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Google Analytics is pretty popular for tracking website usage, and we use it here at Gruden on our own sites – including this blog. Here’s our collection of general purpose Google Analytics tips and tricks…

1. Clever homepage tracking

Need to know which areas of your site’s homepage visitors are clicking on?

Google Analytics’ “Site overlay” functionality works OK for HTML-only sites but it’s fairly useless if your site includes Flash elements. To get around this add Google Analytics tracking parameters to your internal links.

Here’s an example of how you can structure these links to generate some useful stats.

This link is for a “Partners” link in our homepage’s top navigation area:

http://www.gruden.com/index.cfm/p/partners?utm_source=homepage&utm_medium=topnav&utm_campaign=partnerslink

Do this for all links on your homepage and you’ll get a report on all clicks of the “homepage” source, and you’ll be able to break this down by section (e.g. “topnav”) and then by the link (e.g. “partnerslink”).

2. Filter out your own traffic

Traffic stats, especially on smaller sites, can get really skewed if visits from the people running the site aren’t being filtered out.

To fix this, add a new filter using “Exclude all traffic from an IP address”. Add your own IP address, and repeat for any other IPs you don’t want to be included (follow Google’s advice on how to use backslashes before the fullstop characters in the IP address).

Don’t know what your IP address is? Try going here: www.whatismyip.com

3. Get a weekly email report

To get in the habit of checking your site’s stats every week, simply get Google Analytics to email you a scheduled report.

4. See what people are searching for

Don’t forget to set up Site Search reporting on your account. It’s useful when creating content to know what your users are searching for – especially if it’s not something they can currently find.

5. See where people are going

When linking to external sites, track clicks on outbound links and you’ll know which sites you’re sending traffic to.

6. Use Advanced Segments

Google Analytics’ Advanced Segments aren’t really as complicated as they sound. You can use Advanced Segments to group together different types of data and then create a report.

For example, a car manufacturer might want to create a report on visits to its site’s “small cars” content only. To do this include all small car content in a custom segment by creating a series of filters that only include content with particular title text.

7. Know your site’s top-performing times

If you know the times of day when your site performs best you can then time other activity around this – such as only running your online advertising (Google AdWords etc) at these key times.

To do this create a custom report using Time on Site, Pages/Visits, and Bounce Rate metrics and then apply an “Hour of the day” dimension to the report.

Now you know when you’re getting your most serious visitors!

Microsoft’s new browser – Internet Explorer 8 – will be made available to Windows Update users within the next 10 days. If you can’t wait for that, you can download the final version from Microsoft right now.

If you’re a Gruden customer and you’re wondering if the site we built for you will look like a mess when your users view it with Internet Explorer 8, we have some good news – you can relax!

We’ve spent the last couple of weeks checking all our clients’ sites with Internet Explorer 8, looking for:

• Usability – making sure all elements of a template were still useable and visible
• Template rendering – making sure the design did not change noticeably between IE7  and IE8

We found only minor issues with a couple of sites.

So why the great results? The main reason is this new version of Internet Explorer is more standards compliant than the previous versions – and we always build web pages with web standards in mind.

One of the main goals of following web standards is to ensure that website code does not need to be rewritten as traditional desktop browsers evolve, and this is exactly what has been avoided here.

Gruden has been involved in the web standards community since the start of the Web Standards Group back in 2003. We’ve even been busy translating web standards articles into Chinese and Portuguese!