3 Things You Didn't Know Google Analytics Could Do
 Deepa Maran, group manager of technical activities, Digital Brand Expressions

If you only use Google Analytics to track your Website's traffic and measure the impact of your pay-per-click ad campaigns, you may be missing out on some great features that will help increase the effectiveness of your overall marketing efforts. Here are three useful features of Google Analytics that you ought to know about:

1. Mobile Reporting
Mobile devices are no longer just for placing calls. If you want to know how many people visit your Website using mobile devices and how effectively you're targeting this segment of users, Google Analytics can help by tracking mobile Websites, mobile apps, and Web-enabled mobile devices. What's more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad; to marketplace; to download; to engagement.

2. Custom Reports
The custom reports feature lets you group together whichever metrics and dimensions you find most valuable. This lets you go beyond standard reports to compare data from multiple areas of Google analytics, all in one place. It means quicker access to the information you care about, less data overload, and easy sharing with colleagues.

For example, your marketing department may want to discover which hours of the day are the best for your online sales, and where those sales are coming from. You can build a custom report that shows site usage for each hour of the day, and another report for viewing in-depth revenue by city. Once the template has been saved, you can share the report by clicking the “Share” link, and emailing the unique permalink to anyone with access to a Google Analytics account.

3. Automatic Alerts
Wouldn't it be nice to have a dedicated assistant on call to monitor your Website's analytics around the clock? With the automatic alerts feature, you can tell Google Analytics to create an alert when a significant change happens (for example, if there's a spike in the bounce rate in visitors from a campaign), send an email notification to you, and flag the activity in your Intelligence reports.

Creating alerts is also an effective way to track visitor segments that are of special interest. If you were running a banner ad campaign, you could set up an alert that would notify you when the campaign bounce rate increased by 10 percent, compared to the same day in the previous week. This would allow you to modify or end the campaign as its effectiveness is dropping off.

---Source: DMNews Jan. 27, 2010 (www.dmnews.com).