On its own, Google Analytics is an invaluable resource for webmasters, marketers, and businesses. It helps you keep track of your site’s traffic, user base, and how they engage with your pages. These are the metrics that are essential for formulating any effective SEO and digital marketing strategy.
With that said, if you are serious about keeping yourself ahead of your competition, you should be making use of additional tools, add-ons, and plugins that bring enhancement to Google Analytics’ features and improve your data quality. Here is our list of the 8 recommend Google Analytics tools for businesses.
1. Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-on
This official add-on from Google lets you export your Google Analytics data to your Google Sheet, allowing you to leverage its features to get more powerful insights out of the data. It enables you to create reports from any number of views. From there you can run scripts and formulas to create additional valuable insights.
In addition, it can allow you to make use of Google sheet’s advanced visualization tools to better make sense of your Google Analytics data and host the generated visuals on external websites, with them being automatically updated as you run your report.
Do note that making full use of the add-on does involve a high learning curve, but the payoff is well worth it.
2. GA Checker
GA Checker is a free online web tool that, as its name implies, crawls through the entirety of your website and checks which pages contain Google Analytics code and which ones don’t. It’s a simple function but one that can save you a lot of trouble.
3. GA Debugger
Troubleshooting and debugging configuration and implementation issues on Google Analytics can be an exhaustive process, especially if you are not from a technical background.
GA debugger is an official Google Chrome extension that serves a simple but very useful purpose – enabling you to run the debug version of your Google Analytics JavaScript for all websites without the need to change your tracking code.
This can be extremely convenient for helping you find out what site data is being sent over to Google Analytics and debug your own website. Not only that, but it also can enable you to see how others, such as your competitors, have implemented their Google Analytics tracking.
4. Google Tag Manager
Let’s face it, even for an experienced web developer, the process of hardcoding, testing, and updating various custom Google Analytics tags into a website can be a messy and frustrating affair, and this is where Google Tag Manager comes in, making it much easier to deploy and manage tags as well as define the rules on where they should fire.
In addition to that, making changes to your custom tags is also a breeze with Tag Manager – simply edit them directly in the tool’s interface and publish changes for a website directly with a click of a button. Google Tag Manager also greatly facilitates with event tracking, allowing users to configure trigger type and firing the tag automatically upon user action.
5. Google Tag Assistant
Tag Assistant is another free extension from Google that makes it easier for you to verify, diagnose, and troubleshoot your installed Google Analytics tags in real-time.
Jump on any page, and it will instantly reveal what tags are present, report any errors, and suggest what improvements can be made. Through it, you can also run a recording of a typical user flow through your website and get an immediate detailed analysis of your tag set up.
6. Da Vinci Tools
Da Vinci Tools is an extremely useful Chrome extension that brings with it a number of enhancements to Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and other Google products. The whole set of features are too many to cover. For Google Analytics, some of the highlights include the ability to table heat maps, simplify data table comparison, calculate confidence intervals, add and remove segments, and turn off tracking for specified properties.
7. Google Analytics URL Builder
For tracking digital campaigns with Google Analytics, you need to generate campaign URLs set with UTM parameters. While Google’s own URL builder tool is quite helpful, this Google Chrome URL builder extension is even better.
It also features support for link shortening and provides the ability to create, import/export, and use an unlimited preset of URL tags.
8. RegExr
Regular Expressions are characters that are used to match search patterns within text. Thus, for Google Analytics, learning their use can be extremely useful. RegExr is a free online resource where you can learn how to create, use, and test regular expressions. It is also particularly helpful if you want to make your regular expression sequence is working properly before you deploy them to your websites.