I wrote a post published earlier today on IQWorkForce of WebMetricsGuru on Google Analytics Hacks – here’s the post in full plus some comments.

Google Analytics is a great platform for tracking what is actually happening on a website (providing there is enough enablement of the advanced features of Google Analytics to track everything you might want to capture). Most of the time people fail to properly set up Google Analytics and there are a few things you can do to make it easier to get the more out of your analytics implementation without too much extra effort.

Hack 1: – Install Google Analytics Tracking Script

I have been using a tracking script for several of my clients that I found is very useful and fairly easy to install. Immertia has  a great script that tracks all downloads, all email links and all outgoing links automatically for you as events – that is very helpful and very cool and something I think everyone should install.   The complete instructions are at Google Analytics: script to track outbound links and downloads on  Stephane Hamel’s blog in a post titled: Google Analytics: script to track outbound links and downloads::immeria::web analytics blog::Stephane Hamel

One thing you’ll have to keep in mind is all of the events tracked can not be made into Goals within Google Analytics – I understand this is a functionality Google Analytics may enable at some future time – but today you can do all the same tracking as virtual pageviews (which an be made into a Goal) but without the Goal tracking.

Hack 2: Build Advanced Segments so you can use them across site profiles

I have a couple of Advanced Segments I often use in all my profiles, regardless of the client – one of them is the Social Media Advanced Segment which is a regular expression that is easy to update – here’s what I have for my Social Media Segment – if more that should be in there, it’s easy enough to update the segment.

Source matches regular expression :

What this is great for is giving a client a quick and dirty assessment of their social media traffic – here’s a link to my advanced segment in case you want to start off right away – I hope you enjoy using Advanced Segments and if any of you know of many more social media sites that ought to be included, let me know.

Hack 3: Use Advanced Segmentation to track conversion pages or events

In many cases a website has multiple goals, just like the businesses it’s connected to, and there may be multiple places on a website that are considered evidence of a successful visit or transaction.  Normally, Google Analytics would look at all of the urls or pages where a conversion took place individually, but through Advanced Segmentation, you can put all to the “success urls” together into once segment and then look at behavior of successful visits vs. non-successful (where product or services wasn’t sold or is developing but didn’t take place yet) visits.

Hack 4: Use Reverse Goal Path to figure out how people reach your success pages.

I have several goals set up on my blog and one of my favorite reports is Reverse Goal Path – one of my goals is on based on those who read my ebooks and another on those who view my CV.  Reverse Goal Path allows me to easily see how people got to my content successfully – and did what I wanted them to (succeed at the goal).  With the newer features of Goals which allow you to set up more criteria – the pathing view looks more and more enticing.

There are more hacks I could share with you on Google Analytics – many of them you’ll find me posting on at my blog, Webmetricsguru.com – by subscribing to my RSS feed you’ll get constant updates  including more Google Analytics hacks.

Summary:

With any luck at all, and very little effort, you can vastly improve your analytics capabilities using a few simple hacks like the ones I have shared with you today.

Some Comments: I have more hacks than what I listed in this article and I’ll be publishing them shortly in a few other places besides WebMetricsGuru.     One thing to keep in mind – much of the “social” activity we’re most interested in measuring these days is going to be invisible to Google Analytics unless the activities involve the website and you have provided a unique landing page / url parameters, etc, to mark the activities.

Amused and have a wry smile on my face as I just happen to  read about one of my predictions on the Future of Social Media Monitoring get echoed in Smart Data Collective yesterday (see Social Search Engines: Radian6 vs. Google?) referring to an earlier seminar by  Altimeter Group Partners  featuring  Jeremiah Owyang and Charline Li that took place this February titled “Developing A Social Strategy”

n his post Hugh Macken waxes that ..

One observation in particular made by Mr Owyang has gotten me thinking about the effect of the slowly evolving semantic web on analytics platforms like Radian6 and ScoutLabs.

Here’s what Owyang had to say about Radian6, Scoutlabs, and the many other analytics platforms (the words after “produce” were hard for me to decipher):

“These products alone really are just a commodity and we should expect large search engines to produce [?tools like?] this in the future.”

I said the same thing last year in London well ahead of Altimeter Group, first in my presentation to Monitoring Social Media 09 on the Future of Social Media Monitoring.

As a result of that presentation in London (my slideshare doc had over 10,200+ views – I’m bet Jeremiah Owyang was accounted for at least one of them, as we do communicate from time to time, I came to write an article and post on Google getting into Social Media Monitoring in a big way.

And that brings me to Radian6 – who I’m getting a new appreciation for – I’ve used the platform for 2 years now and have noted that besides the charting abilities it has excellent workflow management and that comes to play here as the Radian 6 Engagement Console starts rolling out to the rest of us (customers) anyday now.

Google is likely to make a play for what is currently done in many of the monitoring platforms today – my guess is a PR like dashboard – I gave many ideas on how and why they would do it in my earlier post “I’ve been saying this is coming” – Big Brother & Google’s Entrance into Social Media Monitoring – from MyCustomer.com but what I didn’t say is that Google will never fill the niche and specialized needs that many organizations have.      I doubt that Google will put forward an Engagement Console, for example, when they get into Social Media Monitoring in a big way (but I could be wrong).

I don’t see Google out to deliberately destroy anyone’s business model – but if one of their engineering teams has an idea or notion they can do what other companies are currently making a living at – better – they have shown an utter disregard for those industries and just entered – it’s been referred to as the Google “Hive Mind”.

