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Google Analytics course notes...

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Introducing Google Analytics Purchase Funnel  Acquisition involves building awareness and acquiring user interest  Behaviour is when users engage with your business  Conversation is when a user becomes a customers and transacts with your business Digital Analytics in Practice Different kinds of businesses can benefit from digital analytics:  Publishers can use it to create a loyal, highly-engaged audience and to better align on-site advertising with user interests.  Ecommerce businesses can use digital analytics to understand customer’ online purchasing behaviour and better market their products and services.  Lead generation sites can collect user information for sales teams to connect with potential leads. The process of collecting Analytics data Tracking a Website To track a website, you first have to create a Google Analytics account. Then you need to add a small Javascript tracking code to each page on your site. Every time a user visits a webpage, the tracking code will collect anonymous information about how that user interacted with the page.     

How many users visited a page How many users bought an item Language the browser is set to Device and operating system used Traffic source – what brought users to the site in the first place

Every time a page loads, the tracking code will collect and send updated information about the user’s activity. Google Analytics groups this activity into a period of time called a “session”. A session ends after 30min of inactivity. Processing and Reporting When the tracking code collects data, it packages that information up and sends it to Google Analytics to be processed into reports. When Analytics processes data, it aggregates and organizes the data based on particular criteria like whether a user’s device is mobile or desktop, or which browser they’re using. There are also configuration settings that allow you to customize how that data is processed. Eg. You may want to apply a filter to make sure your data doesn’t include any internal company traffic, or only includes data from a particular country or region. 

Once Analytics processes the data, it’s stored in a database where it can’t be changed

The Analytics account structure All of your Google Analytics accounts can be grouped under an “Organization” which is optional. This allows you to manage multiple Google Analytics accounts under one grouping. When you create an account, you also automatically create a property, and within that property, a view for that account. But each Analytics account can have multiple properties and each property can have multiple views. The Google Analytics account determines how data is collected from your websites and manages who can access that data. Typically, you would create separate Analytics accounts for distinct businesses or business units. Each Google Analytics account has at least one “property”. Each property can collect data independently of each other using a unique tracking ID that appears in your tracking code. You may assign multiple properties to each account, so you can collect data from different websites, mobile apps, or other digital assets associated with your business. Eg. You may want to have separate properties for different sales regions or different brands. This allows you to easily view the data for an individual part of your business. View Settings Just as each account can have multiple “properties”, each property can have multiple “views.” You can use a feature called Filters in your configuration settings to determine what data you want to include in the reports for each view. Eg. Separate views for continents, separate view for external traffic only 1. New views only include data from the date the view was created and onwards. When you create a new view, it will not include past data. 2. If you delete a view, only administrators can recover that view within a limited amount of time. Otherwise, the view will be permanently deleted. The view level also lets you set Google Analytics “Goals”. Goals are a valuable way to track conversations, or business objectives, from your website. A goal could be how many users signed up for an email newsletter, or how many users purchased a product User Permissions You can assign permissions to other users at the account, property, or view level. Each level inherits permissions from the level above it. For example, if you have access to an account, then you have the same access permissions to the properties and views underneath that account. But if you only have access permissions for a view, then you won’t have permission to modify the property or account associated with that view.

By clicking “Admin”, Google Analytics lets you set user permissions for: “Manage Users,” “Edit,” “Collaborate,” or “Read and Analyze.”    

“Manage Users” lets users add or remove user access to the account, property or view. “Edit” lets users make changes to the configuration settings. “Collaborate” allows users to share things like dashboards or certain measurement settings. “Read and Analyze” lets users view data, analyze reports, and create dashboards, but restricts them from making changes to the settings or adding new users.

How to set up account views with filters To see what views are currently available for a property, click the “admin” tab at the top. Then, under View, click “View Settings.” You can see that when you first create a property, Analytics automatically sets up an unfiltered view called “All Web Set Data.” This contains all of the raw, unchanged data you collected for the property. Setting up a Test View If we configure something incorrectly, we may inadvertently lose data we want to collect, so it’s best to test all of our configurations in a test view first.   

To set up a test view, at the top left, click the view selector pull-down menu. Then select “Create new view”. We’ll name this view “Test View” Now click “Create view.”

We recommend adding a setting to the test view that filters your data for automated bot and spider traffic.  

For this Test View, select “View Settings.” Under “Bot Filtering,” select “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders”.

Creating a Master View This will be the view that we use to do all of our reporting and analysis. We can simply copy the test view and rename it. By copying the view, all of our settings and filters we created like excluding bot traffic will also be included in the new view. Adding Additional Filters Now we have three views that can be used to back-up our data, test new analytics configurations, and do our daily reporting and analysis.

But we still need to add filters to determine what data we want Analytics to display in each view.   

