Google Analytics Basic

What are the options for filtering data in Google Analytics? Exclude data from a view Include data in a view Modify how data appears in your reports All of the above

All of the above

Which represents the hierarchical structure of a Google Analytics account from top to bottom? View > Account > Property Property > Account > View Account > View > Property Account > Property > View

Account > Property > View

Google Analytics interface

Account/Property/View switcher Alert icon Alert menu Feedback, Help, and Settings Customization Left-hand navigation Real-Time Reports Audience Reports Acquisition Reports Behavior Reports Conversion Reports Admin Collapse left-hand navigation

In which order does Google Analytics filter data? Alphabetical order by filter name The order in which the filters were last edited The order in which the filters are applied Randomized order

The order in which the filters are applied

What report should be used to check if users are leaving from important pages on your website? Landing Pages report All Pages report Exit Pages report Pages report under Events

Exit Pages report

Date range selector

At the top of every report is a date-range selector. This lets you set the time period in which you want to analyze report data.

A deleted view can be recovered by account administrators within how many days? 35 65 95 125

35

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) or "Other," (a group of low volume traffic sources)

To locate a property's Analytics tracking code, which sequence of steps should be followed? Admin > Tracking Code > Tracking Info Admin > Tracking Info > Tracking Code Reports > Audience > Tracking Code Audience Reports > Settings > Tracking Code

Admin > Tracking Info > Tracking Code

What setting must be enabled to view data in Demographics and Interests Reports? Content Grouping Advertising features User permissions on the view In-Page Analytics

Advertising features

What is a "secondary dimension" in Google Analytics? An additional widget you can add to a dashboard for more specific analysis. An additional metric you can add to a report for more specific analysis. An additional dimension you can add to a report for more specific analysis. A visualization that allows you to understand the impact of your data.

An additional dimension you can add to a report for more specific analysis.

What is a "dimension" in Google Analytics? The total amount of revenue a business has made in a given date range. An attribute of a data set that can be organized for better analysis. A comparison of data between two date ranges. A report that offers information about your audience.

An attribute of a data set that can be organized for better analysis.

Segment Picker

At the top of the report, notice the segment picker. Segments are ways to look at a specific data set and compare metrics. We'll cover this in an advanced course. For now, notice that the default segment includes all of the Users that visited your site in the given date range.

Feedback, Help, and Settings

At the top right of your Analytics view are two more icons: The "question mark" 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

Audience reports overview

Audience reports are located under "Audience" in the left-hand navigation. These reports can help you better understand the characteristics of your users. This can include 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.

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.

Behavior Reports

Behavior 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.

Behavior reports

Below "Geo," are a set of behavior reports that 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. You can look at this comparison over time to see how audience loyalty may be shifting. Consider your website objectives, as well as your marketing activities, when evaluating the mix of new and returning users to your site.

When selecting "Share Template Link" in the dashboard, what will be shared? Dashboard only Data only Dashboard and data Neither dashboard nor data

Dashboard only

To use Analytics to collect website data, what must be added to the website page HTML? Google campaign parameters Google Analytics terms and conditions Google Analytics tracking code A permissions button

Google Analytics tracking code

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. When you open up the account picker, you can select by account, property, or view. You can also search any of these by name. To close the Account picker, click anywhere on the screen outside of the picker.

Which "channels" are available in the default Channels report? (select all answers that apply) Organic Search Device Display Direct

Organic Search Display Direct

Customization

The Customization section allows you to create custom reports, specific to your business. We'll cover customization in an advanced course.

What report shows what mobile devices were used to view a website? The Exit Pages report under "Site Content" The Landing Page report under "Site Content" The Engagement report under "Behavior" The Devices report under "Mobile"

The Devices report under "Mobile"

Language Dimension

The default dimension selected in the Audience Overview report is "Language." Note that the table to the right includes the top 10 values for 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, Operating System, and Service Provider.

What is a "metric" in Google Analytics? A dimension that can help you analyze site performance. The dates in your date range. A segment of data separated out in a report for comparison. The numbers in a data set often paired with dimensions.

The numbers in a data set often paired with dimensions.

