Analysts often consider an aggregated view of their visitors when assessing reports in Google Analytics. Every visitor is assumed to be of the same type. Looking at the information in an aggregated form is not nearly as useful as assessing the data for individual audience segments. The ability to segment these visitors is extremely important if the website owner wishes to optimise their site for user experience and conversions. Different types of visitors - whether new, returning, organic, paid, and so on - behave differently and have vastly different expectations. The ability to understand what each of them wants and how to cater for them is important towards building a successful online presence.

Google Analytics makes it easy to segment your audience with advanced segments. There are a number of predefined advanced segments (e.g. new visitors, paid search visitors) that you can take advantage of immediately. More useful, however, is the ability to create custom advanced segments tailored to your own specific needs.

You want your Google Analytics account to serve as a solid tool for your website measurement, analysis, and optimization. After all, you are taking important business decisions that will affect your online performance, based on that data. Can you afford to rely on partial, inaccurate or otherwise misaligned data? You must have your tool properly setup to meet your website goals and your tracking needs.
Below I provide my tips on common technical configurations that you should check. A default implementation will provide you with information regarding your visitors. However, the techniques below provide you with the level of data accuracy and insight so that the tool will serve its ultimate purpose: improve conversion rates.

Let’s face it, we’re all a bit “lazy.” I admit it, I don’t check my website data every day. And when I’m on vacation it can be a bigger challenge.
But that’s OK, I use data alerts to stay on top of my data even if I can’t check analytics every day. Are you using alerts?
If you’ve never used Google Analytics alerts they’re fairly simple to set up. You can find them in the Profile Settings.

Recently, at the GAUGE conference, I talked about Google Analytics custom reports and dashboards. During the dashboards section of the talk I walked the group through the process of setting upa dashboard. As an example I created a dashboard for a fictional ecommerce website.
After the talk someone came up to me and asked if I could share more details on the dashboard. So here they are!
My goal with this dashboard is deep-dive on the mobile segment of the business: to focus on the business objectives (conversions), key actions that could lead to conversions AND ancillary data about the mobile experience. This will give us a wide range of metrics that provides a deep understanding of the mobile experience.

Last month, an anonymous blogger popped up on WordPress and Twitter, aiming a giant flamethrower at Mac-friendly writers like John Gruber, Marco Arment and MG Siegler. As he unleashed wave after wave of spittle-flecked rage at “Apple puppets” and “Cupertino douchebags,” I was reminded again of John Gabriel’s theory about the effects of online anonymity.



Out of curiosity, I tried to see who the mystery blogger was.

He was using all the ordinary precautions for hiding his identity — hiding personal info in the domain record, using a different IP address from his other sites, and scrubbing any shared resources from his WordPress install.

Nonetheless, I found his other blog in under a minute — a thoughtful site about technology and local politics, detailing his full name, employer, photo, and family information. He worked for the local government, and if exposed, his anonymous blog could have cost him his job.

I didn’t identify him publicly, but let him quietly know that he wasn’t as anonymous as he thought he was. He stopped blogging that evening, and deleted the blog a week later.

So, how did I do it? The unlucky blogger slipped up and was ratted out by an unlikely source: Google Analytics.

You cannot currently transfer profiles or account data from one Analytics account to another Analytics account.