Digital Marketing Midterm pt 3

The data collection process works in three steps:

1) Collecting data about the user (and defining a new vs. recurring user) 2) Defining a session 3) Joining data with other data sources

Cohort Analysis:

A cohort is a group of users who share a common characteristic that is identified in this report by an Analytics dimension. For example, all users with the same Acquisition Date belong to the same cohort. The Cohort Analysis report helps isolate and analyze cohort behavior.

Goal Funnel:

A data visualization of the different steps needed to complete the goal in Google Analytics that helps identify where users are dropping out of the conversion process. -Ecommerce businesses could use goals and funnels to see whether users are able to complete a multi-step checkout process. Other businesses could track newsletter sign-ups, contact form completions, page navigations, number of pages viewed in a session, or time on site.

tracking code review

A snippet of JavaScript tracking code that's included on every web page of the site begins the data collection process • Goal of the tracking code is to track each user interaction that occurs on the site • These interactions can be as simple as loading a page or something more specific like clicking a video play button or a link • The Analytics tracking code uses the domain of the website you are tracking to define it as a "site" • With the tracking code installed, Google Analytics will drop a cookie in the user's browser for that website and any related subdomains. This makes it easy to track traffic on a single website URL domain or subdomain by default. • Note: if you install the same default tracking code on pages with different domains, Analytics will count these users and sessions separately. If you need to track users across different domains, you will need to set up cross-domain tracking

Summary:

A summary of the dimension categorized by Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion metrics - - Makes it easier to interpret these metrics in the context of the marketing Funnel

Performance:

Bar graph of your data that helps you compare individual segments side by side like which countries bring in the highest traffic, can also use the pull-down menu to select various metric

Comparison View:

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

Good uses for Flow Reports

Each flow report shows you specific data for that area of Analytics, but all reports can show you: • The relative volume of traffic to your site by the dimension you choose (e.g., traffic source, campaign, browser) • The relative volume of users in at each step (node) in the path • The relative volume of traffic and the rate of abandonment between steps (exits) • Where users backtracked along the path • Specific metrics for connections, nodes, and node exits when you hover over them

Conversion:

Each time a user completes a business goal on the website. This could be signing up for a newsletter or buying a product. • In Google Analytics, "Goals" tracks these conversions. . Once the Goals section is configured, Analytics will create conversion-related metrics. like the total number of conversions, as well as the percentage of users that converted. This is referred to as the "conversion rate."

E-Commerce reports:

Ecommerce reports allow you to analyze purchase activity on your site or app. You can see product and transaction information, average order value, ecommerce conversion rate, time to purchase, and other data (need to enable Ecommerce in your reports and add code to your site/app to collect ecommerce data in order to view)

Share:

Email a copy of the report as an attachment and even schedule regular email updates

Custom filters:

Exclude: This type of filter excludes log file lines (hits) that match the Filter Pattern. Matching lines are ignored in their entirety: for example, a filter that excludes Chrome also excludes all other information in that log line, such as visitor, path, referral, and domain information. • Include: This type of filter includes log file lines (hits) that match the Filter Pattern. All non-matching hits are ignored and any data in non-matching hits is unavailable in the reports. • Lowercase / Uppercase: Converts the contents of the field into all uppercase or all lowercase characters. These filters only affect letters, and do not affect special characters or numbers. • Search & Replace: This is a simple filter that you can use to search for a pattern within a field and replace the found pattern with an alternate form. • Advanced: This type of filter allows you to build a field from one or two other fields. The filtering engine applies the expressions in the two Extract fields to the specified fields and then constructs a third field using the Constructor expression.

custom report types

Explorer is the standard Analytics report that includes a line graph and a data table, search and sort options, and secondary dimensions. • A Flat Table is a static, sortable table that displays data in rows. • Map Overlay is a map of the world with regions and countries in darker colors to indicate traffic and engagement volume.