What is the "Bounce Rate" in Google Analytics? The number of times unique users returned to your website in a given time period The percentage of sessions in which a user exits from your homepage The percentage of total site exits The percentage of visits when a user landed on your website and exited without any interactions

The percentage of visits when a user landed on your website and exited without any interactions

Which "sources" are available in Google Analytics? (select all answers that apply) googlemerchandisestore.com Email Google (direct)

googlemerchandisestore.com Google (direct)

Which "mediums" are available in Google Analytics? (select all answers that apply) organic cpc mail.google.com referral

organic cpc referral

Overview Reports

provide a high-level summary of metrics in one place. The Audience Overview report shows aggregate Audience metrics like number of users, pages they visited in a session, average session duration, and bounce rate.

Site Usage

shows behavior 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, which we'll discuss later. And "Ecommerce" will show you transaction metrics if you've set up ecommerce tracking in Analytics. Now let's switch back to the Summary view.

Acquisition reports overview

"Acquisition" reports are located under the "Acquisition" section in the left-hand navigation. You can use the Acquisition reports to compare the performance of different marketing channels and discover which sources send you the highest quality traffic and conversions. This can help you make better decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts. Before we discuss Acquisition reports, it can be helpful to know how Google Analytics identifies traffic sources for your website. When a user lands on your site, the Google Analytics tracking code automatically captures several attributes (or dimensions) about where the user came from. This includes the traffic medium, source, and marketing campaign name.

How to set up views with filters

1. Admin tab 2. View Settings 3. Change View name 4. "View" Pull down menu, create new view 5. View Settings 6. Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders Master view 1. Copy View 2. Select Test View 3. Select Filter, Add filter, change filter name 4. Select filter type, Exclude, select source or destination, traffic from IP addresses 5. Select expression, that are equal to 6. Copy IP Address 7. Reporting, Real-time, overview 8. Admin, View pulldown, master view, filters, add filter, apply existing filter

Walkthrough 1

1. go to analytics.google.com 2. sign in 3. track website or mobile, enter other information about your business 4. Javascript Tracking ID will allow you to track user data 5. Real-Time allows you to see the real-time data for website 6. Click "Admin", "Tracking Info", "Tracking Code", to find the tracking ID

Main Data Table

Below the graph is the main data table. You can see that the first column shows the current dimension "Country," which was the last demographic category we selected in the Overview report. You can switch between other dimensions like city, continent, and subcontinent by clicking the links above the data table. It's important to know you can also add another dimension to the table for even more specific analysis. We call this a secondary dimension, which is a common technique when analyzing data. For example, you could add a secondary dimension of "device category" to the Location report to see what kinds of devices were used by people in different countries while visiting your website. Here you can see that each row of the table represents a different segment of traffic in the "Country" dimension. Note that Analytics is only showing you the first 10 rows of data and only as many columns as will fit on the screen. To view additional rows, use the "Show rows" pulldown menu on the bottom-right side of the table to select how many rows you want to see, or use the left and right arrows to scroll through 10 rows at a time. If you wish to view all of the columns, you may need to use the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the report. You can analyze the data table in different ways. Clicking on each column in the table toggles the data sort between ascending and descending. The arrow in the column header shows which column you're currently sorting by. Note that 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. For example, 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. We'll cover techniques for advanced filtering in an advanced course.

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.

How can the amount of data in a sampled Google Analytics report be increased? Apply additional filters Remove the Secondary Dimension Choose "Faster response" in the sampling pulldown menu Choose "Greater precision" in the sampling pulldown menu

Choose "Greater precision" in the sampling pulldown menu

Alert icon

Clicking the bell icon in the upper right shows you alerts about your Google Analytics properties and views.

Which Google Analytics visualization compares report data to the website average? Pivot view Comparison view Performance view Percentage view

Comparison view

What report can show how particular sections of website content performed? Location Content Drilldown Frequency and Recency Top Events

Content Drilldown

Conversion Reports

Conversion reports allow you to track website goals based on your business objectives.

To collect data using Google Analytics, which steps must be completed: Install Google Analytics desktop software Create an Analytics account Add Analytics tracking code to each webpage Download the Analytics app

Create an Analytics account Add Analytics tracking code to each webpage

Dashboards

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. 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 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.

