For many of us who are using Google Analytics for either our own sites or for client sites we know about the profiles that can be created, but are you taking advantage of what they offer you? Almost every new client I’ve seen that uses Google Analytics has only one profile setup. This allows you to see stats for your site as a whole, but there are great insights that you’re missing by not creating profiles that allow you to segment your traffic. In addition, the use or profiles allows you to avoid making mistakes that cause you to loose your data permanently by creating a test profile to test adjustments before you move it to your other profiles. Below is a list of profiles that should be used.

Base Profile
This profile will have no filters in place and should be capturing all data. You’ll see all activity that Google Analytics collects including your own internal traffic.

Testing Profile
This will allow you to test adjustments that you make before you push it out to any of your other profiles. This is to ensure that the changes you make are done correctly so that you don’t permanently loose any of the data that you actually need.

Main Site Profile
This is your main profile that has your basic filters in place such as excluding your own internal IPs. This is the profile that most people have setup and is usually the only profile they’ve created. It’s great for looking at your site as a whole, but it doesn’t give you the capabilities to segment your traffic.

PPC Profile
If you’re running PPC you definitely want to have a profile setup to show only your PPC traffic. That way you can move beyond just looking at conversion rates and ROI to see deeper into the behavior of your PPC traffic. In this way you can begin to learn what is happening with those visitors so that you can make adjustments that will increase your conversion rate and in turn increase you ROI.

Other Marketing Campaign Profiles
For the other marketing campaigns that you are undertaking, such as email or banner ads, you should also create unique profiles. This will allow you to look at each source in the same manner as you would with your PPC traffic.

Non Marketing Traffic Profile
I’ve found this to be a great profile to have since when you are running PPC campaigns you often will see a decrease in some of your overall site metrics. There are often groups of PPC keywords that while they deliver a good ROI because the CPC is very cheap also often do not stay on the site long or make it past the landing page. Since these are often high volume keywords they can pull down the overall top level site metrics. Because of this it’s a good idea to look at your non marketing (PPC, banners, email, etc.) traffic in a separate profile.

Top Traffic Driving Sources Profiles
Creating profiles for your top sources of traffic is also a good idea. Just because you receive a ton of traffic from a particular source doesn’t mean that the overall value of that traffic is any better then a source driving half the number of visitors. In order to find out you need to look at these sources to see the behavior that each exhibits to fully understand the impact they have on your site.

These are just a few examples of profiles that you can create. Based on the goals of your site you could come up with any number of other profiles that allow you to segment your traffic and evaluate it on its own or in relation to your other profiles.

In order to setup profiles you’ll need to understand filters. Depending on the type of profile you’re trying to setup the filter may be quite easy or it may take a bit more effort to configure. For more information on creating filters check out the Google Analytics Installation Guide.

Filed under: Analytics on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 by Nate Linnell |
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