The stream of new Google Analytics features coming out of the Googleplex continues, and that’s what we like. Recently Google announced a helpful feature called Weighted Sort, which helps efficiently surface actionable data while helping you avoid meaningless outliers.

One of the innate issues with using ratio-based metrics (bounce rate, conversion rate, etc.) is that when you sort, you return all of the outliers – the 100%’s and 0%’s, even when the sample size is tiny. Let’s say you want to figure out which AdWords keywords have high bounce rates, so you can adjust your bidding, landing pages, etc. Sorting by bounce rate, you’ll get something like this:

Of course, this isn’t what you were trying to do. What you actually want to know is: which keywords most need the most optimization attention? In the past, you would have had to manually create an advanced filter to specify that all returned results have more than X number of visits. That works fine, but it takes more effort, and we don’t like that.

Now, we can simply check the “Weighted Sort” button and – voilà - Google’s new sorting algorithm automatically surfaces the most significant results!

That’s really all there is to it. A couple of things to keep in mind:

• You can use weighted sorts on other metrics, too: conversion rate, exit rate, % new visits, etc.
• You’ll notice that the entries in your table are no longer strictly in order. Of course, that’s because you’re no longer sorting based only on the metric – you’ve asked Google to take other factors, like sample size, into account.

Questions? Cool use cases? Leave them in the comments for us, and for more tips, tricks, and updates, don’t forget to subscribe to our feed and follow us on Twitter!

We help answer questions like this all the time! And with this simple method, you can too.

With WebShare redesign projects, we do more than just build pretty websites. A truly good website is a combination of being aesthetically pleasing, functional and highly measurable. The purpose of the site has to be clearly defined and the results must be tracked, tested and analyzed in order to make informed decisions to better serve its purpose. Testing, measuring, analyzing: This is what we do.

We recently completed development on the new C3 Concerts website (www.c3concerts.com) and have configured some very common additional Google Analytics tracking to provide the necessary insights to make better decisions about the site. After collecting enough data, seeing how effective various design elements are on the site is a snap!

Example: There are two banners on the home page to showcase various events, promotions or news articles. An internal debate exists over the necessity and/or effectiveness of these banners.

Enter WebShare and Google Analytics. In their native state, these banners are simply links to other pages within the website. Clicks on these banners send the user to the expected page and GA records a standard pageview of that resulting page. However, while this shows how many visitors are viewing a particular page, the method doesn’t provide the insights of how I got to that page (other than knowing I came from the home page). For C3 Concerts, we add virtual pageviews to the onclick event of the anchor tag that links to the target page.

Using an organized naming convention for virtual pageviews makes it very easy to see in the Content Drilldown reports:

• A banner was clicked
• Which banner was clicked (1 or 2)
• What type of announcement (event, news, promotion)
• Info about the specific announcement

For example, Banner 1 links to a specific event:

<a onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackPageview', '/vpv/banners/banner1/event/name-of-event']);"
href="event.html" >BANNER</a>

Note the “vpv” that leads it off…by putting all virtual pageviews that we create in this base “folder”, we can easily create profiles in Google Analytics that filter this “fake” data out so as not to throw off our true pageview counts, bounce rates, etc…

In Google Analytics, a few clicks through the Content Drilldown report provides the answers needed to make decisions:

• How many banners were clicked?
• Which banner was clicked more often?
• How many events, news or promotions were clicked via banners?
• How many click-thrus per promotion?

About C3 Concerts

C3 creates, books, markets, and produces live experiences, concerts, events, and just about anything that makes people stand up and cheer. Among others, C3 produces the Austin City Limits Music Festival, Lollapalooza, as well as more than 800 shows nationwide. In additon, C3 offers representation services and publicity to artist and entertainers.

The User Defined report in Google Analytics is a custom segmentation feature allowing you to expand the standard scope of analytics. With this report you can, as the name implies, define your own visitor segments and then compare those segments with each other. This feature requires adding a bit of code to your site.  If you’re using ga.js, you’ll simply call the _setVar method of your pageTracker to set this variable. There are numerous situations where it could be beneficial to “bucketize” your visitors based on your specific needs.

One useful example would be to track registered members versus other visitors. If your site has an option to register as a member you may want to see what registered member visitors are doing compared to those that browse as an unregistered guest. After setting your setvar to segment members you can access the User Defined reports under the Visitors section on the left of your Google Analytics screen. Each segment you set up will show in this report for comparison.

