For those of you that use Google Analytics for your website, you may have noticed the new addition to the view bar. It’s the Pivot function. This little button can work wonders. It is a fantastic tool for quickly seeing where your visitors are coming from, and to see what’s their favorite content from those sources.

Back in September I wrote this post: Targeting Sources for Better Visitors. That post was about getting more page views by tapping into the right audience. Using Google’s new pivot option, you could drastically improve your understanding of your audience.

Using Pivot with Top Content

When looking at your top content using Google Analytics the default view is table, and you get the basic information. You see what pages are the most popular, their bounce rate, time on page, stuff like that. You don’t see what the driving forces are though.

When you click the pivot option, all of a sudden the top content appears a great deal differently. Top content is ranked by source.

Looking at the screenshot from above you can see how my home page (/index.php) is not the top dog when it comes to direct visitors, and if I were to sort Stumble’s traffic, my home page ranks 11th. Using the pivot function with top content, you can very quickly see what Google visitors  like best.

Pivot by Source

I typically like to look at the referring site source for this blog, but if you look at the top left of the screenshot above you will see a drop down box where you can pivot by all sorts of options, and not just for top content. You can pivot by browsers, locations, ad campaigns, and another favorite of mine new and returning visitors.

Looking at new and returning visitors for this site I found that my Twitter Toolbar page (almost a year old now), is the number one source of all my new visitors. Looking at my returning visitors the number one source is the home page followed by my usability analysis.

Pivot Anything

Your not stuck using the pivot function for your top content. It’s visible on most of the Google Analytic pages. A nice one to test out would be to select search engine traffic under Traffic Sources, and then pivot that data selecting city from the drop down source button. I can quickly see I get a lot of search engine traffic from London, NY, and San Francisco.

If you sell a product online pivot can play a huge roll in your marketing game, and you can almost pinpoint exactly where to market. Very cool tool by Google that quickly gives you insight to your visitors.

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