When Google announced the lauch of segments and custom reports functionalities, that was an awesome news. But the problem was that we could’nt share segments and custom reports over different users. Now we can share them with our clients or collegues. Advanced segments sharing When creating a segment, you have a ist at the bottom of the page letting you make the segment available on the profile of you choice. And when you’re viewing the segments management page, you can withdraw a segment from the profile you’re in. Custom reports sharing This is the same as advanced segments management. Appliying the custom report to a profile or another. And when you’re viewing the custom reports management page, you can withdraw a custom report from the profile you’re in. Conclusion Sharing enterprise specific reports and segments was key for any user deeply involved into analysis. But you should think at the start of you web analytics project who will need what reports as as this is the user rights for one or another profile that will give access or not to segments and custom reports. And as you know, a new profile will only provide data starting the day of its creation. Please have a look at this new web analytics book (written in french). Jacques Warren and Nicolas Malo says that you should start defining your business objectives, your KPI’s and the reports each people involved will need. This will be key to set up Google analytics accordingly from the start of your web analytics strategy.
This allows you to filter the rows (only table based reports) on different metric conditions (as you would create a segment).
The pivoting and secondary dimensions functionality and this new advanced table filters functionality let you perform in-depth, on the fly analysis without having to export your data to spreadsheet tools.
Please watch the video that illustrate how to use Google analytics reports advanced filters (i.e. filter thousands of keywords to identify just the keywords with a bounce rate less than 30% and that referred at least 25 visits.).
This book is well written. There is a good methodology given here. There are a lot of actionable insights.
And the good thing is that authors don’t put at first place web analytics tools choice. And I agree with this, as there are several very important steps to go thourgh before thinking about one or another tool.
If you haven’t defined what your KPI’s are and what dashboard you need, then it is no use thinking about a tool in particular.
The other good thing about the methodoly they are giving is that dashboards (final results) have to be defined as much as possible with advertisers at the start of a project to prevent from any disappointment.