Site Search:

What terms are searched for and how frequently on the site

Behavior Flow report:

visualizes the path users traveled from one page or Event to the next • Can help you discover what content keeps users engaged with your site • The Behavior Flow report can also help identify potential content issues • must have set up and be tracking Events before they appear in the Behavior Flow report • Behavior flow reports focuses on content that keeps the user engaged vs. comparing volumes from different traffic sources. The Behavior Flow can answer questions like: • Did users go right from product pages to checkout without any additional shopping? • Is there an event that is always triggered first? Does it lead users to more events or more pages? • Are there paths through your site that are more popular than others, and if so, are those the paths that you want users to follow

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

Custom Dimensions

you define what they are and their value; lets you collect data that's customized specifically for your business. • This can be incredibly powerful because it enables you to report on particular characteristics of your users or their behavior within the Google Analytics data you've collected. • You collect data for a Custom Dimension using JavaScript tracking code that's implemented on a page. • When a user lands on that page or performs a specific action, the Custom Dimension will capture that data and send it over as an additional parameter attached to the existing hit. You can then use these Custom Dimensions in your reports.

Benchmarking:

compares data with aggregated industry data from other companies who share their data. This provides valuable context, helping to set meaningful targets, gain insight into trends occurring across the industry, and find out how you are doing compared to your competition.

The Location report

compares your Country/Territory data to the benchmarks for each of the Countries and Territories from which you receive traffic. Since we already selected Country/Region of "United States," we'll only see the U.S. show up in this report.

The Devices report

compares your Devices data to the benchmarks for desktop, mobile, and tablet traffic

2 types of segments

default segments and custom segments. • Default (or System) segments are segments already available in Google Analytics and show up under the System section. • Custom segments are segments that you create and show up under "Custom." • Can also import segments that other users have created or share your own custom segments

Cohort Size:

determines the size of each cohort. You can group by day, week, or month of acquisition.

Experiments:

focused on experiments set up through Google Optimize (Will discuss in a later section)

Content Drilldown:

groups pages according to your website's directory structure; can click on a directory to see the pages of your site within that directory. • useful if you're trying to understand the performance of content in a particular section of your website.

Pie Chart:

helps you compare the percentages of a whole such as how many users are on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones (can choose which metric from your report should display in the pie chart using the pulldown menu)

Custom Metrics

let you collect metrics in Google Analytics that are specific to your business. • This can be the number of ads that loaded on a page, the bandwidth that the page consumed when it loaded, or the total number of brand pageviews that each of your marketing channels leads to. • Similar to Custom Dimensions, you collect Custom Metric data using JavaScript that's implemented on a page. • When a user lands on that page or performs a specific action, the Custom Metric will be sent as an additional parameter attached to the hit.

Save:

lets you create a link to the specific report in the Customization area in the left-hand navigation under "Saved Reports"

Cohort Type

lets you select a single dimension of cohort to report on. The cohort type "Acquisition Date" groups cohorts based on when users started their first sessions with your site.

Metric Selector:

metric you want to evaluate for each cohort

Date Range selector:

preset date ranges that vary based on the cohort size. If you group the cohorts by day, the date range will offer choices from 7 to 30 days.

Full Reports

provide a greater depth of information than Overview Reports. (the full report icon is at the bottom right hand corner of the Overview Report)

Source

provides more information about the medium. For example, if the medium is "referral," then the source will be the URL of the website that referred the user to the site. If the medium is "organic," then the source will be the name of the search engine such as "google.

Funnel Visualization:

represents actions taken by users on the website in order to accomplish the Goal and provides detailed metrics around their actions

Multi-Channel Funnels reports

show how your marketing channels (i.e., sources of traffic to your website) work together to create sales and conversions

attribution model

the rule, or set of rules, that determines how credit for sales and conversions is assigned to touch points in conversion paths

Events:

tracks how users interact with specific elements of website (e.g. click a video to play or click on a download link) • Requires additional implementation beyond the Analytics tracking code snippet

Ecommerce:

transaction metrics if you've set up ecommerce tracking in Analytics.

