The Google Analytics Cheatsheet
I’m an idiot.
Last week, someone commented on a post I wrote for SEOMOZ’s YouMOZ service that they’d like a Google Analytics Cheatsheet.
I wrote back “OK, I’ll do it.”
Guess what? Google Analytics has a ton of features. And even more tricks and hacks that folks have developed over the years. So this 2-page cheat sheet, which took 3 days and nights to pull together, is a tiny sliver of the whole system.
But it does cover the stuff that I’d want my staff to use. You can download it for free, no strings attached:
Version with links: The Google Analytics Cheatsheet
Printer-friendly version: The Google Analytics Cheatsheet, Printer Friendly
It’s licensed under the Creative Commons. If you re-use it, be sure to keep the attribution at the bottom.
If you have any cool ideas for improving it, let me know.
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Portent's Founder & CEO
Ian Lurie is founder and CEO of Portent Inc., an internet marketing agency that has provided internet marketing, including PPC, SEO, social and analytics services, since 1995. more >
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Thanks for going through the effort – at a first glance it looks really useful, and I already found 2-3 things I will try out later!
We need more “idiots” like you ;) Thanks again!
Very good PDF, especially the subdomains section. I’ve found that event tracking is a very good use of Google Analytics, maybe you could include a brief summary in another cheat sheet ;)
About a year ago I wrote a post on my site about it, I’m not proud of the post though, I’m rubbish at explaining things!
Great sheet!
Could you make it a 2 page document when printing?
Hi Ian:
This is great! Thanks a ton for putting it together.
One question: could you make it a bit more printer friendly? I try to print it and it’s so teeny I can’t even read it.
3 votes for the more printer-friendly version.
Thanks for all the work though. Awesome.
Brett
So helpful and appreciated! Great road map to Google Analytics. Thanks for your effort!
Loving this document. Thanks for putting it together. :)
-chris
Every post you make reminds me of all of the work I have yet to do. Thank you so much for the document and your efforts, they are greatly appreciated.
Thanks Ian!
Great stuff!
Had a look through and it does what it says on the tin.
Thanks for putting this together.
-Gareth
Hi Ian,
Glad you like the SEO Rankings hack. Thanks for the shout!
Nikki Rae(@analyticsgirl)
Awesome, Ian! Thanks for not only making this available for all of us, but for allowing others to share it under creative commons.
Josh
I am fortunate. I live not two blocks from Google headquarters, and two of my friends are programmers with Google.
I mentioned the strategies being used by SEO analysts the other day, especially regarding page rank, and one friend said. “Are we still offering that?”
His comment was that the programming at Google is so compartmentalized and dynamic that he would be surprised if any one person had a handle on the effects of any one “strategy” on the overall positioning of an entity on a search.
In other words, all this analysis goes on, and Google itself has folks employed who believe it irrelevant to the Google system itself.
Things change in the Google system so often that, although each change is made to get a better result on a search, that doesn’t easily translate into one or even many ways of an entity climbing to the top of a page result.
What works one week may be obsolete the next.
That’s just the way a living ever-evolving system works. To try to pin it down in any absolute manner is a hopeless task.
Great sheet, thanks for taking the time to put this together. Currently planning work around goals and goal tracking.
You made it so easy, a caveman can do it.
Thanks for taking the time. I’m off to go try a couple of your cheats.
Uh, locating pages with 0 organic traffic = priceless.
Thanks for doubling my workload yet again, Ian. ;)
Ian, this is so useful, thanks for the effort you’ve put on producing it. It is definitely handy to have all the essential tricks compiled in one single doc… cheers, David
The cheatsheet is great. Even better are the various blogs listed, I was only following Avinash Kaushik, will be adding the others to my list.
Great list. Especially liked the 404 error tracking part. Cant wait to implement it and see the results!
This is a great document. For webmasters and corporations, this is an extremely helpful tool to decipher some of the technical elements of Google Analytics.
The tough part is still getting executive buy-in for GA. As a web analytics consulting company, we are always recommending GA as a great mid-market solution but people are always worried about Google reading their data.
Tough sell as I can understand the concerns…
Interesting information. I wasn’t even aware that you were allowed to change the GA Javascript.
And I wasn’t aware either that you could filter GA information to filter out certain addresses (e.g. your own or your office’s).
I’ll have to play with this.
Thanks for the cheatsheet!