Google Analytics

Linking Google Search Console to Google Analytics

1. Ensure your website is verified in Search Console because it must be verified to link to google analytics. 2. Log into search console and analytics 3. Click admin, go to properties settings in the center of the admin area 4. Scroll to the bottom of the property settings page and clicl Search Console Settings.

Creating a URL Destination Goal

1. Enter the screen name of the page you want to track. You don't need to include the full URL, just the URL directory name details that appear after the forward slash. 2. This will track any visits to that page as a goal. They indicate that a valuable action has just happened.

Setting up a Goal Funnel

1. Enter the screen names of all the steps in your funnel. For example, add to cart, proceed to checkout, enter address, or add payment details. 2. Don't add the homepage as a step in the funnel - just add the action pages like adding to cart or entering details. 3. The last step in your funnel should be the thank-you page or destination page.

Linking Google Ads to Google Analytics

1. Log into google ads and analytics at the same time 2. Click the admin area of analytics 3. In the middle property section, click on the property you want to link, and then click the google ads linking button. 4. Press the +New Property group button an select the google ads account you want to link. 5. Choose to use auto-tagging to get click, cost, and other data from google ads directly into analytics. Its important not to use UTM tracking on google ads and auto tagging, as this will double count data.

Testing the GA tracking code

1. Right click on your webpage and 'view source' 2. Click 'Control+F' to find the UA number from your tracking code. 3. Locate the closing head tag and ensure the GA code is placed before it. 4. Then double check to see if you are receiving data in Google Analytics interface.

Sending Data using code

1. Someone visits the website, the website is served. 2. Javascript tracking code is executed every time the page loads. 3. A temporary cookie is dropped onto the user's browser 4. Session data is sent to the google server. 5. Data is process by the analytics tool 6. The cookie expires after browser sessions is done.

Account Set- up for Google Analytics

1. You will need an email attached to a google account 2. Add your info and read terms of service 3. Data sharing settings must be enables to link other google products. 4. Demo Account: Simply click to add your demo account to your GA account list.

Benefits of Analytics Data (in general)

A fundamental benefit of using analytics as part of your digital marketing efforts is that it helps you make informed, data-led decisions. Other benefits include: Understand your users, gain insight on real customer activity, forecast trends using historical data, media spend and resource allocation, prioritizationBeen of resources.

Basic Terms: Goals

A goal within analytics is defined conversion that allows you to measure the number of times or rate at which users take a desired action on your site. These valuable action can be tracked and then you can attribute each goal to a channel, country, ad, or other dimension to learn more about conditions that drive goal.

Behavior Flow Report of Behavior Report

A view of users journey through a website, beginning with a landing page, then moving to their first, second, and third interactions with the website. User Journey.

Audience Report: Demographic Reports

Age and gender of your visitors

Audience Report: Cross Device Report

Aims to show you the overlap between mobile, desktop, and tablet devices in driving traffic and activity on your site. There are 4 main reports: Device Overlap: # of users who use multiple devices access your website. Device Paths: show the device journeys that you take Cross Device Channels: show the channels that drive traffic and conversions across devices Acquisition Device: shows the number of new users by device type.

Acquisition Reporting: Search Console Report

Allows you to view information regarding SEO performance in Analytics. First, you must find a link your google analytics account to your website's google search console account. Once linked, you can view SEO information on landing pages, countries, devices, and some search queries that are used to in google searches.

Google Tag Assist

Another way of investigating if the code is working correctly. It is a free browser extension provided by google and it makes sure your google tags are installed correctly by checking all the tags on the web page.

URL Builder

Before you track non-google channels in GA Campaigns reports, you need to add UTM URL parameters to your campaigns using the Campaign URL Builder. Use the URL Builder to configure a specific URL for the campaign you are creating. With this tool you can add: Traffic source, traffic medium, campaign name, and ad content.

Audience Report: Technology Report

Browsers they use to visit and convert using the technology report. Provides info about browsers, networks, and operating systems being used by your audience. 'www.browsershots.org' service to check how a site renders in different browsers.

Determining the Value of Campaigns

By looking at the number of goals and transactions from each channel, the conversions rates, and the cost per conversion... you can decide if a channel is profitable in relations to its time and cost investment.