Channels report:

view traffic by channel, which bundles the sources together under each medium Traffic sources are automatically grouped into basic categories (or channels) like Organic, Social, Direct, Referral, Display, etc. -Clicking into each channel will break out the individual sources for that channel.

Referrals Report:

view traffic organized by which sites have linked to the site being analyzed • Can click into individual referrals to see which specific web pages link back to your site. • Can add a secondary dimension (like landing page) to see what specific pages traffic is being sent to

Data Filters

• Can set a filter on a view that can exclude particular data, only include particular data, or modify the data during processing • Helps align the data that shows up in reports with business needs • Filters are essentially "rules" that Google Analytics applies to the data during processing • If the "filter type" is true, Google Analytics will apply the filter to the data. If the filter type is false, Google Analytics won't apply the filter.

Business goals

are actions you want the user to take on the website.

Site Usage:

behavior metrics like users, sessions per user, new users, sessions, pages per session, and average session duration

There are several different types of mediums:

"Organic": traffic that arrived to site through unpaid search like a non-paid Google Search result • "CPC": traffic that arrived through a paid search campaign like Google AdWords text ads • "Referral": traffic that arrived to site after the user clicked on a website other than a search engine • "Email" represents traffic that came from an email marketing campaign • "(none)": users that come directly to the site by typing the URL directly into a browser. In reports, will see these users have a source of "direct" with a medium of "(none)".

Among the key reports in this area include:

- Active User Reports - Demographic and Interests Report - Geographic Reports - Behavior Report - Technology & Mobile Report

When a user performs an action on an element with event tracking, the event tracking code will pass four parameters along with the event hit. These parameters are:

- Category (organizes events) - Action (action taken by the user such as play, pause) - Label (optional value that further describes event) - Value (optional numerical value like amount of time it takes a video to load)

Custom Reports can be useful:

- if you want to use a Custom Dimension as your primary, not your secondary dimension - if you want to see more than two dimensions per row, which can be helpful if you need to export the data table into another software for analysis - if you want to report on any Custom Metrics you have collected

Can create advanced segments that:

- let you match dimensions and metrics to specific values that you enter - specify multiple filters that make up conditions within the segment - base it on sequences of user interactions (eg users that viewed a page and then watched a video) - isolate subsets of data and find opportunities to improve your website's performance. - import segments or share them to the Solutions Gallery by clicking "Share segments."

Few reasons you might want to apply filters:

- may need to transform the data that shows up in a view (e.g. data form a particular country) - exclude data (e.g. might want to exclude any internal employee traffic from a view reporting on customer data) - track subdomain in separate views

Site Speed reports

- show how quickly users are able to see and interact with content and can identify areas that need improvement, and then track the extent of those improvements. • The Site Speed reports measure three aspects of latency: • Page-load time for a sample of pageviews on your site. You can view the data across different dimensions to see how quickly your pages loaded from a variety of perspectives (e.g., in different browsers, in different countries). Data is available in the Page Timings report. • Execution speed or load time of any discrete hit, event, or user interaction that you want to track (e.g., how quickly images load, response time to button clicks). Data is available in the User Timings report. • How quickly the browser parses the document and makes it available for user interaction. Data is available in the Page Timings report.

Users Flow Report:

-Compares volumes of traffic from different sources, examine traffic patterns through a site, and troubleshoot the efficacy of a site -Compare relative volumes of traffic from different sources within the same dimension: for example, the traffic from different search engines, campaigns, or mediums. -Overall comparisons let you make some initial determinations about which channels are most effective or offer the best return.

Session and hits

-Google Analytics groups user hits based on the time in which they were generated. To measure these periods, Analytics uses a metric called "sessions." -Begins when a user navigates to a page that includes the Google Analytics tracking code and generates a "pageview" hit and ends after 30 minutes if no other hits are recorded.

