Notes

four Goal types

- "Destination": user reaches a specific page on your site (thank-you page) - "Duration": length of a user's session - "Pages or Screens": how many pages a user views in a session - "Events": tracking specific actions on a site is triggered by a particular user action

different Custom Report types

- Explorer: standard Analytics report that includes a line graph and a data table, search and sort options, and secondary dimensions. - Flat Table: static, sortable table that displays data in rows (all of the event parameters together) - Map Overlay: map of the world with regions and countries in darker colors to indicate traffic and engagement volume.

Using additional information (other sources such as IP address, server-log files, and other ad-serving data), Analytics can understand things like

- user's location - specifics about their browser and operating system - age and gender - source/medium that referred them to a site.

Analytics offers two kinds of filters

1. "Predefined": templates for the most common filters you'll use, include or exclude data based on traffic from the ISP domain, IP addresses, subdirectories, or the hostname, and designate how the filter will match that information 2. "Custom" Filters: let you design a filter to include, exclude, or modify data, include or exclude hits from your data collection, format data to lowercase or uppercase, search and replace data collected in the hit, matching a particular filter text-pattern that you identify Since excluding data by IP address is common, Analytics offers a predefined filter for that, so we'll leave the filter type as "Predefined." filters refine your data and make it more readable in your reports (rack activity in a specific website directory or track subdomains of your website in separate views)

Analytics account structure

All of your Google Analytics accounts can be grouped under an "Organization": optional, manage multiple Google Analytics accounts under one grouping Large businesses or agencies could have multiple accounts medium to small-sized businesses generally (only) use one account

You must include Source, Medium, and Campaign tracking variables in your link tags to track campaigns accurately

All other variables are optional. The optional campaign parameters are Term and Content. · Term: record the keyword from paid search campaigns · Content: test different variations of your campaigns. Remember that campaign variables don't need to be in any specified order. Campaign variable values are case sensitive.

Behavior reports

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 ("Total Pageviews" metric is simply the sum of each time a user loaded a page on your website)

Accounts have Properties which have Views

At the account level, businesses can group their digital assets together and set configurations like user access. Each business or business unit typically has a single account. Each account can have multiple properties, which each individually collect their own data with their own Google Analytics tracking IDs. It's generally a good idea to create a different property for your business's websites, subdomains, mobile apps, and other digital properties. Views allow you to configure your data for reporting, like setting filters that exclude traffic from your company's IP address, or creating distinct ways of looking at the data for different users to access.

Custom Reports for Analysis

Customization area contains any dashboards, shortcuts, alerts, or Custom Reports that you've created can add up to five dimensions and 10 metrics to a Custom Report, but make sure they're of the same scope or no data will appear (mixing the Event Category dimension with the Time on Page metric won't work because this mixes a hit-level dimension with a session-level metric) good alternative to secondary dimensions if you want to use a Custom Dimension as your primary, not your secondary dimension, useful if you want to see more than two dimensions per row if you need to export the data table into another software for analysis, allow you to report on any Custom Metrics you have collected

Goal Funnel

Each funnel step represents an action on your website that needs to be taken in order to accomplish the Goal, unique part of the URL for each page the user has to view in order to check out and make a purchase if we only wanted users who entered the funnel on the first step to show up in our funnel visualization report, we could set the first step to required Goal completion numbers in the Conversions report will not be affected by the funnel you've set up, even if you've made some of the steps required, as these steps are only reported in the funnel visualization report If you see users dropping off dramatically in a particular step, there could be technical issues

"conversion"

Each time a user completes one of your business goals (signing up for a newsletter or buying a product.) use a feature called "Goals" to track these

Tracking Code

Google Store: could show how many users visited a page that sells drinkware versus a page that sells houseware OR could tell us how many users bought an item like an Android doll by tracking whether they made it to the purchase confirmation page 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, collect the traffic source will collect and send updated information about the user's activity every time a page loads

Real-Time

If you're on your internal network, you should notice that your internal user traffic should decline over the next 30 minutes. Once the filters have taken effect, Analytics won't collect any internal activity for the IP address you filtered.

