I love Google Analytics. It is astonishing to have such an incredibly advanced statistics tool at one's disposal for free. I also believe most owners of small to midsize websites do not get the most out of it, I'm certainly guilty of that. That's why I first want to briefly revisit two earlier posts concerning features you may not expect in Google Analytics:

Measuring your site's speed as seen by your visitors

Change a single line of code in your GA tracking javascript and GA will then sample your site's loading speed. This is a big deal. You can easily see how your site performs based on different bandwidths, locations, browsers, any dimension you like. There's enterprise solutions charging you tons for such a service. In GA it's free, and all you need to do is to add a single line of code.

In-page Analytics

My absolute favorite. We know we have tons of metrics available in GA, but its hard to bring them down to meaningful conclusions. In-page analytics changes that. You will see your page as you designed it, and visually attached you see the click-through data, amongst other metrics. 

This is the first-ever easy way to test your design. Recently I wanted to redesign parts of the navigation of a site, yet I was worried that users would be confused, as some options would be relabeled or removed alltogether. Until I learned that option in question was hardly ever used at all. It is quite powerful to make design decisions based on data, rather than gut feel, personal preference or emotion. This also seriously strengthens your position amongst stakeholders, in case you have to defend a design decision.

Real-time analytics

Ok, so those were the earlier posts. They are game changers, please check them out in detail.

The new one, which actually has been available for several weeks now, is Google Analytics realtime. Where all of GA's former metrics had data with a delay of about one day, realtime analytics show you those metrics as they occur. Perhaps you tried to launch a viral campaign in social media, this way you can check the actual effect as it happens. You can also learn about traffic patterns related to timezones. 

The opening screenshot shows a glimpse of the realtime view, with the currently active visitors, their locations, target pages and more. Truth is to be told though, this really is only interesting in case you have critical mass, meaning a large website with many visitors.

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