5 Free Google Analytics Applications You Can’t Live Without…

10 Sep 2010 by Graham Lyons - Featured, News, SEO adobe, google, google analytics, Juicekit 1 Comment »

Did you know there are more than 70 ways to take your Google Analytics experience to the next level?

Continuing in Google’s traditional vein of open sourcing everything, the ‘Google Analytics Application Gallery’ is growing rapidly with a good number of applications already available for users to extend their use of Google Analytics experiences in a bunch of cool ways. Google Analytics on its own is a pretty delicious tool for SEO, but when keen eyed developers are given the opportunity to use this tool as a base from which to create new applications; which not only enhance the Google Analytics experience but take the data in a whole new direction, we are in for a real treat.

There are currently 70 applications available under the following category headings:

Business Intelligence, Campaign Management, Content Management, Data Collection, E-Commerce, Email Marketing, Mobile Solutions, Phone Call Tracking, Reporting Tools, Search Optimization, Site Audit, Social Media Analytics, Widgets & Gadgets.

Within this mountain of ‘appy’ goodness, there are some true gems which seem to successfully extend the Google Analytics experience or even added a whole new dimension you might never have considered. After some extensive research I have come up with the following list of apps you can’t live without!

Call Tracking by >ifbyphone

Historically call tracking has been a tricky thing for marketers to measure. You might be the biggest Google Analytics whizz kid in the world but without this app you will be missing out on an important range of data that can really help you focus elements of your campaign. This application allows you to track the call data generated by your website right alongside your regular web data using their cloud telephony service. This way you can accurately track how many calls you have generated for your client, or what pages are encouraging calls best and which are not. Here is their video to best explain how ifbyphone works:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6fTfQHz7OU&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

In 2008 this application won Internet Telephony’s product of the year and Unified Communications product of the year and it has received a lot of press this year not only for its relatively unique service but for its staff philosophy also. I think this data can make a real difference to your lead generation campaigns and help you scratch that metrics itch that every Google Analytics savvy webmaster has been suffering from for a while.

Analytics Visualisations by JuiceKit

Google Analytics API + JuiceKit = Analytics Visualisations. This lovely looking application takes all your Google Analytics data and paints it onto a rich canvas for your viewing pleasure and stat heavy goodness sucking. While Google’s own visualisations are not bad, Juice has a bit more of an eye for the exquisite. For example, they take the data about your referrers and compound them into a ‘Newsmap’ style display with every referrer represented by their weight.

While Juicekit is limited by the data in Google Analytics already, the visualisations seem to add an extra added kick to the data, taking it from being just ‘good data’ to good data which is easier to absorb and in a friendly presentation style. There is a handy timeline along the bottom of the page which shows you the volume of traffic your site has been receiving and the bounce rate (colour coded of course).

Here is a handy video which shows you how pretty it looks and how to set yourself up:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkgFK2rshUk[/youtube]

Easy Excel Data Import with Excellent Analytics

If you are in need of a tool to grab your Analytics data and slap it into an Excel document for use in wider reports, printing, sending to non-GA users and combining with offline data, then look no further. Excellent Analytics is by far the easiest to use tool released so far for working Google Analytics data into your Excel spreadsheets. The sheer time saving benefits of this plug-in alone will be worth so much to your business if you have in the past spent hour’s painstakingly transferring data into Excel by hand. Like all the best innovations, someone has seen a problem needing fixing and done it in a smooth and easy manner.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRsiAUtslx0[/youtube]

As you can see from this video tutorial, the process of importing data is incredibly simple and very adaptable. As a free tool, it is in the same realm as Google’s own Custom Reports and even paid offerings like Omniture.

Mobile Analytics

There are a whole host of excellent mobile apps for checking and manipulating your Google Analytics data on your mobile. Please see my previous blog “What Are the Top 5 Google Analytics Apps for Mobiles” to find out which one is best for you.

Tracking for Adobe Flash with Sprout Engage Platform

One of the hardest things for SEO’s to track has been Flash Content. A while back Google had a chin wag with Adobe and came up with a tracking solution (basically a translation of the old GA tracking code into ActionScript 3 programming language) to allow flash developers to use Google Analytics to track the success of their work in campaigns. This means that you can use GA to track embedded videos, widgets, micro sites and online games, to name but a few. Google even provided tracking libraries for Flash, as well as Flex, which include:

Flash visual component
Flash AS3 library
Flex MXML component
Flex AS3 library

The whole thing is of course open sourced so if you like a tinker, then check out the AS3 code base under Apache 2 license here.

Sprout is a flash advertisement developer which has particularly appreciated this new integration. Here is a video diagram of how the integration works:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXdV4LnF3v8&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

There are indeed, many other extremely useful applications for Google Analytics which not only enhance and extend the GA features but often bring you information you didn’t even know you needed to know until you knew it!

What Applications would you like to see? You never know, if you mention it often enough, it just might get made…

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