five different campaign tags

Medium, Source, and Campaign are required campaign tags - "Medium": communicates the mechanism, or how you sent your message to the user. You could include "email" for an email campaign, "cpc" for paid search ads, or "social" for a social network. - "Source": communicates where the user came from. This could be a specific web page or a link in an email. Source could also differentiate the type of medium. So if the medium was "cpc" (or "cost per click" paid traffic), the source might be "google," "bing," or "yahoo." If the medium was "email," the source might be "newsletter". - "Campaign": communicate the name of your marketing campaign such as "2015-Back-To-School" or "2015-Holiday-Sale". - "Content": used to differentiate versions of a promotion, useful when you want to test which version of an ad or promotion is more effective. If you're running a test between two different versions of a newsletter, you might want to label these tags "v1-10dollars-off" and "v2-nopromo" to help differentiate which newsletter the data is associated with in Google Analytics. - "Term": identify the keyword for paid search campaigns. You would only use this field if you are manually tagging a paid search campaign like Bing or Yahoo!.

Multi-Channel Funnels allow you to see how different channels assisted in generating conversions

Most conversion reports give all credit for the conversion to the last channel a visitor interacted with before converting, but with this report, you can examine how other marketing activities might have led to that final conversion. The report will include any other channels the visitor experienced within the last 30 days before converting by default, but can be set to include interactions as far back as 90 days prior to the conversion three roles a channel can play in a conversion path: first, assist, and last. · Assisted Conversions (helped by social media) report: you'll find a column titled Assisted/Last Click or Direct Conversions, which is a ratio representing whether or not a channel provides more assisted or direct conversions. The closer the ratio is to 0, the more the channel was responsible for direct conversions rather than assists. If the ratio is above 1, that means the channel was responsible for more assists than direct conversions. If the ratio is exactly one, that means the channel was responsible for as many assists as it was direct conversions.

"URL builder"

To add these parameters into the URLs associated with your ads, Google Analytics provides this tool in our Help Center If you use phrases, then the URL builder will add underscores between the words to avoid spaces use consistent medium names like "display" for banner ads and "email" for email campaigns only makes one at a time can instantly see campaign information in the Real Time reports or wait a few hours to review the data in your standard Campaign reports quickly understand which campaigns drove the highest quality traffic to your site

destination URL

URL of the page that is shown when the user converts or completes the conversion process

Smart Goals

goals automatically generated by Google's machine learning algorithms

Dimension widening allows you to upload your own external data to use as dimensions

With dimension widening, you can import external data that wouldn't otherwise be tracked with the GA tracking code into your account (you're running a news site, you could import author and topic data for each page on your site. This would allow you to view page metrics with 'Author' and 'Topic' as dimensions, allowing you to see things like average time on page for each topic or bounce rate for each author)

Attribution Modeling

a set of rules that determine how sales and conversions get attributed to your marketing campaigns OR a way to assign credit for conversions to different touchpoints, goal is to help you better understand how different marketing campaigns and channels all work together to produce conversions so you can better allocate and invest your marketing time and budget (customer could visit the Google Merchandise Store from a Google Ads ad, return a week later by clicking on a link in a social network, That same day they could return a third time through an email campaign and make a purchase. All of those marketing activities worked together to generate the conversion) "last-click" attribution model: Google Analytics will attribute all of the credit, or ecommerce revenue, to the last marketing activity (email campaign)

Master View

all of our reporting and analysis. We can simply copy the test view and rename it.

Goal Value

assign a monetary amount to the conversion if each conversion was worth a consistent amount to your business

Demographics Report

collection of demographic information is made possible by DoubleClick third-party cookies. Cookies that are associated with a user are the only ones that will contribute to your data collection. There are a portion of cookies that do not have a user associated with it so you will not get a full picture across your users, but a subset of the whole. Demographics can also help identify a market that you do not currently promote to, but have active users

Acquisition reports

compare the performance of different marketing channels and discover which sources send you the highest quality traffic and conversions

Goal Flow Report

creates a visualization of how your visitors moved through a conversion funnel towards a goal. Each step or 'node' will represent a page the user navigated through towards the final conversion. You can use this report to optimize the performance of each page in the funnel and thus the ultimate conversion rate of your site by looking for things like where loops back to a previous step in the funnel, steps of the funnel that underperform, where visitors unexpectedly exit the funnel and where your visitors are entering the conversion funnel

