal PCs with dynamic IP addresses, but tweaking the Hosts file is a bit tricky for the average user. Plus, if you've got dozens or hundreds of employees, it's really not practical.

Using Google Analytics' Visitor Segmentation, you can achieve the same result, much more efficiently and with a lot less work on your internal users' end.

Continue reading "Exclude Internal Visits from Google Analytics" »

Control is everything when it comes to web site analytics. You want to make sure you're tracking the right data, and you need to make sure you're tracking the data right. With traffic filters, you can control exactly which data are flowing into your Google Analytics profile, and which aren't.

There are three predefined filters that you can use, right out of the box:

• Exclude all clicks from a domain (hostname), which can be used to exclude all clicks originating from one network. Get rid of the hits from your internal office network. Just plug in your hostname here and apply to your profile.
• Exclude all clicks from an IP address, which is great for removing any clicks from a single IP address, or even a range of IP addresses. Take a visit to www.whatismyip.com, then plug in the IP address here to exclude any computer that has a static IP address from your data results.
• Include only traffic from a subdirectory will allow you to set your profile to only report on a subdomain or a subdirectory. Use this to only see traffic to your nonfiction titles (www.example.com/nonfiction/) or to your user's section (users.example.com).

Continue reading "Filtering Your Data" »