Anatomy of a Flow Report

-Nodes: points through which traffic flows. A node can represent several things, including a single page or screen, a directory, a Content Grouping, an Event, or dimension. The user count appears on each node, giving you an immediate sense of the volume of traffic flowing through that node. • Dimension nodes (In white): determines the basic entry point into a flow, so you can compare how different marketing channels, social media, technology dimensions, or other entry points affect your user flow. -Page, Content Grouping, and Goal nodes and app screens are green & event nodes are in blue: • Connections: (shown as gray bands flowing between nodes) represent the path a segment of traffic takes from one node to another. The thickness of the connection indicates the relative volume of traffic in that segment: the thicker the band, the more traffic flowed through that connection. • Sometimes these paths loop back or around nodes in unexpected ways. Loop-backs appear as a connection with an arrow pointing towards the previous node. • Drop-offs (also called exits, in red) indicate where users left the flow

The Channels report

-compares your channel data to benchmarks for each channel in the Default Channel Grouping. You can quickly see which channels perform better in Acquisition and Behavior based on the green up or red down arrow -More darkly colored cells indicate larger differences in outperforming or under-performing other businesses in the category you selected.

Dashboards

-used to provide a quick way to report on metrics that businesses need to check regularly, avoiding the need -Keep your audience in mind for dashboards • Dashboards should only contain the necessary information • Dashboards are flexible and may be used for different purposes. For example, 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.

adding widgets

Add "widgets" or reports 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.

all pages report

By default, this report will show data by the page URI. The URI is the part of the URL after the domain name in the location bar of the browser. If the primary dimension is switched to the report to "Page Title," you can view this report by the title listed in the web page's HTML. • Other metrics in the "All Pages" report like "Average Time on Page" and "Bounce Rate" indicate how engaged users were on each page of the site. • Can sort the report by these metrics to quickly find low-performing pages that need improvement or high-performing content to guide future content decisions.

Calculated Metrics

Calculated Metrics are user-defined metrics that are computed from existing metrics and drive more relevant analyses and enable greater actionability without leaving the product. • Admin permissions are needed to compute calculated metrics as well.

goal details

Can add a monetary value or turn on the Goal Funnel under Goal details • Then Goals will appear under Conversions

Audience reports

Can help you better understand the characteristics of your users such as what countries they're in, what languages they speak, and the technology they use to access your site. But it can also include data like age and gender, their engagement and loyalty, and even some of their interests.

active user reports

Can show you how many users had a least one session on your site in the last day, seven days, 14 days, and 30 days • Called "site reach" or "stickiness" • If marketing activities and site content encourage users to visit and return to site, the active users in each time frame should grow

Users Flow Report:

Compares volumes of traffic from different sources, examine traffic patterns through a site, and troubleshoot the efficacy of a site • Compare relative volumes of traffic from different sources within the same dimension: for example, the traffic from different search engines, campaigns, or mediums. • Overall comparisons let you make some initial determinations about which channels are most effective or offer the best return. • E.g. if one campaign is delivering a lot more traffic than another, you can shift resources to make the more successful campaign even more visible. Or if one medium, like email or cpc, is outperforming the others, you can invest more heavily in that medium. -If you do find that one source is outperforming the others in terms of traffic volume, you can then examine that traffic more closely by viewing just that one segment. • Click the starting dimension node in the first column, then click View only this segment. (This is different from applying a user- or session-based Segment, as described below).

Audience Reports:

Create audiences, publish them to Analytics, then apply them to reports to explore audience behavior in response to marketing. Can use the audience as a secondary dimension in reports, and as a dimension in segments, custom reports, and custom funnels.

Pivot View:

Creates a pivot table in which both rows and columns can show different dimension values for comparison

Edit:

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."

Data Table:

Default visualization for most reports that organizes your data in a table broken out by acquisition, behavior, and conversion metrics for the audience and acquisition reports

demographic & interests report

Demographics: provides information about the age and gender of users • Interests: shows users' preferences for certain types of web content like technology, music, travel, or TV • Together, can verify that you're reaching the right demographics • Can help guide decisions about your marketing and content strategy • Must first enable advertising features in the Demographics and Interests reports for each property. • Go into the "Admin" tab under "Property" and select "Property Settings." Under "Advertising Features," set "Enable Demographics and Interest Reports" to on. • Demographic reports may not contain any data if your site traffic is very low or your segment is too small.