Bounce Rate

different kinds of business objectives this metric will help you to improve upon, and for which objectives it isn't of any direct help (when measuring the performance of a landing page that's meant to lead into a conversion funnel, a high bounce rate provides evidence that users might not be finding what they expect on that page, and that by testing new page designs or copy you might be able to send more visitors further into the funnel to generate more conversions) There are other types of pages, however, for which a high bounce rate is perfectly acceptable (blogs, which often list multiple posts on a single page, will naturally have higher bounce rates, as the visitor isn't necessarily required to navigate to another page to view more content)

Technologies Outside of GA and You as a Website Owner

few technologies that were suggested that affected your and the technology's interaction with GA (how Flash and AJAX will affect how you count a visit or what metrics you would look at most when rebuilding a website)

four types of goals

further divided into two more types, those that track actions (destination and event goals) and those that track behavior (Duration and Pages per visit) · Destination goals: triggered when a visitor lands on a specified page or page type · Event goals: track specific actions like watching a video or downloading a file, require special code called 'Event Tracking' to be implemented on your site. · Pages per visit goals: triggered when a visitor views more or fewer pages than you specified when you set up your goal, while · Duration goals: triggered when a visitor spends more or less time on your site than the threshold that you set

Measurement Protocol

gives developers the ability to see raw interaction data throughout their platforms creating a view across devices not normally found in GA, like digital appliances or a point of purchase system. Your UA code helps connect these interfaces and is a feature of Universal Analytics

Don't mix your Sources up with your Mediums

if a visitor searches Google and follows a link there to your site · Source: name of the site which sent the visitor your way (Google) · Medium is how the user got there (depend on which link on Google the user actually followed. If the visitor came to your site by clicking a paid ad in the Google search results, then the medium for the visit would be CPC. However, if the visitor clicked a link to your site in Google's organic search listings, then the medium would be counted as Organic. So that first visit would have a Source/Medium of Google/CPC, while the second would have a Source/Medium of Google/Organic) For an email newsletter, you could use the name of the newsletter as your source (for example, 'Email Newsletter'), while the medium should be counted as 'Email.'

Intelligence Events

reports can be found under the home tab and can be generated automatically or you can create a custom one, helpful in identifying large statistical variations that you may have otherwise have missed

Google Analytics

platform that collects data and compiles it into useful reports

Site Speed Reports

site speed it is determined by three main indicators of latency: Page-load time, Execution speed, and how quickly a page can be parsed for the user to interact with

Tag Manager

takes the developer work out of building custom tracking code. 3 main tips - use one account for every site, delete all other tracking code on the page after implementing them, and you only need one container for all tracking codes

Remarketing

target ad content to users who have already visited your website (When a user visits your site and doesn't make a purchase, you can use remarketing to show them relevant ads on the Google Display Network, on mobile apps, or on Google Search. This can bring them back to your website and encourage them to make a purchase) but didn't complete a conversion or make a purchase Audiences: to target ads to those users (users who visited a specific page of your website or clicked to play a video), doesn't require any additional tagging, user clears their browser cookies, they will no longer be a part of the remarketing audience you created until they visit your site again, can see an estimate of the users in that audience over the last seven days, set how long users are eligible to be served remarketing ads using the membership duration (from 1 to 540 days), Audience Builder - If your Audience in Analytics meets the requirements for Search remarketing, it's eligible for both Search and Display remarketing in your Google Ads account. An Audience list for Google Search ads must have at least 1,000 users before it can be used. Audiences that include the Google Display Network's demographics dimensions "Age, Gender, Interests" are not eligible for Search remarketing.

Dynamic Remarketing

target remarketing ads more precisely, based on content or products users previously viewed on your site, related and top-performing content and products, and purchase histories and demographics (Google Merchandise Store can collect product IDs from the merchandise that users viewed on their website and later advertise those products to those same users to bring them back to the Store website and make a purchase) audiences can include: - general users who viewed your homepage or any category or product pages - users who viewed a search results page on your website - users who viewed product lists or product detail pages - users who abandoned their shopping carts - users who previously converted.

