Many things we do not know about even those we use regularly. This is truer for Google Analytics. In this part blog, we will discuss 7 features of Google Analytics which probably you didn’t know about or ignored due to ignorance. This is what it is:

Plotting Individual Rows

All those reports Google Analytics generate can be plotted as a graph; it could be individual rows in graphs as well. All the changes can be tracked over the time. The sudden drop or rise in organic traffic can be identified quickly and review all those factors contributing to change significantly.

Customization of Standard Reports

You can generate all the standard reports with the help of Google Analytics and if you want to add some single metric missing, you do not need to regenerate the report from scratch. There is an option to “Customize” which is given in the form of the button that is shown in the report, just by clicking it takes to “Create Custom Report” page. It also has the existing metrics in which you can add missing metrics.

Getting your own “Calculated Metrics”

A Google Analytics report has numerous metrics which are included and there is an option which can use these metrics for the base to create a new set of metrics, known as Calculated Metrics. Click “Calculated Metrics” Under the “Admin” tab in “View” column.

Using ‘Weighted Sort’

Use of casual sort for few metrics isn’t useful; take an example, if bounce rate report shows 100% bounce for entries with one visit. In those cases, Weighted Sort will be of lots of use which gives weight to total visits for each row, giving you data you actually need. Not to forget that this feature is only for metrics with a percentage. Sort the table for that metrics, click “Sort Type” dropdown to pick “Weighted”.

Keeping the Number of Sessions in control

In the case of high volume (greater than 500,000 sessions), Google Analytics samples the data and you get a notification in yellow telling “This report is based on X sessions …”. This speed up the pace of report generation for a large volume of data. You can re-adjust the sessions the sampling size for a response (loading time) and accuracy.

Making your Custom Channels

You can do “Channel Grouping” under “Channel Settings” in Admin which lets you define the channels you want, through “New Channel Grouping”. Name it and define it the way you want. This is in addition to the default channels (Organic Search, Direct, Social and others) of Google Analytics. You can also use to combine for various FB referrals in one. And this could be viewed in “Default Channels Grouping” report by selecting from drop down.

Selecting a Month completely

For the selection of whole month for a report, you can simply click the name of the month instead of clicking the first and the last date in the date range. This is a very simple feature which seems to be unknown to many Google Analytics users.