So I end this post by saying – I’m happy that Altimeter Group is echoing my own ideas from last November (and I’m sure I’m not the only one that had that idea about Google) but I don’t see it as a bad thing for Social Monitoring – I see it as good thing – once Google gets involved all the rest of the vendors will need to start working on data quality issues, consistency – standards around crawling data, around Sentiment Analysis and Tonality – the things that are missing now.

I was talking to a friend tonight who develops  mobile applications on the Android platform and came up with a sound generation program that works really neat – he showed it to me and said he learned to create some of the most interesting programs from totally undocumented features within the Android platform – like how it addresses sound chips and what you could do with that power.

So asked him …. are you telling me that you were “mucking around” and found stuff that hardly anyone knows how to do?

He replied, “Yes”.

Funny, that’s exactly what I end up doing with Social Monitoring platforms – playing with them and trying to make them do things they were not designed for -  I find things to do with various platforms I “play” with that are often more interesting than what the platform was developed for in the first place (one example).

Here’s another example using Sysomos to drive SEO Keyword Research – Sysomos was not really designed to do but lends itself well to.  How about Geo-Targeted Influential lists using FollowerWonk – again, not really what the tool was designed for – but it lends itself to find influentials.   Those were a couple of examples – but they came up because I was playing, testing out hunches, having questions.

Along the way I have had thoughts of what would improve programs and platforms that could be added – often by working through real life questions – things that can not be fully anticipated – you have to just try it and play, play, play.     Most businesses I have worked for don’t like to play, nope .. no one seems to want to pay anyone to play.

But that got us back to thinking Social Monitoring is “wide open” just as “Android” programming is – with rapidly evolving frameworks and hardware/firmware – no one “knows” how to do it right, 100% – the best of us are all “mucking around”.

That’s especially the case with Social Media.  I know people complain about Social Media Gurus, that everyone is calling themselves one – (well, not everyone) … but would they if anyone really knew how to do it well?   How many people do?

The same thing is true of Art and Artists … does anyone know how to “paint”?  A lot of people call themselves artists who play with art, but are they?   Well …… it depends.  But, if since no one knows that Art is …. actually, or what makes something special … anyone can call themselves an artist, and be correct about it.

And even if you knew it well … Social Media is changing so quickly that just keeping up with it .. the field could totally change every 6 months.  What worked today might not work in November – only constant play and experimentation will keep you ahead of the curve or current with it.

In fact, the best way to learn Android is to “play with it” – try stuff – see what happens, relax and observe – sometimes, you’ll see things at the most unexpected moments – when your not even looking.  That is true here too …. if your not allowed to play (and you should be payed for it … I believe – if it’s also something that is related to your job and your doing it on company premises) you will not get the best out of these platforms.   Of course, if your creative, you will create anyway – weather anyone pays you for it, or not.

But if the company pays for it … they own it – after all, isn’t that what Google did/does?   If the company won’t pay for …. they don’t own it (my view) (I guess, if your an entrepreneur – you want to own your ideas, so maybe that’s ok).

Only one company I know of is willing  to pay for play.. … Google.  I’m sure they are not the only company … just the only one that I know of.

Google pays people to play … 20% of their time is often spent “playing with a personal project” -  that way – Google gets the fruit of that labor and the employees feel more happy and fulfilled.

This is a good place to point out that many people exhibit creativity and creative solutions, on their own time and at work, but they may not be equipped or know how to do anything with those ideas.    In the current scheme of things – that creativity is often “wasted”.

A company like “Google” (who I often criticize, but for other things) might be much better at “harvesting creativity – taking ideas that would normally not make it outside of someone’s personal experiments , supporting the employee with resources and mentoring and helping, when they want to,  in to a product – because they are willing to let the employee create it on company time and pay them for it.

That is a insight that is often overlooked – harvesting Creativity might be Google’s real strength – more than anything else they do.

Could it be that Google’s secret isn’t all the other stuff – the simple design of it’s homepage or it’s focus on search? I think the main reason Google succeeds is they know how to play and pay and are better and more successful at it than anyone else, so far (yes there are some companies like 3M that had those policies for Researchers, etc).

Note: Success is relative – who knows – maybe 3M thinks they are more successful at letting employees play than Google.

As this study I cite points out – if you have a crucial task – your “play” time at Google will be scaled back – but afterwards, it is made up to the employee with extra time for their pet projects.

Certain types of work – client driven (PR and Advertising fall into that category -  so does Law),  operate in “Crisis” mode much of the time (often, due to poor communications and a lack of the right kind of planning)  but Play & Pay is a solution  even here (though I don’t have any case studies on hand to show how – so you’ll need to take my word).

Granted – when your working in a commodity type field or task – there is probably no room or reward for playing around creatively – competition for products and services will  reward the lowest price or fastest service (etc).    While we may complain as constrained employees but we are also consumers and like the best deal, too.

On the other hand …. it’s individuality and  “successful play” that is the most valued in this society, I think.

Even more than “hard work”.  We can work very hard, very earnestly, yet still not accomplish much.

Some of the most successful people in society might  be   “lazy” yet very smart, and managed to find an easier way to accomplish something that was really, really hard for them to do … via a creative solution (in order to make their life easier).

Almost  no one wants to pay for play.

But … I think, we probably can’t create anything of enduring good or of great worth without play.

It’s a paradox, and life is full of them.