AdWords reports

the AdWords Day Parts Report breaks down how your AdWords campaigns perform for each hour of the day. Use this report to better target the timing of your AdWords campaigns

Goal values vs. Ecommerce values

· Goal values: allow you to attribute monetary values to actions other than transactions. (determine that each visitor that signs up for your email list is worth approximately $50 to your business, you can set that value and have Google record it whenever an email signup is completed) · Ecommerce values: allows you to track sales and other transactions, and requires you to 1. Enable Ecommerce tracking in your GA view, and 2. Add the special Ecommerce tracking code into your GA tracking code on your 'Transaction Complete' landing pages Goal conversions can only be counted once per visit: if a visitor watches a video that you've set up as a goal worth $5 five different times in a single visit, that's only counted as a single conversion worth $5. If you've set the goal up as an Ecommerce transaction, that visitor just triggered 5 conversions worth a total of $25 to your business.

Understand different Attribution Models and when you might use them

· Attribution models allow you to assign credit for sales or goal conversions to channels at particular points in a conversion path. Setting up the appropriate attribution models can give you insight into how you can better allocate resources by channel. · Last Non-Direct Click attribution model: default, last channel a visitor interacted with gets all of the credit for the conversion, disregarding whether or not the visitor actually converted on a direct visit. This model assumes that the direct visit was actually won by the previous channel the visitor came in on, and so that channel deserves all the credit. (visitor found your site via a PPC ad but then didn't convert until a direct visit the next day, that PPC ad deserves credit for the conversion) · Last Click model: last channel a visitor came in on is responsible for the conversion, even if it was a direct visit · First Interaction model: gives 100% of the conversion value to the channel a visitor first experienced, and is useful when running ad campaigns geared towards building brand awareness · Linear model: all channels a visitor interacted with receive equal credit, and is useful for measuring the holistic performance of a campaign · Time Decay model: also gives credit to all channels in a conversion path, but attributes more of the credit to channels nearest to the conversion · Position Based model (First and last touchpoints receive more credit than those in the middle): allows you to specify the percent of the conversion credit each step in the path should receive, first, middle, and last · custom model: compare how models represent your data and figure out which is best for your campaigns using the Model Comparison Tool.

ins and outs of table manipulation

· Dimensions are characteristics of your users, their sessions and their actions (location, which would allow you to segment your data to see individual metrics like sessions or bounce rate for visitors from different cities or countries) · secondary dimensions: further segment the groups from the first dimension based on another dimension (add Browser as a secondary dimension to a location report where the primary dimension is Country/Territory, we'll get metrics for segments divided first by country, then by each browser) - I'd use this combination of dimensions to answer a question like 'Do I get more visits from the United States from users browsing with Chrome or Internet Explorer?' or 'What's the bounce rate for Indian visitors using Safari?' · Table filters: allow you to exclude data based on certain dimensions or metrics, view only dimension segments that saw more than 10 visits · Table sorts: allow you to change the order in which the data in each column is displayed (default the metric 'Sessions' is displayed from highest to lowest, but I can change the sort order to see the segments with the lowest number of sessions in the topmost rows) · Pivot tables: another way of adding secondary dimensions to your report, and allow you a more fluid way of segmenting data into groups

Google detects three mediums without any customization

· Organic: all unpaid traffic from search engines · Referral: traffic from another (non-search engine) site on the web · None: medium for direct visits to your site (these visits will have a source of Direct). For Google to detect other mediums like display ads or email, you'll need to tag your links, otherwise they'll be counted as referrals. The one exception to this is AdWords. AdWords auto-tags your links, so you won't need to add any campaign variables for these campaigns. Remember, however, that you'll need to first link your Google Analytics and Google AdWords account for this data to sync correctly.

best traffic

"high quality," meaning that users who arrive from a source engage with the website or complete a conversion, good indicator of traffic quality can be bounce rate

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.

user performs an action on an element with event tracking, the event tracking code will pass four parameters along with the event hit

- "Category": organize the events you track into groups. For your website, this might be "Videos" or "Social Shares." - "Action": action the user took when they initiated the event. If you were tracking when users click a video play-button, you might have a category called "Videos" with an associated action of "Play." - "Label": optional value used to further describe the element you're tracking like the name of a video, can help you make your event reports more readable. - "Value": optional numerical value (amount of time it takes a video to load or how much a specific event action is worth), can use to assign a specific dollar amount when a specific action occurs. make names easy to understand (If the Google Merchandise Store wants to set up an event on their website to track the "Android" link under "Brands", they can set the event category as "Navigation," the action as "Brands," and the label as "Android." Since navigation doesn't have a direct monetary impact, they can leave off the "Value" parameter)

By clicking "Admin", Google Analytics lets you set user permissions for

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

Sharing and customizing reports

- "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."

