Google Analytics

Predictive Analytics: Google Analytics can be used to create predictive models based on historical data to forecast future trends and patterns.

User Experience Optimization: Google Analytics can be used to measure and improve website performance, load times, and overall user experience, through features such as A/B testing and funnel analysis.

Customer Journey Mapping: Google Analytics can be used to track a customer's journey from initial visit to conversion, providing insights into the touchpoints and interactions that drive customer behavior.

Identifying User Behavior

Focusing on specific platforms where the users are

A/B testing creative

Improving above and below the fold navigation

Sharing insights with clients

Actually none

We developed a widget that allows other sites to embed pieces our content (as a teaser to click through to our site). By setting up a separate Google Analytics instance for exclusive use by the widget, we can isolate views and clickthrough rates on the widget without having to filter them out of our other site traffic (which we would have to do by default everywhere otherwise). So my suggestion is make use of the ability to setup multiple Google Analytics instances where appropriate.

By using non-interaction events, we are able to measure engagement and time on pages that would otherwise count as bounces with zero duration. This is important for separating the effect of a true bounce (this page wasn't useful to the user and they immediately left) from a softer bounce (they came and read the page for 5 minutes but then didn't see anything else interesting and so left the site). We set a threshold internally and ping the GA server every 30 seconds or so but only send interaction events after a minute to ensure the person was really engaged before we "debounce" them.

With Universal Analytics, we're able to send analytics events from the server side of our application to the same Google Analytics instance, which can be very useful in avoiding client-side race conditions and other threading issues. UA can also be used for tracking across not just server (vs client/browser) but mobile apps as well. If you haven't upgraded your Google Analytics instance to Universal, you should.

Finding painpoints in where we could improve on getting brokers to participate in contests

Visualizing the impact of paid search that has lead to organic conversions

Navigating year long trends / trends over time

So far, nothing out of the ordinary or that we didn't expect