There are four Goal types in Google Analytics:

Destination: a user reaches a specific page on the site • Duration: based on the length of a user's session • Pages or Screens: is based on how many pages a user views in a session • Events: tracking specific actions on a site -Only a Destination-Type Goal will work with the Goal Funnel / Funnel Visualization

Limitation of View Filters

Filters are destructive. Filtering your incoming hits permanently includes, excludes, or alters those hits in that view, according to the type of filter. Therefore, you should ALWAYS maintain an unfiltered view of your data so you always have access to your full data set. • Filters require up to 24 hours before they are applied to your data. • Fields specified in a filter must exist in the hit and not be null in order for the filter to be applied to that hit. For example, if you are filtering on Hostname, but the hit does not contain that field (perhaps the hit was sent via the Measurement Protocol and that request did not contain the & parameter), then any filters acting on Hostname will be ignored and the hit will be processed as if there was no filter. • Filters are account-level objects. If you edit a filter at the view level, you are also changing the filter at the account level, and any other views that use the filter are also affected by the change. If you want to customize a single instance of an existing filter used by multiple views, create a new filter and apply it to that single view. • Filters are applied after your data has been processed. Creating a filter to change the scope of dimensions is not possible.

anatomy of a hit

For each user interaction on a tagged website, the Analytics tracking code sends what's called a "hit" to Google Analytics. • A "hit" is a URL string with parameters of useful information about users. • If we break down the URL string, we can see it's passing useful information to Analytics about the user that triggered the hit. For example, we can see things like: • the language the user's browser is set to • the name of the page they're viewing • the screen resolution of the user's device • and the Analytics ID that associates that hit to the correct Analytics account • This is just some of the information passed in the hit, depending on the user interaction with the site and what is being tracked. • The hit will also include other information like a randomly-generated user identifier. This will allow Google Analytics to differentiate between new and returning users.

behavior reports

Overall Behavior reports show how users interact with a website • Analytics uses a small piece of Javascript code (tag code) to capture information every time a user loads a page on the website, creating a "pageview" that is reported in Google Analytics

Landing Pages:

Pages of your website where users first arrived; can monitor the number of bounces and the bounce rate for each landing page. • A high bounce rate usually indicates that the landing page content is not relevant or engaging for those users.

sharing dashboards

Private dashboard: only visible to you within that view • 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 what shows up on their dashboard, but their changes will only be visible to them. • Your original shared dashboard cannot be changed by another user. • If you want to share a dashboard, simply click "Share" at the top. "Share Template Link" will provide a link to your dashboard template that can be added to any other view, but don't worry, this won't include any of your Analytics data. • If you wish to share your template more broadly, you can add the dashboard template to the "Google Analytics Solutions Gallery" by clicking "Share in Solutions Gallery." The Solutions Gallery is a place where Google Analytics users can share different types of customizations like dashboards. It's also a great place to find dashboard templates that you can import and then customize for your own business.

Site Speed Reports:

Related to the speed of how different part of the site loads

Export:

Save a report to your desktop in different file formats such as PDF or CSV

Frequency & Recency:

Shows Number of Sessions each user has had in the time period specified.

Behavior Flow:

Shows a tree of user activity on the website

Engagement:

Shows how long users are on the site and how many pages they go through on the site

Exit Pages:

Shows the pages where users left your site (don't want users to leave an important page without converting)

campaign URL builder

This tool allows you to easily add campaign parameters to URLs so you can track Custom Campaigns in Google Analytics.

analyzing traffic sources

To identify effective and high quality traffic sources, for each medium source we need to look at both: - number of users - bounce rate (to see traffic quality)

segments

To view a subset of data in a report, can create user segments or session segments • User segments can span multiple sessions with a maximum date range of 90 days. • Session segments are confined to user behavior within a single session. For example, you can create session segments for a Goal users completed during the session or the amount of revenue a user generated. • Can add multiple segments to a single report for comparison by clicking "Add segments" to open up the segment builder • Both user and session segments can be built using dimensions, metrics, session dates, and even sequences of user actions. • Segments automatically applied and will include every user within the selected date range in that segment