Metrics

- "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.

Report Visualization

- "data table": view is default for most reports, organizes data in a table broken out by acquisition, behavior, and conversion metrics for the audience and acquisition reports. - "pie chart": compare percentages of a whole such as how many users are on desktops, tablets, and mobile phones. - "performance" view: bar graph, compare individual segments side by side like which countries bring in the highest traffic. - "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. - "Pivot" view: both rows and columns can show different dimension values for comparison (pivot table could show Google Store the bounce rate and number of sessions for each landing page and device type)

three most common types of hits

- "pageview" hit: triggered when a user loads a webpage with the tracking code, most common type of hit sent to Analytics. Every time a user opens a page with the tracking code, a new pageview hit will be sent. - "event" hit: lets you track every time a user interacts with a particular element on your website (whether users click a video Play button, a particular URL, or a product carousel) Event hits pass four parameters of data in the URL: event action, category, label, and value. can use these to categorize interactions in reports that are specific to your website. - "transaction" hit (also called an "ecommerce" hit): can pass data to Analytics about ecommerce purchases such as products purchased, transaction IDs, and "stock keeping units" (or SKUs). Enhanced Ecommerce within Google Analytics: pass additional ecommerce data (product category, whether items have been added or removed from a shopping cart, and how many times users viewed a product on a website) - "social hits": pass likes, shares, or tweet data - "page timing hits": allow you to report on page timings

Google Analytics interface

- Account/Property/View switcher - Alert icon - Alert menu: may include data that is not collecting properly or a setting that needs to be optimized - Feedback, Help, and Settings: "question mark" icon lets you send feedback to Google Analytics or search Help articles and the user icon lets you switch between different Google accounts, manage your current Google account, or sign out - Customization: create custom reports, specific to your business - Left-hand navigation: expose the reports that belong to each section - Real-Time Reports: live user behavior like where your users are coming from and if they're converting - Audience Reports: characteristics about your users like age and gender, where they're from, their interests, how engaged they were, whether they're new or returning users, and what technology they're using - Acquisition Reports: which channels (such as advertising or marketing campaigns) brought users to your site ("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)) - Behavior Reports: how people engaged on your site including which pages they viewed, and their landing and exit pages, can even track what your users searched for on your site and whether they interacted with specific elements - Conversion Reports: website goals based on your business objectives - Admin: all of your Google Analytics settings such as user permissions, tracking code, view settings, and filters - Collapse left-hand navigation: shrink the navigation and provide more space for your reports

basic purchase funnel

- 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

Using activity, cohorts, and benchmarking for audience analysis

- Active Users report: number of unique users who initiated sessions on your site over the last day, seven days, fourteen days, or thirty days, monitor traffic drops (Short-term drops may be due to negative press or social content, while long-term drops may signal new release problems or the inability to build a growing audience) - Cohort Analysis report: specific groups of users and their behavior • Cohort Type: single dimension of cohort to report on ("Acquisition Date" groups cohorts based on when users started their first sessions with your site) • Cohort Size: day, week, or month of acquisition • metric selector • Date Range selector: preset date ranges that vary based on the cohort size (cohorts by day, the date range will offer choices from 7 to 30 days) - Benchmarking reports: compare your data with anonymized aggregated industry data from other companies who share their data, set meaningful business goals, gain insight into industry trends, and give you a baseline to measure your own business, over 1600 industry verticals

two types of goals

- Business goals: actions you want your user to take on your website - Google Analytics Goals: below, must be an Administrator on the View in which you want to enable Goals, only set up to 20 goals per view (successful checkouts)

Channel and Content Groupings

- Channel Groupings: organize your data into customized channels - Content Grouping: aggregate metrics within reports based on the organization of your website

