You may have noticed in your local supermarket, coffee shop or video store an exciting new item – Google Analytics Gift Cards (beta)! They’re good for redeeming in any Google Analytics profile for additional intelligence in your Intelligence reports. And the great part is, you can give them away to friends or colleagues who you think could benefit from more Intelligence. They’re the perfect gift for your boss’s upcoming birthday.

So why would you need additional Intelligence? For starters, you’ll get new alerts in your Intelligence reports that are only available by redeeming the Google Analytics Gift Card. The new alerts are even more sensitive and smart. For example, a new alert will be triggered when the system finds one of your pages a little too loud or noisy from a design standpoint, or if your checkout process is annoying, or whenever there’s use of blinking, neon, non-hyperlinked text on your site.

The Gift Cards offer the new Intelligence Alerts in amounts of 5, 10 and 500 – for people who really, really need more Intelligence. They’re still in beta, but should be available in a store near you at some point in the coming weeks most likely, or not.

Warning: Purchasing an Analytics Intelligence Gift Card will not magically turn you into an analytics ninja.

Posted by The Google Analytics Team

Step 2: From a secret undisclosed location at the Googleplex Avinash Kaushik & Nick Mihailovski answer them. : )

We are also thrilled to present Lloyd from Cape Town with the “Analysis Ninja of the Episode” award for his excellent question about the differences about custom variables and advanced segments. Lloyd, just send us an email and we’ll send you an autographed, personalized, copy of Web Analytics 2.0.

Here is the list of last weeks questions.

In this action-packed episode we discuss:

• (0:38) Why you see differences between clicks and visits from Facebook metrics
• (2:35) Setting up goals to match multiple conditions
• (3:55) The best way to create inverse advanced segments
• (4:36) Is there a way to get the path of sources for a user?
• (5:44) Comparing Website Optimizer experiments against different success criteria
• (7:30) How you should track banners for internal campaigns
• (9:01) Targeting visitors using Google Analytics data
• (10:25) What Google Analytics reports for URLs that get rewritten by the server
• (11:41) Is it “cheating” to track virtual pageviews on tabs?
• (13:12) How to group and compare keywords in the longtail
• (15:18) Differences between custom variables and advanced segments
• (18:32) Best ways to test regular expressions on your own data
• (20:30) Testing if multiple tracking codes on the same page are sending data
• (21:45) Generating dashboards for data across profiles
• (23:08) Why conversion goals can be over 100%
• (25:14) Whats up with providing a podcast of web analytics TV?
• (25:53) An easy / automated way to track the download of PDF files
• (27:22) Using events to track more realistic time on site
• (29:11) Removing extra referrals from Google Analytics

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:

• Using regex to configure goals and filters in Google Analytics
• Using the BTBuckets / Google Analytics integration to target segments of users
• How to diagnose and troubleshoot data sent to Google Analytics
• 3rd party tools to test regular expressions
• Compare data across accounts with dashboards from Trakkboard
• Automate tracking download links using the Analytics Engine
• Removing extra referrals from Google Analytics

As always, if you need help setting up Google Analytics or leveraging the advanced configuration options, we recommend hiring a Google Analytics Certified Partner.

If you found this post or video helpful, we’d love to hear your comments. Please share them via the comment form below.

This series would not be possible without your awesome questions. Please submit them on our public Google Moderator site, and while you are there don’t forget to vote for your favorite questions. Avinash and Nick will answer them in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Thanks!

The graph on top of most Google Analytics reports is designed to give you a quick overview of your site’s performance over time. From the graph it’s easy to spot trends and understand how your traffic has changed over time. One request we heard was the ability to quickly focus the graph on a particular row of data. While you could do this with a drill-down report or using an advanced segment, we saw this as an opportunity to provide an easy way to do quick comparisons in the new Google Analytics.

Say for example you’re examining your site’s traffic by traffic source. You can see there are peaks and valleys in the traffic, but if you want a sense of the major contributors, you need to dig into the table.

With Plot Rows, you can graph any two rows alongside the overview. You can then easily determine how much a row contributes to the whole. Or you can compare two lines against each other to look for comparison trends.

To use Plot Rows, just tick any one or two checkboxes next to the rows you want to plot, then at the bottom of the table, hits the Plot Rows button.

Remember, that some reports like New vs. Returning default to a Pie Chart view. This doesn’t mean you can’t use Plot Rows, just switch the view to Data, and you’re good to go.

Here’s a quick video showing this in action:

When looking at continuous metrics, like Visits, Plot Rows is most revealing when exploring the rows of similar scale, for example to see how they contribute to the whole and change over time. When looking at rows at different scales the graph will be more informative when using percentage metrics like Bounce Rate.

In this example, we’re looking at organic search traffic driven to the Google Store from Google and Bing. One would not expect that Bing users are actively looking to buy Google merchandise (like this awesome t-shirt), so the number of visits is understandably low. Since the traffic from Bing is relatively low, the graph doesn’t share much we didn’t already know from the table.

In new version of Analytics you can quickly graph any of the metrics in the scorecard (the bar on top of the graph) by clicking on the metric in the scorecard. Looking at Bounce Rate, we can see that over time the Bounce Rate from Google search (orange) has dropped, which has reduced the overall Bounce Rate of the site (blue), while the Bounce Rate from Bing (green) has more or less stayed constant.

You can use Plot Rows in just about any report that has a data table. Let us know if you find a place you want this functionality that doesn’t already have it. Also, we’re planning to give a bunch more of you access to the new version this week. Be on the look out!