Attribution Models of Multi Channel Report

Channels interact with each other to drive conversions and sales, so we can assign credit to each channel along the journey for the part it played in the decision- making process. This is called attribution. By default, Google Analytics is set to 'Last Click' attribution, where the final channel before the conversion gets all the credit. However, there are several other attribution models that can be used, including Last Click, First Click, Linear, Time Decay, and Position-based.

Versions of Google Analytics

Classic Analytics: needs to be upgraded to universal Universal Analytics: has been the standard since 2013

Key Reports

Click on the link analytics.google.com/analytics/web/demoaccount to add the demo account to your GA account list. Transforming a complex report containing lots of data into an easy-to-read performance 'snapshot' using the dashboard feature.

Closing Channels vs Assisting Channels

Closing Channels: Are the channels used before a goal or transaction is completed. Assisting Channels: Move along their paths to purchase. This includes display, social media, video, and other top-of-funnel awareness and consideration driving channels.

Google Analytics SDK

Collects data from mobile apps using google analytics SDK. You'll need to implement and configure additional code to view mobile app data in the GA interface.

Audience Report: Benchmarking Report

Competitive Analysis, as it allows you to see aggregate statistics for other sites in the same category as your website across channels, locations, and devices.

Conversion Metrics

Conversion Metrics focus on telling the story behind the valuable action that users take on your website. These include Goals, Conversion Rate, Transactions, and revenue.

Custom Segments

Custom Segments are temporary filters that are used to cut up data for deeper understanding and f or making comparisons. Its important to note that customer segments differ from filters.

Potential Security Risk of Collaborations

Data breaches, unintended or purposeful deletion of accounts, incorrectly changing settings within the tool, and incorrectly modifying custom reports, filters, segments, goals and funnels.

Value of Web Analytics

Data-led decision marking: These actions were taken to improve performance based on our understanding of data we collected. Information Source: report back to stakeholders Deduce the 'story': gain valuable insights Understand customers better: tells you who they are where they come from, demographics, etc. Reveal conversion challenges and Interaction on the website.

Basic Terms: Dimensions

Describe data. Common dimensions include: Channel name, month, country, Device. We segment metrics using dimensions.

Goal Reports of Conversion Reports

Different goal-conversion rate over a particular time frame. You can view goal overview information through the Goals Overview Report in the Conversions Tab.

Events Report

Digital marketers can use event tacking to track non-standard actions that people take on their websites-actions like pressing the play button on a video, or clicking a button. Neither of these actions generate a thank-you page so they can't be tracked using standard goal set-up method. It requires additional set-up or coding to implement. IT provides valuable insights into how users are interacting with your website and content. i.e. downloading PDFs.

E-commerce Report of Conversion Reports

Enables you to view e-commerce overview information, shopping behavior, checkout behavior, product list performance. This e-commerce report requires certain specialist coding to link your website transactions to Google Analytics. Many out of the box e-commerce solutions like WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify have user friendly ways of linking to Google Analytics. Simply Enter Google Analytics UA code and tick a box in the e-commerce tool to link GA.

Acquisition Reporting: Social Report

Enables you to view information about sources of social media interaction, social media conversions, and social plugins. It is a limited report. It does not have the native link to other social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Linkedin.

Custom Report Types: Explorer Reports

Explorer Reports allow you to click into dimensions for further detail on the metrics - these reports are more complicated.

Custom Segments vs. Filters

Filters are applied to a view and are constantly active in segmenting your data. However, Custom Segments are temporary filters, which you can apply to data to understand how it looks under different segment conditions. They can be removed after use and the data will return to normal.

Basic Terms: Filters

Filters are more permanent ways to segment data. Some commonly used filters include IP addresses, email campaigns, country, social traffic, PPC traffic, and search traffic.

Creating a new filter

Filters can be set at an Account, Property, or View level in the Admin area of google analytics, Filters work by segmenting the first filter on the view. Multiple filters work together by segmenting including or excluding traffic from the first filter, and then applying the next filter to the segmented traffic from the first filter. Chronological order.

Google Analytics tracking code

First, you will need a piece of code, which must be put on your website to send data back to google analytics. This is the UA-code and is provided during set up. You can aslo add the UA-code into tag manager and it will fire the code on all pages of the website.

Custom Report Types: Flat Table Reports

Flat Table Reports allow you to have your dimensions on the left and metrics across the top in table format - these are the simplest type of custom report.