Custom Dimensions and Metrics

- Custom Dimensions: define a group of metric data that's specific to your business and then apply that as a dimension across your reports, can be used as a secondary dimension in standard reports, a primary dimension in a Custom Report, or as a segment, enables you to report on particular characteristics of your users or their behavior within the Google Analytics data you've collected, Google Tag Manager is a great option for managing tracking code more easily, can use Custom Dimensions as secondary dimensions in standard reports or as primary dimensions in Custom Reports (if the Google Merchandise Store wanted to see which products were most popular among employees and retail customers, we can open the Product Performance report under Conversions in Ecommerce and add the secondary dimension we set up of "User Category"), standard Google Analytics users can create up to 20 Custom Dimensions and Analytics 360 customers can create up to 200 - Custom Metrics: collected for any standard dimension or Custom Dimension that can't be measured by any predefined metric in Google Analytics (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), can only have a scope of "hit" or "product", formats are basic integer, a decimal value, or a time-based value, set min and max, Google Analytics assigns an index (or slot number) for each can only be paired with dimensions or metrics from a similar scope, can't choose index, won't be able to apply a Custom Dimension to data you have previously collected

Audience Overview Report

- Date range: the time period in which you want to analyze report data - Date range selector: affects all of the reports in your view - Date Range Comparison: compare data from two different date ranges to see how business changed over time - Segment Picker: look at a specific data set and compare metrics, default segment includes all of the Users that visited your site in the given date range - Duration Selector: more specifically, you can change the data points to show hourly, weekly, or monthly, especially helpful when looking at large date sets, default is hourly for single day data - Metric Selector: from users to a different metric, can compare to second metric - Graph Annotator: helpful notes to add business context to your data - Metrics: look at 28 - New vs. Returning Users - Dimensions and Metrics: see the top 10 dimensions and metrics in each category - Language Dimension: default dimension selected in the Audience Overview report, view top 10 values for those dimensions

two types of segments

- Default (or System) Segments: already available in Google Analytics and show up under the System section based on sequences of user interactions - Custom Segments: create by adding characteristics and show up under "Custom", can segment by demographics (age "25 to 34" and language contains "es" for Spanish), technology, behavior, session dates, traffic sources, and ecommerce (if implemented), advanced segments that let you match dimensions and metrics to specific values that you enter. You can even specify multiple filters that make up conditions within the segment, segments based on sequences of user interactions (users that viewed a specific page and then watched a video), Sequences can be a mixture of pageviews or events applied to every report you open until you remove the segment or exit Google Analytics, can compare up to four segments at one time, share segment doesn't share data, segments are applied after sampling (data being shown in your reports is a sample, the data shown in your segments will also be a sample)

User permissions

- Each Analytics account has a limited number of properties and each property has a limited number of views (you're the administrator of a site with multiple sub-directories based on different departments in your business. You can create different views for each department using filters and then grant access to each view for the members of those departments) - Google Merchandise Store is a medium-sized ecommerce business. They use a single account, a single property, and three views for raw data, testing, and production. But you'll need to decide how to set up your organizations, accounts, properties, and views based on the individual needs of your business

first few steps in which Google Analytics processes data

- First, Analytics determines new vs. returning users. - Then it categorizes hits into session (or periods in which the user engaged with the site). - Next, it joins data from the tracking code with other data sources.

Custom Filters

- Include filters - Exclude filters - Lowercase and Uppercase filters: quickly combine rows that differ only by case to eliminate duplicate data, consolidate that page reporting and make the data in those reports a little neater - Advanced filters: Regular expressions (or "reg ex" for short) are characters that you can use to identify matching text in order to trigger an action (word or combination of characters), filter out the query parameters, so that it doesn't appear multiple times, add the hostname in Analytics so that you can distinguish between multiple domains applied from the moment you create them and can take up to 24 hours before being applied to your data (filters, like all configuration settings, are not applied retroactively to your data)

Different businesses will naturally have different macro- and micro-conversions

- e-commerce site: the macro-conversion might be to purchase a product with a micro-conversion of subscribing to a newsletter. - lead generation site: the macro-conversion might be filling out a contact form with a micro-conversion of following the site on social media. - macro-conversion: might be engaging with a particular amount of content with a micro-conversion of clicking into an article. - online information and support site: the macro-conversion might be completing a guided support flow to successfully solve an issue with a micro-conversion of rating a support article.

