Google Analytics is a standard tool used by countless webmasters and bloggers around the world. It possesses the ability to quickly and easily collect and organize data about traffic, engagement and SEO performance in a variety of ways. For many, Google Analytics serves its purpose and provides all that is needed by the webmaster or blogger. Unfortunately, many fail to realize the incredible power that Google Analytics possesses – even in its most basic features – and that can lead to less than stellar performance. Below, we’ll talk about some commonly neglected uses that Google Analytics can provide its users.

The Ability to Create Multiple Views

Rather than risking the loss of your data by reorganizing it in fundamental ways, you can make it possible to assess data in unlimited ways by creating multiple views of the same data. When only using one view, it is much easier to miss crucial data points and trends in the underlying day-to-day changes in traffic, clicks and other engagements. By keeping one “vanilla” view and then creating additional views with custom filters and changes, the data can be analyzed in any number of ways, making it possible to be pinging servers on Google about your stats for any occasion. In addition, those websites with multiple subdomains can be much more easily analyzed by using multiple views instead of separate accounts.

The Ability to Access Demographic Reports

Weirdly enough, many people never bother with generating reports that relate to demographics and interests of their audience. This is quite reckless and can lead to plenty of missed opportunities when analyzing data. The interests that your visitors share and their overall demographics can provide a gold mine of ideas and possibilities when creating new content, deciding which social media networks to use and how to frame your calls-to-action. Without a proper understanding of who is visiting your website, how can you adequately serve their needs? With information such as gender, age group and interests all available – but not often enough used – you have no excuse not to tap these reports for more information about your audience.

The Ability to Use Benchmarks

Metrics in and of themselves may provide some valuable insight into the health of a brand, but this data proves even more useful when compared against data from other competitors within the same niche. Google Analytics allows users to utilize benchmarking reports as one way to see how they stack up against the competition. Google is constantly pinging servers for Analytics data, and – without disclosing innately personal information – can be used to see how well your stats compare with others on email, organic search, social, direct visits and paid search. Success is more often measured in terms of how well you do relative to the rest, and not how you do in a vacuum.

Conclusion

Google Analytics truly is a powerful tool, but only for those who utilize its full potential. By creating multiple views, using demographic reports and accessing benchmark information within the system, your efforts for better SEO performance and audience engagement will not go unrewarded.