When a filter is applied to a view, what data is affected? Data from before the filter was created Data from after the filter was created All the data available in a view None of the data available in a view

Data from after the filter was created

When a new view is created, what data will be included? Data from before the view was created Data from after the view was created Data from before and after the view was created No data

Data from after the view was created

What feature would be used to compare two date ranges in a report? Hourly, Day, Week, Month views in the time graph Real-time reports Date range comparison Account selector

Date range comparison

Uses for analytics

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 customers' online purchasing behavior and better market their products and services. Lead generation sites can collect user information for sales teams to connect with potential leads. While we've primarily talked about collecting data from a website, Google Analytics can also collect behavioral data from a variety of systems such as mobile applications, online point-of-sales systems, video game consoles, customer relationship management systems, or other internet-connected platforms. That's right. This data is compiled into Analytics reports, which you can use to perform in-depth analysis to better understand your customers and their purchase journey. Then you can test out new solutions to improve your business.

Dimensions and Metrics

Dimension- attribute of a data set that can be organized in order to do better analysis. they are often paired with metrics which are the actual numbers in a data set. 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.

Using tracking code, Google Analytics can report data from which systems: E-Commerce Platforms Mobile Applications Online point of sales systems Systems not connected to the internet

E-commerce platforms Mobile Applications Online point of sales systems

Dashboard (cont)

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.

Referrals Report

If you want to view your traffic organized by which sites have linked to yours, you can look at the "Referrals" report. You can even click into individual referrals to see which specific web pages link back to your site. If you want to understand which specific pages of your site are being linked to, you can add a secondary dimension of "landing page" to the report. This will show you which external sites are sending traffic to each of your specific pages, and potentially offer you a source of new advertising partnerships with those referring websites.

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.

Where should the Analytics tracking code be placed in the HTML of a webpage to collect data? Immediately after the opening <head> tag of your website Immediately before the closing </head> tag of your website Immediately after the opening <body> tag of your website Immediately before the closing </body> tag of your website

Immediately after the opening <head> tag of your website

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. For example, The Google Store sells merchandise from their website across different geographical regions. They could create one view that includes all of their global website data. But if they wanted to see data for individual regions, they could create separate views for North America, Europe, and Asia. If the Google Store wanted to only see data for external traffic (that didn't include their own store employees), they could set up a view that filtered out internal traffic based on IP address. The view level also lets you set Google Analytics "Goals". Goals are a valuable way to track conversions, 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. We'll discuss Goals and Conversions in a later lesson. Be thoughtful when setting up your accounts, properties, and views, because you can't change data once it's been collected and processed. by Google Analytics. Important: 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.

What report lists the website pages where users first arrived? Events > Pages All Pages Exit Pages Landing Pages

Landing Pages

The Analytics tracking code can collect which of the following: Language the browser is set to Type of Browser User's favorite website Device and operating system

Language the browser is set to Type of browser Device and operating system

All Pages

Let's begin by looking at the "All Pages" report located under "Site Content" and scroll down to the data table. The "Pageviews" metric shows how frequently each page on your site was viewed. 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 you switch the primary dimension of 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 your site. You 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.

Active Users report

Let's begin with the "Active Users" report. This can show you how many users had at least one session on your site in the last day, seven days, 14 days, and 30 days. We call this "site reach" or "stickiness." If your marketing activities and site content encourage users to visit and return to your site, the active users in each time frame should grow.

How to track a marketing campaign

Marketing campaigns are tracked in Google Analytics through "campaign tagging." Campaign tags are extra bits of information that you add to the URL links of your online marketing or advertising materials. These include tracking parameters followed by an equals sign and a single word or hyphenated words that you designate. When users click on a link with added parameters, the Google Analytics tracking code will extract the information from the link and associate that user and their behavior with your marketing campaign. That way, you can know which people came to your site through your various marketing activities. For example, the Google Store has a monthly email newsletter it sends to its customers with links back to the Google Store website. Adding a campaign tag of "email" to these links allows the store to easily identify the users that came to the website from the email newsletter in Google Analytics.