Conversion Report

Focuses on the metrics relating to the valuable actions that users can take on your website. Ecommerce KPIs typically include sales transactions, AOV, ecommerce conversion rates, cart abandonment rates, and repeat purchases. Non-ecommerce KPIs for lead-generation sites might include cost per lead, total leads, trial sign-ups, conversion rates, unique leads, and comments submitted.

Funnel Visualization Report of Conversion Reports

Found in the Goals reporting area. This report should be set up during goal creation. It allows marketers and web developers to look at the different stages of the conversion process as a goal funnel, which can help them enhance use experience and increase conversion rates through funnel optimization techniques and tests.

Benefits of Google Analytics (specifically)

Free, easy to install, user-friendly interface. Customizable reports, dashboard, data collection. Basic and Advanced options available. Seamless integration with other google products Post-click integration with non-google traffic sources. Valuable insights into website behavior.

Annotations

Help track or record our offline activity. Annotations are small ,written notes that appear as speech bubbles at the base of GA graphs. When you are viewing traffic to your site later, and wondering what caused a spike or a drop, an annotation relating to an event might provide insight into why iy happened.

Types of Multi Channel Reports: Time Lag Report

How long it takes. for a consumer to commit to purchase or sign-up, by showing the length of time between their first visit to your site and the day they complete a conversion.

Audience Report: Audience Behavior Report

How they engage with your site. It lets you see behavioral information about your users. The Audience Behavior Report shouldn't be confused with the Behavior Reporting Tab, which details interaction and engagement with site content. These are different reports and they contain different metrics.

Site Search Report of Behavior Report

If you have a search bar on your website, then the site search report could prove to be useful. It allows you to track what users are typing into the search bar on your website.

Ecommerce Websites

If your site accepts transactions, your web development team will need to set up a special ecommerce code. This code will capture all revenue, product types, and transactions, and will share them directly with google analytics. Personally Identifiable informations, or PII, about purchasers is not shared with google analytics.

Web Analytics

Involves the collection, measurement, and analysis of website data. It provides useful information about the origin of website traffic, how websites users navigate and interact throughout a website, what content and web pages they're most engaged with, and how they exit the site.

Limitations of Google Analytics (specifically)

It does not provide real time data in downloadable historic reports. Free version is limited to 10 million hits per month. Defaults to last-click attribution Not as comprehensive at measuring the performance of top-of-funnel campaign activities.

All Pages Report of Behavior Report

It gives a list of page-name metrics associated with each page. Its very straightforward to see whats working and whats not.

Measure Goals

Its important to measure goals in order to see if their campaigns are contributing to commercial success of their organizations. Common goals include: A purchase, inquiry form of completion, brochure request, newsletter sign-up, file download, increased session duration, pages viewed per session.

Audience Report: Geo Report

Key report is always important to know where your visitors are physically located. View the language and location fo your website visitors.

Site Content Report of Behavior Report

Look at the individual pages on your website and see how users interact with each page. This can give you a better understanding to improve your content.

Custom Report Types: Map Overlay Reports

Map Overlay Reports allow you to view a world or location map with a series of metrics you define.

Basic Terms: Metrics

Measures data. Metrics might include visitor numbers, revenue, goal completions, and so on. Common Metrics: sessions, users, percentage of new sessions, page views, pages per sessions, average session duration.

Export and Schedule Reports

Much of the real data analysis happens when you export the reports. It is possible to export and schedule all reports into Excel spreadsheets, google sheets, and PDFs sharing for further analysis. Most marketers use excel.

Site Speed Sub-Report of Behavior Report

Page timing Report is a sub-report in Site Speed that contains info on page views and the average load times for the various pages on a site.

Multi-Channel Funnel Reports

Purpose: It assigns a value to each channel that played a role in completing a goal or transaction.

Collaboration Permission Levels

Read and Analyze: minimum access level Collaborate: share assets, reports, dashboards, notes Edit Permission: modify goals, reports, filters, Manage Users: (highest access level)

Linking to other tools

Seamlessly link to other google products and tools such as google analytics, google ads, google search console, and search ads 360. The product link setting is within the property setting. Benefits: increased data available, google ads imports costs and impression data from google serp.

Acquisition Reporting: Referrals Report

Shows 'referring' sites - these are sites that link back to your websites. Identify the high-value links for SEO and for driving quality traffic or conversions.

