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Google has continued to add new features and functionality to their tracking system, Google Analytics. Whether you are a longtime user of the system looking to update your knowledge and use of Analytics, or you are researching the tool to see if it’s right for you, it’s important to understand the changes and upgrades that have been made. Here’s an overview of a handful of the new features that Google Analytics offers. (more…)

The next report under Traffic Sources is “Search Engines”. This is simply a breakdown of your search-referred traffic based on the search engine that they came from, and their respective performance. Note that this report shows you the general search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo!), but does not drill down to regional search metrics, such as google.co.uk vs. google.com. Here is what the default report looks like:
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The Referring Sites report is the next in the series of Traffic Sources reports. This report essentially provides details on the different domains from which visitors have followed a link to your site. This includes other websites and search engines (they are websites after all). As opposed to the “Direct Traffic” report, this one contains quite a bit of valuable data. Here’s what the basic report looks like:

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The Direct Traffic report is fairly straightforward. Most often this is a “nice to know” statistic, and in most cases it’s not directly actionable. It really just tells you how many visitors arrived at your site directly – either by typing in the URL in the address bar, or perhaps clicking on a bookmark that they’ve created. In other words, no site is responsible for referring them to your site; there is no apparent point of origin. The report screen looks like this:

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The next report in the Google Analytics suite is the Traffic Sources Overview. This is a very basic snapshot of your traffic reports. However, these mini-reports are so useful at a glance that I prefer to add them to the main dashboard instead of the reports that are there by default! The Traffic Sources Overview looks like this:
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As I finished the tutorial on the visitor Network Properties in Google Anaytics, I saw that the next section for reporting is the “user defined” section. I honestly thought it would be a simple two paragraph post. I haven’t yet been able to use the “user defined” reporting, and was under the very wrong impression that it’s simply a ‘hotwire’ mechanism that enables users to add tracking for variables that Google hasn’t yet included in the suite. And while I’m sure that it could be used for that, the real purpose is to provide an extremely powerful and useful means of segmentation and A/B (and even C!) testing within Google Analytics.

Here is what the basic screen looks like. As I mentioned, I haven’t set any custom variables yet, so it isn’t all that exciting.

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I must be blunt – the Network Properties is the section of Google Analytics that I visit the least. It truly is some pretty basic reporting, and I’ve only found a couple applications for the data in the reports. Essentially, these reports provide you with connection-level metrics for your visitors:

• Network Location
• Hostnames
• Connection Speeds

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