This example is just one of the many situations where setting up visitor segments can be valuable. Language preferences, repeat buyers, and testing purposes are just some of the other “buckets” you might find useful for segmenting and analyzing your visitors.

One side note, this will not apply to the current session, but will set the cookie during the session where you call setVar.  Then, any session after that will reflect the segment.  That makes this particularly good for repeat buyers.  Set the setVar on the thank you page and the next time they come to your site they’re identified as a “repeat buyer” segment.

Up Next: Traffic Sources – Overview

What connection speeds are your visitors using and why does it matter?  It matters because the more you know about your visitor the more you can do to enhance their experience on your site.  The Connection Speeds report is going to give you a breakdown of visits by their Internet connection speed.

You can use this data to optimize your site so that it loads at a speed that is fast and efficient for most of your users.  I say most because there is no way your site can be all things to all people and as with all analytics reports you are not going to capture every user’s connection speed.  The data will provide you with information for a good sampling of users that are representative of the whole on which you can make your business decisions.

When considering technologies and content to add to your site you want to make sure your users can support what you are providing them.  If 40% of your users are coming to you from a dial up connection and you have just installed the latest and greatest animated RIA (Rich Internet Applications) those users are likely to leave your site without having had the experience you intended.  And potentially take their conversion elsewhere.

Use the Connection Report to get a feel for the capabilities of your visitors before adding technologies such as Flash videos.  Or if you already have such content and it is not getting you the conversion results you intended use this report to verify if the majority of your users can support it.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – User Defined

The Hostname report under the Network Properties section of reports can offer you several insights. In Google Analytics, the Hostnames report lists the traffic to the different domains and subdomains on which you have installed the tracking code for your account.

Use this report to see traffic to subdomains such as blog.mysite.com, vanity URLs, and if someone else has your code installed on their site.

In the above example visits came from 7 different hostnames.

• Notice the main domain is listed twice both with and without the www, www.mysite.com and mysite.com.  It is an SEO best practice to always redirect non-www to www.  This also has the side benefit of cleaning up your reports.
• We can also see the traffic from different subdomains such the blog and store in this site’s case.
• Although not evident in this report, should you be tracking multiple top level domains with the same GA code they would show up here as well.
• Vanity URLs are an important marketing tool allowing you to attach a unique URL to offline ad campaigns and track their results through Analytics.  This report will show those hostnames as well.
• Also useful in this report is tracking hostnames that are not one of your own. Although in this example it is just one visit for this time period, a high traffic domain with your code installed could skew results quite a bit and point to someone scraping your site for content by reading the source code (a practice that could hurt your ranking in the search engines).  If they grab the GA tracking code as well their hostname could show up in this report.  So be on the look out for these.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Network Properties – Connection Speeds

After the Browser Capabilities reports are the Network Properties reports. These reports include Network Locations, Hostnames, and Connection Speeds. At first glance you may be wondering what value knowing something like your visitor’s network location would be to you. Although it may not be something you use regularly, reading between the lines of these reports can reveal some useful information depending on the nature of your site and your business.

Let’s start with the Network Location report. The network location is defined by the registrant information for an IP address. Since many IP addresses are registered through ISPs you are generally going to see a list of ISPs in this report. But some IP addresses are registered to corporations. This is where some useful nuggets of information can be found. You can see if competitors or potential customers are viewing your site. If a customer is coming to your site and not contacting you maybe it is an opportunity to reach out to them. This is especially useful for B2B sites. Of course if one of your potential customers or competitors is an ISP, this may not be of much use to you.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Network Properties – Hostnames

Now that you know why it can be important to see how many visitors are coming to your site from various browsers, we can take that a step further and look at a few more of the capabilities your visitors may have when viewing your site. The Browser Capabilities reports offer data on six additional system settings to consider when maximizing your visitor’s experience on your site. They include Operating Systems, Browsers and Operating System combinations, Screen Colors, Screen Resolutions, Flash Versions, and Java Support.

Operating Systems
Understanding the operating systems your visitors are using can be useful when adding new technologies or features to your site, such as pages for mobile users. If only a small percent of your visitors are coming to your site from mobile operating systems such as the iPhone or Android, maybe this is a trend to watch before spending too many resources on creating pages targeted at mobile users.