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, behavior, 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. You can choose which metric from your report should display in the pie chart using the pulldown menu. 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. You can also use the pull-down menu to select various metrics to be represented as bars. 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. Again, you can use the drop-down menu to select which metric should be displayed. Finally, 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.

Demographics and Interests reports

Next, let's look at the "Demographics" and "Interests" reports. The "Demographics" reports provide information about the age and gender of your users. The "Interests" reports show your users' preferences for certain types of web content like technology, music, travel, or TV. This information is useful in two ways. First, if you know your target audience, it can help verify that you're reaching the right people. Second, it can help guide decisions about your marketing and content strategy. Note that to see data in these reports, you 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. Once activated, you will see data in your Demographics and Interests reports about the age, gender, and interests of your users. Note that if you've just enabled this feature, it may take a day or two for data to appear in these reports. Also, the Demographic reports may not contain any data if your site traffic is very low or your segment is too small.

Graph Annotator

Notice the small arrow at the bottom of the line graph. Clicking on the arrow lets you annotate the graph with helpful notes to add business context to your data. Once you add an annotation, a small indicator will appear on the graph that can be viewed by other users with access to the view. Clicking any of the metrics below will show the data points for those metrics in the line graph above.

The Analytics account structure

Now that you know how data gets collected, let's look at how Google Analytics accounts are organized. 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. Large businesses or agencies could have multiple accounts, while, medium to small-sized businesses generally (only) use one account. 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. This lets you organize your Analytics data collection in a way that best reflects your business. 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 applications, or other digital assets associated with your business. For example, 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, but keep in mind this won't allow you to see data from separate properties in aggregate.

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 or CSV. "Share" lets you email a copy of the report as an attachment and even schedule regular email updates. "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." We'll cover Custom Reports in the advanced course. 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 "Faster response."

Audience Overview Full Report

Previously, we showed you a high-level version of the "Audience Overview" report. At the bottom of that report, there's a link to "view full report," where you can see expanded versions of each Audience report in the left-hand navigation. Now, let's check out a full report. When you open up the full report, you'll see links underneath the segment picker that control the different types of data in the report. The "Summary" view is a summary of the dimension categorized by Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion metrics. This makes it easier to interpret these metrics in the context of the marketing funnel we discussed in Unit 1.

A user with "edit" permissions at the Account level will automatically have "edit" permissions at which other levels? (select all answers that apply) User Property View Product

Property and View

Real-Time Reports

Real-Time reports let you look at live user behavior on your website including information like where your users are coming from and if they're converting.

Which Traffic Source dimensions does Google Analytics automatically capture for each user who comes to your site? Source, Keyword, Campaign name Source, Medium, Keyword Source, Medium, Campaign name Medium, Keyword, Campaign name

Source, Medium, Campaign name

Content Drilldown

The "Content Drilldown" report under "Site Content" groups pages according to your website's directory structure. You can click on a directory to see the pages of your site within that directory. This is especially useful if you're trying to understand the performance of content in a particular section of your website. If you switch to the pie chart view, you can quickly see which sections of your site are most popular with your users.

Events

The "Events" report tracks how users interact with specific elements of your website. For example, you can use this report to track when users click on a video player or a download link. Event tracking requires additional implementation beyond the Analytics tracking code snippet, which we'll discuss in more detail in an advanced Google Analytics course.

Exit Pages

The "Exit Pages" report under "Site Content" shows the pages where users left your site. Because you don't want users exiting from important pages like a shopping cart checkout, it's a good idea to periodically review this report to minimize unwanted exits.

Landing Pages

The "Landing Pages" report under "Site Content" lists the pages of your website where users first arrived. These are the first pages viewed in a session. You can use this report to 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.

Geographic reports

The "Location" report under "Geo" is one of the most useful Audience reports. Google Analytics can anonymously determine a user's continent, sub-continent, country, and city through the IP address used by their browser. Notice the geographic heat map at the top of the report, which you can adjust to display different metrics. For example, switching the map to show "percent of New Visits" lets you identify potential new markets based on new user traffic to your website. This can help you decide whether to build awareness or invest in customer loyalty in particular locations. You could also use the table below the visualization to identify areas that have a high number of conversions (or transactions), but low traffic rates. That could indicate untapped markets to target with advertising. Another analysis technique is to identify the regions where you already have a large audience, but lower than average performance. For example, if certain regions have a higher than average bounce rate (or users that leave after viewing a single page), you might need to optimize your advertising or website. Perhaps you need to translate your ad or site into the local language or add geographically-specific content.