In the right-hand column under “View”, change the view selector from “Master View” to “Test View.” This will ensure we are creating our filters in the right view. Now click “Filters.” The click “add Filter.” We’ll name this filter “Exclude internal traffic.”

Analytics offers two kinds of filters, “Predefined” and “Custom” Filters. Predefined filters are templates for the most common filters you’ll use. Custom filters let you design a filter to include, exclude, or modify data.      

Next, click “Select Filter Type.” Then select “Exclude.” Now click “Select source or destination” Select “traffic from the IP addresses.” Click “Select expression.” And select “that are equal to.” Now we’ll type in the IP address we want to exclude.

Once we’ve saved this filter and applied it to a view, Google Analytics will check the IP addresses of traffic to the web property and exclude those that match the filter. To test that the filter is excluding internal traffic, click Reporting. Then, click “RealTime” in the left-hand navigation. Now click “Overview.” This shows you a report of real-time traffic to your website. If you’re on your internal network, you should notice that your internal user traffic should decline over the next 30 minutes. Once the filters have taken effect, Analytics won’t collect any internal activity for the IP address you filtered. Once you’ve verified this filter is working in your test view, you can add it to your master view.    

Click Admin tab, then select the View pull-down menu Select “Master View” Click “Filters”, then “Add Filter” Select radio button for “Apply existing Filter”

Note that if you apply multiple filters to a view, each filter will be applied in the order they appear in your filter settings. So if you have two filters, the data will pass through the first filter before passing through the second.

The Google Analytics Interface Navigating Google Analytics Account/Property/View switcher

If you have multiple accounts, properties, or views set up, you can easily switch between them by clicking on the pulldown menu with the title of your View in the upper-left corner. Alert Icon Clicking the bell icon in the upper right shows you alerts about your Google Analytics properties and views Alert Menu This may include data that is not collecting properly or a setting that needs to be optimized. Feedback, Help, and Settings At the top right of your Analytics view are two more icons:  The “?” icon lets you send feedback to Google Analytics or search help articles  The user icon lets you switch between different Google accounts, manage your current Google account, or sign out Customization The customization section allows you to create custom reports, specific to your business Left-hand navigation To navigate between reports, you’ll use the navigation on the left. Clicking on each of these sections will expose the reports that belong to each section Real-Time Reports Real-Time reports let you look at live user behaviour on your website including information like where your users are coming from and if they’re converting. Audience Reports Audience reports show you characteristics about your users like age and gender, where they’re from, their interests, how engaged they were, whether they’re new or returning users, and what technology they’re using Acquisition Reports Acquisition reports show you which channels (such as advertising or marketing campaigns) brought users to your site. This could include different marketing channels such as:  Organic (or unpaid search  CPC (cost per click or paid search)  Referral (traffic that comes from another website)  Social (from a social network)  Other (a group of low volume traffic sources) Behaviour Reports Behaviour reports show how people engaged on your site including which pages they viewed, and their landing and exit pages. With additional implementation, you can

even track what your users searched for on your site and whether they interacted with specific elements. Conversion Reports Conversion reports allow you to track website goals based on your business objectives. Admin The Admin section contains all of your Google Analytics settings such as user permissions, tracking code, view settings, and filters.

Audience Overview Report Date range At the top of every report is a date-range. This lets you set the time period in which you want to analyze report data. Date range selector When you change the date range, it affects all of the reports in your view. Date Range Comparison You can also compare data from two different date ranges by clicking “Compare to” and adding in the date range you wish to compare. This lets you see how your business changed over time. Segment Picker Segments are ways to look at a specific data set and compare metrics. The default segment includes all of the users that visited your site in the given date range. Line Graph Below the segment picker are the different metrics of the Audience Overview report shown in different formats. The most prominent is a line graph that by default shows a data point for the number of users on each day over your selected date range. Duration Selector If you wish to view this data more specifically, you can change the data points to show hourly, weekly, or monthly, as well. This can be especially helpful when looking at large date sets. If you are looking at data over a single day, the view will default to hourly. Metric Selector You can change the metric shown from users to a different metric by selecting the drop-down menu under the Overview tab. Analytics lets you compare this to a second metric over the same time period by clicking “Select a metric”. Graph Annotator Clicking on the small arrow at the bottom of the line graph lets you annotate the graph with helpful notes to add business context to your data. Metrics

