A handy trick for using Google Analytics site overlay

Hopefully anyone out there running a paid search campaign is also running analytics as well. Obviously, Google Analytics is a mighty powerful (and free!) tool that provides a wealth of information to improve your campaign(s). Now, one thing that GA does not do in its standard functionality is allow you to segment the site overlay report. Instead, you are given all information in one aggregate mass.

It would be much more insightful to be able to see how your PPC traffic acted from one page to the next, and to be able to use the overlay to show our findings to non-analytics types can be even more valuable. So how can we make this happen?

It really just takes a few easy steps.

1. On the main login page, select "add new profile" above your current profiles.
2. Select "Add a profile for an existing domain" and give it a name - "PPC traffic" works for me.
3. Go to "edit settings" for your new profile and create a name for your new filter. Select custom filter>include>campaign medium> ^(cpc|ppc)$ > and "no" for case sensitive

Note: if you have all of your campaigns setup as only cpc or ppc, you would only need one of them, not both.

Now, once you've had a few days to collect data, going into this profile will only show you your paid search traffic. The site overlay, as an extension, will only show this traffic as well. If you want to take it a step further, you could add an additional filter that includes only the campaign source and add the specific search engine you want to track.

Alright kids, that's all for today. Go try this out and let me know how it works.