5 Features of Google Analytics I Wish I had Known Earlier

Google Analytics has a steep learning curve. It usually starts with you wanting to know how many people visited your site, then who visited that particular page, then who converted from your email campaign. Before you know it you are trying to do multichannel attribution between a TV ad and the social post you targeted people with a day after your commercial.

Since most people teach themselves a lot of the basics, like I have, I thought I would share some AHA moments I had that I probably should have known earlier.

1. The difference between hit and session scope metrics

This is probably the biggest thing to learn if you are going to be trying to make your own reports. Google Analytics is made up of differently scoped metrics and dimensions. The main two to worry about is hit and session scoped. Session scope means it can only have one value in a session - e.g. Landing page, campaign, device, location. Hit scope means that it can only have one value per hit (or each time you send data to Google Analytics), e.g. Pagepath, event label, content group.

Now the dimensions can mix, you can say which Devices completed this action, and which location saw this page. What you don’t want to do is mix up the metrics.

You can create a table of Pages and sessions:

Since sessions are only counted once per visit, what this is actually giving us is the landing page for each session:

You should be using pageviews or unique page views (unique page views means it only counts that page once per session, so if you refresh it doesn’t double count).

So if you are only using session dimensions (occur once per visit) then use session metrics:

• Sessions

• Goals

• Bounce rate

• pages/session (if you have to)

• Avg time on site (if you have to)

• Conversion rate

• New users

If using hit dimension (even if it is mixed with a session dimension) use hit metrics:

• page views

• total events

• unique events

• unique page views

• Entrances

• Exits

• page value

• event value

2. There are more reports hidden away

The navigation on Google Analytics is not amazing, and sometimes it is like the cool bar, you need someone to tell you it’s there before you can get to it.

Some of the more hidden reports are:

Navigation Summary (under Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages)

This report shows you how people got to your page and where they went next. It doesn’t line up (people don’t go store - home - store) it is just ranked from highest page views before and after.

Shopping behaviour by product or category (Under Conversions > E-commerce > Product Performance)

Here you can see the full flow of each product, what is getting the most views but might fall down at checkout, or getting clicked on but not added to cart.

You can also assess the different shopping behaviours of different categories.

3. You can edit reports

If you have a report you like but just wish there were some other metrics or that it clicked through to different dimension you can click the edit button at the top to change it to the way you like it and it will save it to your custom reports.

Not all reports have this option but once I saw it, I started seeing it on more reports than I thought would have it.

4. You can select by month

It may seem small but when I found this out it blew my mind. If you just want to select a whole month you click on the month name, easy as that.

5. The community is very helpful

There is countless websites out there that can help but also the international analytics community, I have found, is one of the most helpful in the world. There is a slack account set up with a channel dedicated to help people with their google analytics problems.

To join go to join.measure.slack