10 Hacks to Mine Your Google Analytics Data Deeper

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Google Analytics was developed in order to help Web developers gain in-depth statistics regarding their Web site. However, sometimes it is necessary to take it a step further and get more information.

There are several plugins and hacks available to increase the power that Google Analytics has to offer. Many of these may require GreaseMonkey for Firefox to function.

1. Social Media Metrics – This Greasemonkey plugin automatically takes social media metrics and directly places it into the Content Detail report that Google Analytics produces, and it also will include links to the submission pagan Mixx, Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.
2. Google Analytics Report Enhancer – As the name suggests, this allows for the reports produced by Google Analytics to be enhanced, allowing users to segment by ad group, transaction or referral path whenever the opportunity is provided. This is useful for detailing which specific medium or source was responsible for specific transactions.
3. Multiple Profile – When you have more than one profile in a single Google Analytics account, changing to other profiles can be annoyingly inconvenient. With this Greasemonkey script you can choose to view a separate profile from the ‘View Reports’ dropdown. There is also the ability to use open another profile in a new tab to quickly compare reports.
4. Google Website Optimizer Experiment – Alone, Google’s Optimizer will offer insightful information about what combination functions the best to improve your conversion rate, but it does not provide enough information about revenue, navigation, transactions, micro-conversations, bounce rate or segmentation by source. Much richer data can be obtained by integrating data from Google’s Optimizer right into Google Analytics.
5. Google Analytics for WordPress – Even WordPress can benefit from Google Analytics, showing the administrator whether a click originated from an article or from a comment. This also makes it possible to track image searches and to obtain the keywords used.
6. SiteScan – This is a tool that was developed in order to offer an audit with more depth in regards to the setup of Google Analytics. It is essentially a tool that reveals whether your Google Analytics integration has been properly configured and maintained. This plugin works very well alongside with the WASP extension for Firefox, which serves to debug web analytics.
7. Goal Copy – This takes all of the values in a profile’s settings and records them, enabling them to then be pasted into a fresh profile for the same account. Now you can set up multiple profiles with the same goals without having to manually input them in all time and time again.
8. Detailed Keyword Data – Filter out the precise keywords that a user searched for instead of the combination that happened to trigger the PPC advert. For example, in the event that a visitor were to search for a “light blue widget,” and an ad could be triggered by “blue widget,” that is all that will show in vanilla Analytics. With this filter, the precise full phrase will show up and allow you to home your PPC campaign much better.
9. Excellent Analytics – A little play on words makes up the title for an Excel plugin that allows information from Google Analytics to be directly exported into a new spreadsheet for added convenience.

James is an in-house technology writer and product analyst at a leading print cartridge store based in the UK where he reviews new products and contributes posts about design and gadgets to their blog.