If you’re new to Google Analytics, then you’ll definitely need to know how to use these three tools in order to get the most out of your data:

1. referral exclusions
2. regular expressions (regex)
3. User Explorer

Referral Exclusions

If you’re not using referral exclusions, then your source/medium data can get distorted.

For example, say that your website has an e-commerce store that takes your customers to a 3rd-party webpage to process credit card payments at paymentprocessor.com, and then brings them back to a receipt page that’s located on your website.

Without excluding the third-party webpage as a referral, all of your reports will show the referral source of all your online sales as paymentprocessor.com instead of the true source of your traffic, such as Google, Facebook, e-mail, ads, etc.

This means that you won’t know where your sales or coming from so that you can figure out where to prioritize your time in attention to drive more sales.

Regex (regular expressions)

Although different computer languages have their own regex syntax, you’ll probably be using JavaScript for front-end website purposes.

The important thing for you to know is that regex allows you to filter words and sentences to include or exclude specific patterns of letters and numbers.

So when you’re creating a report in Google Analytics where you’re only interested in specific activities such as sales, chats, form submissions, emails, phone calls, etc., you’ll be able to get the events you want include in your report while excluding the rest.

User Explorer

So, you just got a new sale on your website. Great!

Where’d they come from? When? What did their journey through your website look like? Which pages did they visit? What did they click on? Which goals did they reach?

User Explorer is the tool that gives you all of these answers. When it comes to tracking an individual website visitor’s path through your website, you can’t beat it. The only downside is that you can’t do much sorting or filtering on specific fields.

With that said, check out this tool every time you make a sale to see what you can learn from your customers. You’ll be glad you did.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is an awesome tool, but without the right know-how you won’t be able to access its full power. Don’t get stuck at the beginner level. Keep learning so that you can keep growing by learning more about your customers and their preferences every single day.