I was surprised to realize today that Google Analytics doesn’t provide an easy way to view the unique visitors to your website broken down by country. You can see Visits by country, average pages viewed per visit (and hence, total page views by country can be calculated) and a few other metrics, but maddeningly, you just can’t get uniques by country – something that marketers often ask you for if you want to sell ad space on your website.
Here’s Google’s official word on this.
I found one workaround that suggests creating a new profile and applying a filter for just that country you are interested in – so basically all the stats within that profile report will be for that one country by default, giving you naturally uniques for that country. The limitations with this workaround is that for one, it will only apply to new data from that point forward as new profiles do not operate on past data already collected, and secondly, you need to create a new profile for every country you have an interest in having this data for. Rather cumbersome but I guess better than nothing.
Thanks for this useful workaround. Although Google Analytics is a great tool – and don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing tool since it’s free – I find data drilling a bit frustrating unless one wants to spend hours customising reports and putting filters. The country-specific data has always bit troublesome for me since my main client’s blog is read all around the world. If you run an online business across borders (like the one you work in, I believe), then this kind of info is actually very crucial, since localization actually involves a lot more than simple translations.