Lifetime Value:

Understand how valuable different users are based on lifetime performance across multiple sessions. For example, you can see lifetime value for users you acquired through email or paid search. With that information in hand, you can determine a profitable allocation of marketing resources to the acquisition of those users.

acquisition reports

Used to compare the performance of different marketing channels and discover which sources send you the highest quality traffic and conversions (and make better decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts) • Google Analytics tracking code automatically captures several attributes (or dimensions) about where the user came from, specifically: - Source: the origin of your traffic, such as a search engine (for example, google) or a domain (example.com) - Medium: the general category of the source or type of source, for example, organic search (organic), cost-per-click paid search (cpc), web referral (referral) - Marketing campaign name: specific name of campaign bringing traffic to your site

New vs. Returning Users (and Hits)

When a user arrives on a page with tracking code, Google Analytics creates a random, unique ID that gets associated with the user's browser cookie. • Analytics considers each unique ID to be a unique user. Every time a new ID is detected, Analytics counts a "new user" and sends it over with the hit. • When Analytics detects an existing ID, it sends a "returning user" value with the hit. • Remember, since Analytics uses a browser cookie to determine unique users over a given session, this information will be lost if a user clears or has blocked that cookie in their web browser. If a user clears their browser cookies, Google Analytics will set a new unique ID the next time a browser loads a tracked web page. Analytics will then count that user as "New," rather than "Returning." • Google Analytics can identify users over multiple sessions, as long as the sessions happen in the same browser on the same device. Analytics doesn't recognize users who visit a website from different devices by default and will count each device as a unique user. • To track users across devices, the User ID feature can be used.

Technology & Mobile Reports

• Help to understand what technologies your audience uses to consume your site content. These reports can help fine-tune site to make sure it's fully functional on different devices and browsers • Can use the "Browser and Operating systems" report to quickly identify issues with certain browsers on your site. E.g. If site has a comparatively high bounce rate on a mobile browser, may need to create a mobile-optimized version of website with streamlined content and simpler navigation. • Also can help identify if users are migrating from desktop to mobile and so can plan development accordingly. • Can use the "Overview" report under "Mobile" to see a breakdown of your traffic based on smartphones, tablets, and desktop devices over time. • Devices lets you see additional details about the devices used to browse site and can provide direction on how to create a mobile-optimized experience to best suit users. This includes the mobile device name, brand, service provider, input selector, operating system, and other dimensions like screen resolution.

audience behavior reports

• Help you understand how often users visited and returned to your website • The "New vs Returning" report breaks out acquisition, behavior, and conversion goal metrics for new and returning users • Can look at this comparison over time to see how audience loyalty may be shifting • Consider website objectives, as well as marketing activities, when evaluating the mix of new and returning users to the site

most common types of hits are (with the top 3 being the most common):

• Pageview hits: triggered when a user loads a webpage with the tracking code (new pageview will be sent every time) • Event hits: tracks every time a user interacts with a particular element on your website such as hitting a play button on a video, engaging with a carousel, etc. • Transaction hits (also called an "ecommerce" hit): passes data to Analytics about ecommerce purchases such as products purchased, transaction IDs, and "stock keeping units" (or SKUs). (Can also pass additional ecommerce data like product category, whether items have been added or removed from a shopping cart, etc if Enhanced Ecommerce set up). • Social hits that can pass likes, shares, or tweet data • Page Timing Hits that allow you to report on page timings

Limits of Flow Reports

• Session limits: Flow reports cannot display data for more than 100,000 sessions. If you have more than 100,000 sessions in the data set, the sampled data appears in the flow reports. Adjust the date range to reduce the number of sessions in the report. • Segment limits: Flow reports support only session-based segments. User-based segments (aggregated by user) are disabled for flow reports. You can apply only a single segment to a flow report.