Admin

The Admin section contains all of your Google Analytics settings such as user permissions, tracking code, view settings, and filters.

What report would best help identify potential browser issues with website traffic? The Active Users report The New vs Returning report The Browser & OS report The Source/Medium report

The Browser & OS report

Metrics

There are a number of helpful metrics beneath the line graph: "Sessions" are the total number of sessions for the given date range. "Users" are the total number of users that visited for the given date range, "Pageviews" are 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" is the average number of pages viewed during each session. This also includes repeated viewings of a single page. "Average session duration" is the average length of a session based on users that visited your site in the selected date range. "Bounce rate" is the percentage of users who left after viewing a single page on your site and taking no additional action. "Percent of new sessions" is the percentage of sessions in your date range who are new users to your site.

Campaign Tags

There are five different campaign tags that help you identify specific information about your campaign traffic. Medium, Source, and Campaign are required campaign tags. You can also add tags for Content and Term.

Channels Report

There are other ways to view which traffic sources bring the most engaged users to the site. Using the "Channels" report, we could 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. If you want to group your sources differently, you can create your own channel groupings in Google Analytics. We'll cover this more in an advanced course.

Alert menu

This may include data that is not collecting properly or a setting that needs to be optimized. To close the Alerts menu, click anywhere on the screen outside of the alerts.

Select Date Ranges (click Date Range Selector)

This opens up a calendar on the left where you can select your date ranges. When you change the date range, it affects all of the reports in your view. So you can switch between different reports without having to adjust the date range each time. You can choose between date ranges like last week, last calendar month, or last 30 days. But you can also set specific dates by clicking the start- and end-date fields and selecting calendar dates. If you'd like to select an entire month, simply click on the name of the month in the calendar to the left. To compare previous date ranges, you can select the "compare to" checkbox and add a second date range.

Intro to google analytics

To begin, let's start by defining "digital analytics" and why it's important. So Krista, what's the deal with digital analytics? Well Justin, people usually purchase goods in stages. In marketing, we have the concept of a purchase funnel. There are different stages within the funnel that describe customer interactions. A basic purchase funnel includes the following steps: Acquisition involves building awareness and acquiring user interest Behavior is when users engage with your business Conversion is when a user becomes a customer and transacts with your business In the offline world, this process can be hard to measure. But in the online world, we can measure many different aspects of the funnel using digital analytics. We can track what online behavior led to purchases and use that data to make informed decisions about how to reach new and existing customers.

Why is it important to keep one unfiltered view when using filters with Google Analytics? To ensure you can always access the original data In order to configure Goals In order to use a filter for multiple views There is no reason to have an unfiltered view

To ensure you can always access the original data

Acquisition Report Overview part 3

To identify effective traffic sources, we can look at the source/medium combinations with the most users, but that doesn't necessarily mean this was the best traffic. Ideally, traffic should be "high quality," meaning that users who arrive from a source engage with the website or complete a conversion. A good indicator of traffic quality can be bounce rate. Our top traffic source is Google organic search, which has a relatively low bounce rate compared to other sources. Our second most popular traffic source is direct traffic. YouTube referrals were the third highest traffic source, but had one of the highest bounce rates. Let's do a bit more analysis to understand if this is a problem. We can click into the comparison view and select the metric "bounce rate" to compare bounce rate for each source/medium combination to the site average. Sure enough, we can see that our YouTube traffic is bouncing at a much higher rate than the site average. The Google Store may want to investigate to make sure that YouTube traffic is landing on a page that's valuable to those users. If we want to see only the "organic" sources sending traffic to the site, we could type "organic" into the filter. You can see that Google referred more traffic than any other non-paid source and had a relatively low bounce rate compared to other sources. This means that users arriving from Google Organic search are landing on highly relevant pages. Now let's compare the performance for all of our various Google marketing activities that generated traffic by changing the filter to "google." We can now see that organic traffic was our biggest traffic source, followed by google/cpc, which represents paid search traffic using Google Ads. This is a great way to add context to your analysis and understand which marketing activities are generating success for 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.

