An all-too-often overlooked feature of Analytics is the Map Overlay, located under the Visitors section. To the untrained observer, this tool simply shows you the regional breakdown of where your traffic to your site comes from around the globe, but with a little bit of refinement, you can use it to visually compare how users in different cities, states, and countries interact with your web marketing efforts, and understand how it impacts your bottom line.

While working with one of our clients from our home state of Michigan, we made great use of the Map Overlay to demonstrate a better way to target their PPC efforts.  Their brand is strong, drawing customers and users from all over the world to their locations.  Through the power of the Map Overlay, we were able to visualize where the site’s international traffic was coming from, and then combined it with their e-commerce reporting to see which countries converted the best.

Now, you don’t have to be a geography whiz to see that the Midwest made the strongest showing, with the Mitten State leading the pack, but this begs the question: if we’re getting most of our sales at home, how can we best reach out to our hometown crowd? We then segmented the e-commerce data for Michigan to see which traffic sources produced what revenue at what conversion rate. Our findings: Michigan residents were much more likely to convert from offline marketing efforts and organic searches; the company’s PPC efforts in the state were not drawing in the desired high-potential visitors they were in states like Illinois and Wisconsin.

Because of this analysis, we were able to re-target the client’s PPC efforts (and budget) away from Michigan to other more valuable states, and focus more of their SEO efforts on keywords that Michigan residents were converting on. Of course, this is just a single, isolated example of the depth of Map View’s utility and it bears noting that there are little gems just like this scattered throughout Google Analytics. We’ll offer tips and tricks as time goes on, but here’s one you can take with you right now: get Google Analytics on your darn site immediately. (We understand that this is more of an imperative than either a tip or trick, but you should listen and obey. You’ll thank us later)