Working for a company that sells B2B has challenged me to be more creative with the way I utilize Google Analytics.

We have a sales team equivalent to the game Hungry Hippos, eating leads for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. And I’m afraid that if they run out of leads I might be on the menu.

Finding More Leads

One day I was purusing Google Analytics, and decided to take a look in the Network Report (audience > technology > network).

The Network Report shows you the service provider visitors on your site are using. Generally this report did not provide me much value in the past, but then it struck me.

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Can you visualize your website as a real world store/place? How would visitors interact, or what problems would they come across?

Everyone has been to a website with a frustrating user experience, can you imagine that experience in a physical location?

The team at Google Analytics came up with these hilarious videos depicting common flaws in the digital experience. The following videos articulate some common issues customers experience online in a real life example.

Landing Page Optimization

Online Checkout

Site Search

My favorite feature of Google Analytics is the Intelligence Events section.

What are Intelligence Events?

Intelligence Events are alerts that register when statistically significant variations occur on your site. Google Analytics is constantly monitoring the traffic on your site. Anytime it finds something out of the ordinary, it places an alert in the Intelligence Events section of your Analytics dashboard.

I like to think of Intelligence Events as my own personal assistant. I call him Jarvis.

Jarvis is a very detailed and calculated assistant who alerts me of major changes happening on my site. He even categorizes them into daily, weekly, and monthly alerts sorted by importance.

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The standard content tracking for Google Analytics is pretty straight forward, it will show you time on site, bounce rate, and pageviews. However, sometimes this leaves you wanting more. Especially when it comes to bounce rate for blogs.

Let me explain. A bounce is calculated as a single-page view or single-event trigger in a session or visit. This means if I come to your site, read your blog post, and exit, I am a bounce. Meaning you gain no insight to how long I was on the page, or how engaged I am with your content.

I want to know more about how my readers engage with my content. Do they read the whole article? How long does it take them? Do they read the comments, or more than one post?

Solution

I have been experimenting with a jquery plugin from Justin Cutroni that fires Google Analytics Events as a reader scrolls down the page. The objective is to gain a better understanding, on a page by page basis, of the content that visitors engage with.

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