There are a number of helpful metrics beneath the line graph:  Sessions – the total number of sessions for the given date range.  Users – the total number of users that visited for the given date range.  Pageviews – the total number of times pages that included your Analytics tracking code were displayed to users. This includes repeated viewings of a single page by the same user.  Pages per session – the average number of pages viewed during each session  Average session duration – the average length of a session based on users that visited your site in the selected date range  Bounce rate – the % of users who left after viewing a single page on your site and taking no additional action  % of new sessions – the % of sessions in your date range who are new users to your site. New vs. Returning Users To the right of the metrics is a pie chart illustrating the % of new vs. returning users. Dimensions and Metrics Clicking into the dimensions on the bottom left of the report, will allow you to see the top 10 dimensions and metrics in each category. Language Dimension The default dimension selected in the Audience Overview report is “Language.” You can also select “country” or “city” to view the top 10 values for those dimensions. To view metrics about what technology people are using to view your site, click Browser or Operating System. Understanding full reports The “Summary” view is a summary of the dimension categorized by Acquisition, Behaviour, and Conversion metrics. “Site Usage” shows behaviour metrics like users, sessions per user, new users, sessions, pages per session, and average session duration. “Goals” will show metrics based on the number of goals you’ve configured and will only show up if you’ve set up goals in Google Analytics. “Ecommerce” will show you transaction metrics if you’ve set up ecommerce tracking in Analytics. Below the graph is the main data table. The first column shows the current dimension. Each row represents a different segment of traffic in the specific dimension. You can analyze the data table in different ways. Clicking on each column in the table toggles the data sort between ascending and descending. By default, Analytics sorts this report by users. It can also be useful to filter the data table to focus only on the segments of traffic that are significant. Use the filter field at the top of the table to include only rows where

the primary dimension contains your filter term. Eg. You may want to look at data for a specific country like India, so rather than scroll through the table, you could simply type “India” into the filter field and Analytics will show you only data for segments that include the term “India.” “Advanced,” next to the search box, lets you apply even more sophisticated rules for filtering. Report Visualization  Next to the “advanced” link, there are several different visualization options:  The “data table” view is the default visualization for most reports. This organizes your data in a table broken out by acquisition, behaviour, and conversion metrics for the audience and acquisition reports.  The “pie chart” icon creates a pie chart based on your data. This helps you compare the percentages of a whole such as how many users are on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.  The “performance” view shows a bar graph of your data. This helps you compare individual segments side by side like which countries bring in the highest traffic.  The “comparison view” shows you a bar graph to quickly see whether each entry in the table is performing above or below the site average for the selected metric. If the value for a given row is better than average, it appears green. If it’s below average, it appears red.  The “Pivot” view creates a pivot table in which both rows and columns can show different dimension values for comparison. For example. A pivot table could show The Google Store the bounce rate and number of sessions for each landing page and device type. How to share reports Sharing and customizing reports Once you’ve found meaningful data in your reports, Google Analytics offers several ways to share or refer back to that report under the report name at the top    

“Save” lets you create a link to the specific report in the Customization area in the left-hand navigation under “Saved Reports.” “Export” lets you save a report to your desktop in different file formats such as PDF. “Share” lets you email a copy of the report as an attachment “Edit” lets you customize the report content by adding metric groups, filters, or additional views. This creates a new report in the Customization area of the left-hand navigation under “Custom Reports.”

Hover over the green check icon next to the report name to view the percent of sessions that the report is based on. Sometimes, Analytics has to crunch through so much data, that in order to return your report faster, it will only analyze a sample of the data collected. This is called “sampling” because it returns an estimate of the exact count based on a sample of your data. To change the report sampling rate, mouse over the green data quality icon and click the pulldown menu. If you want your data to be more accurate and don’t mind the

additional response time, leave this set to “Greater Precision”. If you wish to speed up the time it takes to generate a report and are willing to sacrifice more precise metrics, select “Fast response.”

How to set up dashboards and shortcuts Dashboards Dashboards are flexible and may be used for different purposes. Eg. You could create an overview of how your site is performing by displaying summaries of different reports as widgets together on a single page. Or you could gather a list of critical business metrics that show the state of your business at a glance or compare different reports side by side. Click “Customization,” then “Dashboards” in the left-hand navigation to view the reports that you’ve collected. To create a new dashboard, click Create, select a blank or starter dashboard, and give your dashboard a name. You can add widgets to a dashboard by clicking “Add Widget”. This will let you name the widget that you want to appear on the dashboard and select a visualization type. You can choose to view the data as a number, a timeline, a map, a table, a pie chart, or a bar graph. You can select some of these visualizations for standard or real-time metrics. Use the “add a metric” pulldown menu below to search and add the particular metric you want to include. You can even add filters to the report widget once you’ve brought it into the dashboard, similar to the way we set filters at the view level earlier. Once you have created a dashboard, you can format it by clicking “Customize Dashboard” and selecting a layout. You can also drag and drop existing widgets to different locations within the dashboard. Mousing over a widget will reveal an edit icon that you can use to edit the data coming into the report widget. It also reveals a delete icon that allows you to remove the widget from the dashboard. There are two types of dashboards: private and shared. A private dashboard is only visible to you within that view. A shared dashboard can be seen by anyone who has access to that view. You can have 20 private dashboards per user and 50 shared dashboards per view. If you share the dashboard with other users, they can change wheat shows up on their dashboard, but the changes will only be visible to them. Your original shared dashboard cannot be...