8 BRILLIANT Google Analytics hacks you probably haven’t thought of

Published in

The Data Dynasty

6 min readApr 24, 2017

Today I’m giving away my curated list of Google Analytics hacks

My latest blog post on my favourite report in Google Analytics got so many hits that I thought I’d do another one Google Analytics.

Many website owners only implement the standard GA tracking script. These hacks will take your tracking setup BEYOND default tracking.

So if you are serious about data, now is the time to pay attention.

Let’s jump right into it.

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1. Remember users even though they delete their cookies or change device

Challenge: Your GA stats are being messed up when users delete their cookies or change device. It’s a pain for all of us.

Solution: This KissMetrics blog post will help you overcome that challenge. If you sync your GA visitor ID with your CRM, you are able to re-sync them next time they login from an unknown device. KissMetrics have written a great blog post about how to sync Google Analytics with Salesforce.

Where to find it: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/google-analytics-and-salesforce/

2. Speed up loading times by preloading the next page

Challenge: Bad loading times makes visitors leave your website, so you want to optimise them as much as possible.

Solution: Mark Edmondson has created a great hack for Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics and OpenCPU. By leveraging the information from Navigation Summary in Google Analytics, Mark has build a model that preloads the page visitors are most likely to go to as the next one. Pretty clever! This only brings down the loading time for that page, but the hack works well in check out funnels, or in other cases where there is an obvious next page.

Where to find it: http://code.markedmondson.me/predictClickOpenCPU/supercharge.html

3. Measure Impact with Content Groups instead of pages

Challenge: Getting an overview of your content can be difficult if you have to review every single page. As a big media site you probably have tons of pages where you cannot review all your stats for all your pages. You might have questions like, what categories do people engage with the most? Which do they spend less time on? Or maybe, what content groups drive signups?

Solution: That’s where content groups come in handy. Content groups help you get a high level overview of your content. This allows you to review and evaluate all the usual metrics, now also for your content categories. On a separate note, if you have an ecommerce site, then setting the product category is equally important, in order to evaluate your product categories performance.

Where to find it: https://97thfloor.com/blog/google-analytics-hacks/

4. Track Scroll depth to measure effectiveness of your pages:

Challenge: This is a great way to measure your pages effectiveness. Do people read the entire content you have on your pages? Or just a snippet in the top?

Solution: This analytics hack tracks the scroll depth of your pages. It pushes a Google Analytics Event when people reach 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% scroll points. This can also be customised if you want to track a certain threshold on your pages. Medium offers the metric “Reads”. How many of your visits actually read the content. Without having any inside knowledge or insights into how their stats work, then my guess is that it’s similar to this.

Where to find it: http://scrolldepth.parsnip.io/

5. Measure view time for specific elements and not just whole pages:

Challenge: Great to know that people visited the page, but did they see my newsletter signup box? Did they even view my comment box? All websites has an entrance to a specific page or area where the conversion happens. You want to know if people even see that specific area.

Solution: This is the solution. This hack helps you measure the view time for specific areas on your page. Can be used for header/body/footer, text/images or any other creative way you might come up with.

Where to find it: http://screentime.parsnip.io/

6. Improved formula for measuring user activity:

Challenge: Google Analytics captures session start and end and calculates the Session Duration based on that. But is that really accurate for measuring user activity? What if the user just opens our website and minimises the browser?

Solution: This amazing hack captures only when the user is ACTIVE on your website. That’s when there are mouse movements, clicks or scrolling. It even checks if the tab is visible in the browser.

Where to find it: http://riveted.parsnip.io/

7. Creative use of custom metrics and dimensions

Challenge: Most websites and businesses are different and have different tracking needs. Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) offers custom metrics and dimensions, so you can track what matters to you.

Solution: Selected and implemented wisely, this can provide you with great insights to your business. CHECK THE BLOG POST OUT! It gives you loads of ideas for what to track and hopefully inspires you to come up with even more creative things to measure.

Where to find it: http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2012/08/28/20-ways-use-custom-dimensions/

8. SEO hack: Measure SERP bounce time

Challenge: We all want better rankings in Google. Google wants to deliver the most relevant results. What are the pages with the highest dwell time? Which pages provide a poor experience or lack or relevant content?

Solution: Simo has a solution to this. By extending the User Timings report with a bit of custom tracking, you’d be able to see “SERP bounces”. This will give you a list of dwell times for pages with high bounces. This might indicate a poor experience or lack or relevant content as Simo describes in his post. Definitely worth a read.

Where to find it: https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/measure-serp-bounce-time-with-gtm/

If you want to learn more tricks like this, first understand the basics of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Grab this one. Next research for inspiration on on of the many blogs around the internet. Simo Ahava has a lot of great resources on his blog.

Looking for books? Or more comprehensive resources? Check out these two: My favorite book about analytics and one of the comprehensive books on Google Analytics which also covers cohorts analysis.

As you might already have figured out, then GTM is your friend. It allows you to easily implement events and scripts.

Hope this blog post was helpful. If you liked it, please heart it here on Medium, or even better: Share it with a friend or college. It would mean the world to me.