New vs. Returning Users

To the right of the metrics is a pie chart illustrating the percentage of new vs. returning users.

Tracking a Website

To track a website, you first have to create a Google Analytics account. Then you need to add a small piece of 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. For the Google Store, the tracking code could show how many users visited a page that sells drinkware versus a page that sells houseware. Or it could tell us how many users bought an item like an Android doll by tracking whether they made it to the purchase confirmation page. But the tracking code will also collect information from the browser like the language the browser is set to, the type of browser (such as Chrome or Safari), and the device and operating system used to access the Google Store. It can even collect the "traffic source," which is what brought users to the site in the first place. This might be a search engine, an advertisement they clicked on, or an email marketing campaign. Keep in mind that 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 begins when a user navigates to a page that includes the Google Analytics tracking code. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. If the user returns to a page after a session ends, a new session will begin.

Mobile Dimensions

To view metrics about what mobile devices people are using to view your site, click Operating System, Service Provider, and Screen Resolution.

System Dimensions

To view metrics about what technology people are using to view your site, click Browser, Operating System, and Service Provider

Once Google analytics processes data, it's stored in a database where it can't be modified

True

When a dashboard is shared, users can edit the dashboard configuration. True False

True

Technology and Mobile reports

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

Collapse left-hand navigation

Use this pointer to shrink the navigation and provide more space for your reports.

What does the "Users" metric measure? The total number of visits to your website Users that had at least one session on your site in the given date range Users that landed on the homepage of your website Users who have signed up to an email newsletter on your website

Users that had at least one session on your site in the given date range

When will Google Analytics end a session by default: After 30 minutes, regardless of user activity on your website Once the user opens another browser window When a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more or closes a browser window At noon every day

When a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more or closes a browser window.

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. But there are also configuration settings that allow you to customize how that data is processed. For example, you might 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 that's important to your business. *Once Analytics processes the data, it's stored in a database where it can't be changed* So remember, when you set up your configuration, don't exclude any data you think you might want to analyze later. Once the data has been processed and stored in the database, it will appear in Google Analytics as reports. We'll show you what these reports look like a little later.

Save Reports

You can also save reports in order to view them later by clicking "Save" at the top of most reports. When you save reports, they include any customizations you've made to the report. For example, if you've filtered the data table, then that filter will automatically be applied when you access the report from the Customization area under Saved Reports.

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: "managing users," "edit," "collaborate," or "read and analyze." "Managing 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. And finally, "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 you configure your organizations, accounts, properties, and views can affect how your data gets collected. Be thoughtful when setting up your Google Analytics implementation, and make sure you align your properties and views of the data you collect with your overall business structure.

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".

Behavior reports overview

You can find the "Behavior" reports under "Behavior" in the left-hand navigation. It's important to understand how Google Analytics calculates behavior data. If you recall, Analytics uses a small piece of Javascript code on your website to collect data. Every time a user loads a page on your website, this tracking code creates a "pageview" that is reported in Google Analytics. Analytics uses this to calculate many of the metrics in the Behavior reports. For example, the "Total Pageviews" metric is simply the sum of each time a user loaded a page on your website.

Acquisition Reports Overview part 2

You can think of the medium as the mechanism that delivered users to your site. Some common examples of mediums are "organic," "cpc," "referral," "email," and "none." Let's look at these different types of mediums: "Organic" is used to identify traffic that arrived on your site through unpaid search like a non-paid Google Search result. "CPC" indicates traffic that arrived through a paid search campaign like Google Ads text ads. "Referral" is used for traffic that arrived on your site after the user clicked on a website other than a search engine. "Email" represents traffic that came from an email marketing campaign. "(none)" is applied for users that come directly to your site by typing your URL directly into a browser. In your reports, you will see these users have a source of "direct" with a medium of "(none)". "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." Under "All Traffic" let's look at the "Source/Medium" report in The Google Store Analytics account using the dates August 1, 2015 through August 31, 2015. This shows the sources and their respective mediums sending referrals, search engine traffic, and direct traffic to the site. Notice that the default sort is users.