Site Speed Report

Site speed information. The load time of your pages, and to see if its having a negative effect on user experience.

Basic Terms: Accounts

The Account is the highest level within settings, and it is the access point for analytics. Within this level are the properties you want to track.

404-error Pages of Behavior Report

The All Pages Report can help identify any 404-error pages on your website by showing you the number of hits on your error page.

Types of Multi Channel Reports: Assisted Conversion Report

The Assisted Conversion Report can help you understand the assisted value of channels and campaigns and provides insight into how different channels function at each end of the funnel, from

Using the E-Commerce Report

The E-commerce Report is an excellent way to track revenue online and attribute it back to channels. It also contains details regarding transaction and product types, so you can understand which channels drive what transactions and order values. The report gives you insight into the time it takes to purchase a product, from first visit to sale, as well as details about transactions, sales, and product performance.

Google Analytic Dashboards

The Google Analytics dashboard is a collection of widgets that give you an overview of the most important metrics and reports for your campaigns. A benefit of dashboards is that you can share them with key stakeholders to give them a top-line view of visitor and conversion information.

Google Analytics

The market leader and most commonly used program is the free version of google analytics. The paid version of GA is called Google Analytics 360. Its mainly for websites that have over 10 million views per page. Google Analytics is seen as the single source of through for website traffic, engagement, and conversion data.

Acquisition Reporting: Source/Medium Report

The source tells us where traffic is coming from and the Medium is the type of traffic. Sources: includes Google, Bing, Facebook, Direct Medium: includes CPC, Organic, Display, Social, refferal

Basic Terms: Views

Then within the property, you can segment the data into views. A property can have more than one view - usually there should be a raw view with unfiltered data. A view within google analytics helps organize visitor data, such as origin, source, or pages viewed into a defined view about a website, and you can use filters to create your views.

Basic Terms: Properties

There can be many properties in one account. Usually, a website or app would have its own property, so a business with multiple websites could have one account, with a property for each website. The tracking code is generated at property level.

Secondary Dimensions

These are additional fields which can be added to standard or custom reports to get deeper insights into your data and trends.

URL Destination Goal

These are the pages that a website visitor sees after buying something, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a piece of content. Marketers track these 'thank-you-pages' because the only time they are shown is when someone downloads something.

Smart Goals

They record the most engaged visits to your site. They are mostly used for reference only.

Experiment Features of Events Reports

This allows digital marketers to view and manage A/B tests for page performance. You can use this feature to test new layouts, content types, and formats, and to measure them against KPIs.

Goal Set Up and templates

This can be done on a 'View' level. There are 4 predefined goal templates: Revenue, Acquisition, Inquiry, Engagement, Custom

Bounce Rate of Behavior Report

This is visible on the All Pages Report and shows what percentage of visitors landed on your website and left without looking at any other pages or content on the site. Consider the context when analyzing the bounce rate.

Real Time Reporting

This provides a live snapshot of activity on your website related to visitors, content, traffic sources, and goals. Its not useful for historically reporting, because it only shows data in real time and it can't be downloaded. It just gives a view on whats happening right now.

Acquisition Reporting: All Traffic Report

This report allows you to find visitor traffic, conversion, and engagement data for different predefined channel types, known as default groupings or channels. Default groupings include: Direct, Organic Search, Social, Email, Affiliates, Referral, Other, Paid Search, Display.

Audience Report: Interest Report

This report lets your view info about users interests. Browsing patterns of your visitors.

Types of Multi Channel Reports: Top Conversion Paths Report

This report provides granular insight into the most popular journeys users take to a conversion. It shows the numerous steps and channels that drive conversions or transactions online. In this way, you can identify your opening and assisting channels, as well as your closing channels, in a visual and shareable way.

Goal Flow Report of Conversion Reports

This report shows the path your traffic travelled through a funnel towards a goal conversion. It allows marketers to see the source, medium, page, or other dimension that leads up to the goals set in Google Analytics.

Acquisition Reporting

This reporting area allows you to identify the sources of traffic to your website in a series of sub-reports based on traffic type. This can help you discover which channels are most effective, which are not performing as well as you'd hope.

Key Settings in Google Analytics

Three levels within the settings: Account, Property, and View. To access these settings, click 'admin' or the cog wheel at the bottom left of the screen.

