Google analytics is a wonderful, invaluable tool for anyone interested in maximising a business return from their website. I’m not going to expand upon the value of such things as identifying the top shopping cart abandonment points in your site’s flow; better folks than I have already done that, all over the web. I just want to flag up Google Analytics’ ‘custom reporting’ feature (currently in beta but available to any who want to try it out) because it had a direct impact upon the redesign of this website.
I was trying to decide whether or not I should cater for 800x600 pixel screen resolutions. I knew that perhaps 6% of my traffic used this resolution; not a big figure, sure, but not negligible either. My quandary was whether this traffic was valuable to me.
I get a lot of ‘accidental’ traffic from people who happen to be looking for information about actual, blood-in-the-water shark attacks — traffic that is unlikely to generate design commissions. (“Hmm, I was interested in how many people were eaten by white sharks in 2008, but hey, maybe I’ll just commission a fully-integrated corporate identity instead…” No, I can’t see it happening either). I wanted a way to see how much of that traffic falls into the 800x600 pixel range.
By selecting the Custom Reporting option from the side menu in Google Analytics, you can set up… well, custom reports. The process is not entirely intuitive (maybe that’s just me) and it took a little bit of trial and error to work out how to get what I wanted, but within 20 minutes or so I had a pair of complementary metric reports designed: one to list search keywords according to screen resolution, and the other to list screen resolutions according to keyword.
A couple of minutes later I had my answer: every single one of the 800x600 visitors from the last couple of years had been searching purely for information about sharks; not a single one of them had entered any design-related keywords at all.
So that, as they say, was that. 800x600 was officially dead as far as this site is concerned. Case closed.
Metropolitan Police
UNIC UK
Nova-I.T.
5 Comments… so far
Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my blog something like that. Can I take part of your post to my site? Of course, I will add backlink?
Hi JessicaJins;
Glad you liked the post. Of course, you’re welcome to reference it in your own blog, but try and avoid copying the whole thing. Provided that any directly quoted text is clearly attributed to this site and linked back here then I’ve got no problem at all. Go for it and good luck.
Google Analytics is a remarkable service that really can provide a goldmine of data for if you know how to use it. What is frustrating is that, to my knowledge, it’s not especially well documented (I can’t complain; I mean it is free, after all) and I’m constantly discovering new ways of looking at the information it supplies. I think that there is scope for plenty more blog entries on this subject — but I have to hunt out those less obvious techniques first!
I’m just getting this blog started and currently it’s a bit thin on the ground, but do come back regularly to get new articles — or subscribe to the RSS feed (see the link in the footer; I have to get around to adding a proper RSS icon soon!).
Thanks for your comment.
thans for the tip
Interesting,
Thanks for sharing,
Keep up the good work