Browsers and Operating System
This report takes the previous two and combines them into one showing you what browser and operating system combinations your visitors are using. This is yet another metric to consider when doing site designs and upgrades.

Screen Colors
The screen colors setting on your visitors’ computers can have an impact on how your site looks to them. You can’t design for all possibilities, but taking into consideration what the majority has can be useful.

Screen Resolutions
Similar to Screen Colors, the Screen Resolution of your visitors effects how they are going to view your site. With screens ranging from wide screen to mini notebooks you want to optimize your site to look great on as many as possible.

Flash Versions
If you have Flash on your site or are considering adding it is good to know if most of your visitors have the capability to view your Flash features. If they have to install or upgrade software to view your site, some visitors, and maybe some conversions, may be turned away.

Java Support
This report simply tells you if Java is supported on your visitors’ platforms or not. Optimize your site to be more engaging and usable and the result can be higher conversions.

The Browser Capabilities reports may not be ones you dig into on a daily basis.  But it is good to examine these metrics every now and again to make sure your site is keeping up with your visitors’ capabilities while not outpacing them either.  Before you do any major additions or redesigns that may include the latest technologies be sure to study these reports and work to optimize your site to meet the capabilities of as many of your visitors as possible.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Network Properties – Network Location

Up next are the Browser Capabilities reports. This section of reports can be helpful in understanding how many visitors are affected when your site behaves differently in different browsers, with different screen resolutions, Flash versions, etc. This is good information to have when re-designing your site or adding pages. Aim to make the user experience optimal for as many of your users as possible. The first report you will find in this section is the Browsers report.

This report defaults to a pie chart graphic of the percentage of visits coming from each browser. Notice here that we received 138,803 visits from 25 different browsers. But 94.76% of those came from just two browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox. So unless you have unlimited resources, there probably is not much need to try to design your site to fit all 25 browsers. The goal is to optimize the user experience of the majority of your users.

For each of the browsers listed you can drill down further to see which version of that particular browser is being used more.

Review your site in the top browsers that are bringing you visits. Look for things that are different between them and things that just don’t work in some of the browsers. These are the parts of your site you want to tweak, at least for the top couple of browsers, to make sure your site is being viewed as you intended by as many visitors as possible.  Notice the same page can behave differently based on the user’s browser.  You can see how this might impact conversion rates and sales of the third camera from the left!

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Browser Capabilities – Operating Systems & More

The last report in the Visitor Loyalty section is the Depth of Visit report. In this report “depth” is referring to the number of pages visitors are viewing.  As with the other Visitor Loyalty reports the data here is “bucketized.” Compared to the Average Pageviews report under the Visitor Trending section you may get a more realistic picture of the number of pages your visitors are viewing with Depth of Visit because you are not looking at an average of all visitors.

Here is a side-by-side comparison of the two reports to give you a better idea of how each presents the data and help you determine which will be better suited for your needs.

For this time period we see that the average pageviews was 3.84 pages.

But now look at the Depth of Visit report for the same time period.  When the data is “bucketized” we see that, in reality, the majority of visitors (61.57%) only viewed 1 page. The other 38.43% of visitors who visited a higher number of pages skew the average.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Browser Capabilities – Browsers

One thing most of us want to know about our site is how long people are visiting.  Have we managed to capture their attention and keep them engaged for hours on end or are they coming in, looking around and leaving after only a few seconds?  Depending on the nature of your site either option may be acceptable.  But we can work to improve the user experience knowing this information.  As we discussed earlier, the Time on Site report under Visitor Trending will give you an average amount of time visitors spend on your site. But one important factor to keep in mind is that averages sometimes lie, or at the very least do not always present the whole picture. Visitor Loyalty reports on the other hand are “bucketized.” Meaning every visitor or visit must fall into a particular category. So it may present a more realistic picture of your data.

Take a look at the Time on Site and Length of Visit reports side by side to get a better understanding of the bucket concept.

For the time period of December 14,2008 to December 20,2008 we see that the average time on site was 1 minutes and 45 seconds.

But now look at the Length of Visit report. This paints a different picture. 70.09% of our visits lasted 10 seconds or less. Those visits in the 60 to 600 second range skew the average a bit.

The “bucketized” views offered in the Visitor Loyalty reports can help use better understand the numbers we are seeing.

Up Next: Visitor Reports – Visitor Loyalty – Depth of Visit