Intelligence Events

To help draw your attention to anomalies and spikes in unusual behavior, you can use the Intelligence Events feature. This sends an automated alert after there is a traffic spike or significant change in metrics, and it can alert you to larger-scale changes in your website's behavior

Perfect Attribution Model of Multi Channel Report

To help you understand which models might be best applied to your activity, you can use the Attribution Report. This report contains a Model Comparison Tool. You can use this tool to view the value given to each channel in the path to conversion, based on the model chosen. It allows you to see what channels would look like if you applied different attribution models to them.

Variables to consider for Events Reports

To set up event tracking, you will need to ask your web developer to inset a piece of code into the item you want to track, such as a play button on a video, or some other piece of functionality. These variables are 'eventCategory'...'eventAction'...'eventLabel'...'eventValue'

Acquisition Reporting: Campaigns Report

To track non-google traffic in GA, you can use the campaigns report. This allows you to report on a range of other digital marketing campaigns such as email newsletters and banner ads. The drawback of the campaigns report is that it only shows traffic sources and onsite engagement. You don't see cost data, impressions, CPCs, and other performance metrics. v

Google Ads Search Query Report

To view information on matched search queries. These are actual words and phrases that people type into the Google Search engine to trigger your keywords. You can also see the position in which your ads appear on the Search Engine Results Page, or serp, and the hours of the day most likely to drive traffic, engagement, and conversions.

Legal Situation (collecting data)

Tracking personally identifiable information (PII) now requires explicit consent from the consumer. You need to get consent if you are collecting cookie data from the website visitors for analysis or in order to personalize advertising experiences. It is essential that personally identifiable information is managed correctly and with the terms of consent provided by your website visitors.

Audience Tab

Types of visitors who come to your website. Overview information to identify top-line statistics and information about audience activity, include GEO locations and lifetime value.

Goal Types

URL Destination: when visitors reach a certain page on your website. Time on Site or session duration: visitors spends on your site. Sessions per Visit or pages per session: how many pages each visitor sees before they leave your site Event: on-page interactions taking place on your website. Example: Video plays.

Creating a Session Duration Goal

You can also create a session duration goal to measure sessions which exceed a certain time duration. Simply state the time of the session in the goal set-up to measure this goal.

Collaboration

You can apply different permission settings in the user management section at an Account, Property, or View level. Benefits are the same data as a single source of truth.

Creating a pages per session goal

You can create a pages per session goal to record sessions where the pages viewed exceed a predefined number.

Behavior tab of Behavior Report

You can discover the content they viewed and how they moved through the website itself using the Behavior Reporting tab.

Importing Goals

You can import goals and ecommerce transactions from Analytics into Google Ads. Simply choose the import feature in Google Ads and select the goals you want to pull across. Its important not to duplicate goals that are being counted in Google Ads by using both Google Ads conversion tracking and Google Analytics goals- choose one or the other. A best practice is to use Google Analytics goals instead of google ads conversion tracking, as you will have a single source of truth in relation to conversions.

Google Ads Report

You can use Google Ads Report to gain insights on traffic, impressions, click cots, and other performance metrics from Google Ads. This report appears in the Google Analytics interface.

Creating an Event-Tracking Goal

You create an Event-Tracking goal when you want to track interactions with your site that cannot be tracked with standard analytics code. This could include actions like video views or PDF downloads. This can also be done by using the advanced feature of Google Tag Manager.

Increase Budgets for high-performing campaigns

You want to improve the budgets that are allocated to these high-performing campaigns. To do this, identify your clusters of high-transaction, high-revenue, or high lead-generating times and search queries in Google Analytics. Then, in Google Ads, increase the daily spend and keyword bids, or percentage bid modifiers, at peak times using ad schedules.

Legal Situation (what you should do)

Your company should have a clear policy or guidelines in place detailing how the analytics data you collect is used and managed. This should include explicit opt-in visitor consent to track user visits, collect anonymous cookie data, and share anonymously with third parties like google and facebook for personalization of ads.

Google Analytic Tabs

a bird's-eye overview of campaign performance includes four main reporting areas. The Audience tab: Who is coming to your website? The Acquisition tab: How are users getting to your website? The Behavior tab - What are users doing on your website? The Conversion tab - What actions are users taking to complete set goals?

Audience Report: Mobile Report

enables you to view the traffic and conversion data from mobile and desktop users, as well as the devices being used. You can use the Google Mobile Friendly Test tool.