20 Google Analytics secrets that any SEO expert must know
Google Analytics is an invaluable source for search engine and user experience optimisation. You can use it to track every user activity from demographic to purchase behavior, making it the best tool to answer online business questions. Here at IT BOOST Australia, we have collected top less-known secrets that enable you to unleash the full-power of website tracking and reporting hero, Google Analytics.
1. Long-Term Statistics
The best strategy for the growth of an online business is stability and reliability. More you keep your website online more you can keep ahead of your competitors. So, the first advice is not only to check for the short-term statistics but also to the long-term statistics. By default, Google Analytics will show you the result from the past days. To check the long-term trends, you should extend the graph to cover the last 3-6 months. In this way, you can determine which pages and keywords are bringing you the most traffic in both short and long term.
2. Track Audience Activities via Google Analytics
Besides looking at pageviews or total visitors you may want to check how many people find your content useful and, though, stay in your site. Go to
Content > Site Content > Content Drilldown
It will display you the average time users spent on each page, the number of users visited the page (Entrance), bounce rate and percent of exit percentage. The bounce rate reflects the number of users who landed on a certain page and left the website without visiting another page. Exit percentage measures the same criteria but users could have been visiting another page from the same website earlier.
3. Know Audience Locations
If you own an international website, it would be super-useful to find out from which country most of your audience come. Just navigate to
Audience > Demographics > Location
and Google Analytics will show you a map of total visitors to your website. The darker areas represent locations with more traffic.
4. Monitor Web Browsers
If you intend to provide the best user experience for your audience, you should collect enough information about Web browsers your site visitor use to surf the internet.
Audience > Technology > Browser & OS
gives you an idea about the visitor’s web browser and operating system. Google Analytics yields the following statistics about web-browsing:
• Web browser type and version
• Operating System
• Screen Resolution
5. Analyse Engaged Traffic
Engaged traffic counts the number of visitors that are likely to stay on the page for more than 60 seconds and often more than one page. The stay time of each user is measured separately and user is often grouped according to Duration. You can access this information at
Audience > Behavior > Engagement
The result is a record of unique visitors and their total number of pageviews grouped by time they spent on your site.
6. Discover Social Referrals
It is always a good idea to check which pages on your website are most shared on social media. It shows you the current trends in the social network and gives you a hint for developing new popular content. You can reach data about social referrals at Traffic
Sources > Social > Landing Pages
7. Watch Mobile Visitors
Nowadays, more people use their smartphones and tablet to surf the internet than ever. Therefore, it is very important to optimize your website for mobile users. For example, if your website is responsive and optimized for the Retina screen you can absorb more visitors form iPhone users. To look into the devices that your visitors use to access your website as well as the average page view and time, go to
Audience > Mobile > Devices
8. Examine In-Page Content
This is one of the most innovative features provided by Google Analytics. You can reach this section at Content > In-Page Analytics. If you look at the results you will be surprised by the amount of data Google provides. It shows you an in-depth analyze of elements in the page layout. My favorite result is the tooltips indicating the percentage of users clicking on the various sections of the website.
9. Pinpoint Your Bounce Pages
The bounce pages are the Achilles heel of your website. If you need more traffic to your website you should find bounce page and learn from your mistakes. For example, if you have a page with 90% exit there is good reason for people to leave your website. You can locate bounce page at:
Content > Site Content > Exit Pages
10. Not Provided Keywords in Google Analytics
Keyword search is an extremely helpful tool to learn from keywords. You usually access this feature form the Acquisition. It will display your organic traffic sorted by keyword, but you may notice that the top 90% are shown as “not provided”. The reason is that Google Analytics cannot decode the content of search query when user performs a search from a secure (https) protocol. Instead, you can utilize Google Search Console or Adwords keyword search tool to reveal these “not provided” keywords.
11. Think again about Bounce Rates
Usually, the bounce rate is considered as the primary measure of internet marketing campaign success. Based on your industry and type of webpage, best practices suggest that you keep bounce rates somewhere between 20%-70%. However, a high bounce rate is not necessarily bad. Thinks about your Contact Page. If the Contact page is designed properly, user can get required information about your business quickly and then leave the page. In this case, a high bounce rate is an indicator of a well-designed page.
12. Block Spam Referrals
Spams are not just the problem of inboxes and search engines. They also found their way into Google Analytics. They can skew your analytics by pretending that they are visiting your site or clicking on the links. But the trust is that they never visit your site. They are only a piece of JavaScript code. Since 2016, you have the chance to ask Google Analytics to filter out the spam bot. Find this useful feature at
Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals
13. Connect Google Analytics and Google Search Console
Get the most benefits from Google keyword search by connecting Google Analytics and Google Search Console. As an advantage, you can get information about keywords users search in Google including those are normally hidden in Google Analytics.
14. View Top Content by Title
Tired of ugly URLs in your Top Content report?
There is a more elegant way of reviewing the top content. Google Analytics includes the capability of looking into the top content by title. The output is exactly the same as the Top Content Report except that it displays page’s title meta tag instead of long page addresses.
15. Define Your Goals
You can absolutely use Google Analytics without setting up your goals, but you will miss out 95+ of the value it offers. Moreover, defining your goal will lead you to a strategic approach to SEO. To access goals setup by simply head to
Admin > View > + NEW GOAL
16. Employ Custom Segmentation
Segments are subsets of Analytic data allowing you to isolate and examine data in depth. For example, you may need to monitor users from a particular country or a specific line of product. That is when the segments come into use. A whole bunch of segment types is already implemented in Analytics. However, you have the opportunity to expand your insight and create custom segmentations. Just click on the “Add Segment” link. Then you will see “New Segment” option.
17. Learn Regular Expression
The regular expressions are sequences of pattern that programmers use to search within a large text. There a lot of use of RegEx(Regular Expression) in Google Analytics:
• Create professional filters
• Configure Goals that math multiple pages
• Fine-Tune your Funnel steps
• And so on
18. Automate Your Reporting
Undoubtedly, analytics is the best tool to find a response to business questions. By the way, most analytic reports are repetitive and you have to run them constantly. Thus, automating this kind of boring task makes your life much easier. Generally, you should transfer your Google Analytics data to a third-party API to be able to accomplish this. Two of my favorite method to automate reports are:
• Google Analytics API and Google Sheets
• Data Studio
Google API is more powerful but involves some technical difficulties, whereas, Data Studio provides a simple and effective interface to automate your analytics reports.
19. Utilise Calculated Metrics
Google Analytics offers a robust way for advanced users to set up their custom measurement metrics. For example, you may need to calculate the revenue per user including shipping. You can easily create this metric using the expression
{{Revenue}} / {{User}}
20. Use Google Analytics to Come with New Content Ideas
To get an idea about what people are currently searching for head to
Behavior > Site Search > Search Terms
It gives you a good insight into current trends. But, to find good ideas for your content it’s better to compare trends over time. For that do a time period comparison and sort by “Absolute Change” instead of Default.
There you have it – 20 things most people don’t know about Google Analytics!