Video Transcript

Hi guys Matthew Woodward here and I have a quick tip today that will teach you how to use Google analytics to get more traffic to your website. I’ll show you exactly how to create a custom profile and setup my personal magic filter and finally, how I use this technique daily to grow traffic! So let’s login to analytics.

So this is the main analytics screen and if we come and have a look at traffic sources here you can see that a third of my traffic comes from referring sites.

And if we have a look at those you can see that we just get a big long list of the domains there’s no way to get a list of the URLs that sent you traffic. You have to click into the domain and then you only get the path you don’t actually get the full URL.

Which is a bit of a problem because it’s nice to know which URLs are sending you traffic and be able to respond to that.

So we have to create a custom report and then also apply a certain filter and that allows us to extract some user defined values and you can see in my report here custom > user defined and now you get a list of the URL’s sending you traffic.

I can also click on goals up here and see which of those are providing the best conversion rates, which are subscribing to my email list, which are clicking on affiliate links and things like that.

So you might be wondering how we actually use this to get more traffic.

Well first of all if we take a look at the URL’s that’s a post on BlackHatWorld there might be outstanding questions on their or responses and I will reply to that which will bump the thread to the top of the forum and bring in more traffic.

Problogger, I got featured on Problogger so there maybe comments there to respond to, people asking questions and things that will again bring more traffic.

We’ve got another forum topic from BlackHatWorld another from TrafficPlanet there, the TrueValhala blog included me in my income report again there’s comments and I have actually since added him on twitter we’ve had a few conversations through email and might end up doing a couple of things together.

So you can see how having this report available, if I make a full list of URLs here how you can work through this list, get in touch with people – look all this different threads here that I can answer and bump to bring more traffic.

Now I do this on a weekly basis and once you have set this report up once you can just come in here browse to it and export it as a spread sheet and just working through the list. Like I said I do this on a weekly basis and is a great way to keep traffic coming from targeted sources that’s really easy to do.

So let’s take a look at how we actually go about setting up this report.

Now this is really really easy to do. So this is your normal analytics screen, if you come and click on Admin and then select your profile. You can see that this is my referrals profile that I’ve just shown you but I’m going to show you how to create this so click on your actual profile here.

And then go to profile settings, copy this profile and we are going to name it so I’m just going to name it MatthewWoodard.co.uk tutorial and click on copy profile.

And you will see the new profile is available here, so select it and we go onto filters, new filter and we can create a new filter and give it a name.

I’m going to call it referring URLs and it is a custom filter that is advanced and in field A -> Extract A we want referral in here. And in this box you want to (.*) and these you leave blank.

Output to constructor is user defined and in this field $A1.

Field A required Yes, field B required No, override output field Yes, case sensitive No. And then click on Save.

And that is it, that is the custom profile and filter ready to rock and roll. So if we jump into the profile now which you can do by coming up here and you can see the new profile there.

Oh one moment we are stuck in admin, there we go. So at the minute there is no visit it takes 24 hours to start populating the report but once you’ve done that you do actually need to create an advanced segment and I will show you why.

If we come to my report here, custom, user defined. You’ll actually see there’s quite a lot of junk that comes in here. There are some results for some split tests at the moment, I’m actually split testing my logo at the moment which is providing some very interesting results I’ll be publishing that shortly.

But we are also getting results from Google & Facebook so to remove those if you come to advanced segments here, my one I have called excludes and if I apply that you will see all of the Google & Facebook stuff disappears.

So to create that you just click on new custom segment and I will show you how I have got mine setup here.

You can ignore these 3 they are for my split test but you will say exclude, user defined value contained www.google and you want to click to add an and statement, exclude user defined value containing www.facebook and if there are any junk results you can preview the segment down here.

If there are any other junk results let me show you removing inbound.org because that doesn’t provide the full URL quickly.

Add And statement, add a dimension or metric, user defined value, change that to exclude containing www.inbound and if we preview the segment here. Oh its removed www.inbound.org but not without the w.

So we can tweak this to be inbound.org, preview the segment again and you can see those results have gone now.

So you do need to quickly setup that custom segment just to remove any junk results but that is it, that is how you get a full referring URL list out and you can begin working through these to increase traffic further to your blog. It’s as simple as that!

Thanks for watching the tutorial and if you want more great tips like this then head over to my blog and subscribe right now, see ya!