Two types of dashboards

- private dashboard is only visible to you within that view - shared dashboard can be seen by anyone who has access to that view can have 20 private dashboards per user and 50 shared dashboards per view 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 user lands on your site, the Google Analytics tracking code automatically captures several attributes (or dimensions) about where the user came from

- traffic medium: mechanism that delivered users to your site •"organic": 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": traffic that arrived on your site after the user clicked on a website other than a search engine •"email": traffic that came from an email marketing campaign •"none": 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: more information about the medium (if 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.") - marketing campaign name:

When you link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account, you can

- view Google Ads click and cost data alongside your site engagement data in Google Analytics - create remarketing lists in Analytics to use in Google Ads campaigns - import Analytics goals and transactions into Google Ads as conversions - view Analytics site engagement data in Google Ads.

All Pages" report located under "Site Content"

-"Pageviews": how frequently each page on your site was viewed, default is page URI which is part of the URL after the domain name in the location bar of the browser. 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. - Average Time on Page" and "Bounce Rate": how engaged users were on each page of your site - "Content Drilldown": website's directory structure, especially useful if you're trying to understand the performance of content in a particular section of your website - "Landing Pages": pages of your website where users first arrived, first pages viewed in a session, use 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 - "Exit Pages": pages where users left your sit, periodically review this report to minimize unwanted exits - "Events": how users interact with specific elements of your website (when users click on a video player or a download link), needs additional implementation

four types of Goals in Google Analytics

2 most common: - Destination (or Pageview) Goals: when a user views a particular page on your website. - Event Goals: when a particular action defined as an event is triggered. measure user engagement: - Duration Goals: sessions that last over a set amount of time. - "Pages or Screens per Session" Goals: whether a user has viewed a set amount of pages in a session. conversion is counted once per session per configured goal (Event goal of downloading a PDF, and the user downloads the PDF five times in the same session, this action will only count as one conversion) hit data for a goal: calculates the goal completions, goal value (if you've indicated one), and goal conversion rate conversions and Ecommerce transactions are credited to the last campaign, search, or ad that referred the user

Auto-tagging (gclid)

Google Ads can automatically add a special campaign tag to your Google Ads URLs, required to get specific Google Ads dimensions into Google Analytics like - Query match type shows how a Google Ads keyword is matched to a user search query. - Ad Group shows the ad group associated with the keyword/creative and click. - Destination URL shows the Google Ads destination URL configured in your Google Ads ads. - Ad Format describes whether the ad is a text ad, display ad, or video. - Ad Distribution Network shows the network used to deliver your ad. - Placement Domain is the domain on the content network where your ad was displayed. - Google Ads Customer ID is the unique ID assigned to your Google Ads account. you can manually add campaign tracking tags to Google Ads URLs using the URL Builder help you better analyze the performance of your Google Ads campaigns (quickly compare the performance of different ad formats using the Ad Format dimension, fine-tune your keyword matching strategy by analyzing the performance of your keywords based on their match type) only available when you link your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts

"rollup reporting"

Google Analytics 360 Customers have another way to aggregate data across domains, aggregate data automatically from multiple properties into a new combined property (use one property to track their website and another property to track their mobile app, they could also create a third property to aggregate data from both the website and the app to analyze that data together) roll-up properties don't include data that you import or link from another account (Google Ads), If you want to include linked data from your source properties into your roll-up properties, you'll need to re-link the roll-up property with the linked account

Storing data to generate reports quickly

Google Analytics collects data like location, device type, and browser type, it turns this data into dimensions that make up your reports in Analytics All Google Analytics reports are a single dimension, and the corresponding metrics for each value of that dimension Analytics calculates the metrics that get grouped in various dimensions in two ways: aggregate such as total sessions, users, or pageviews, or specific dimensions (like Sessions or New Users per country) Dimensions and metrics can have one of three scopes: - hit-level: every time a user visited a particular page or performed a singular action - session-level: organizing data for the duration of a session - user-level: organizing data for particular user, employees or not can only pair metrics with dimensions if they are both in the same scope (pairing a "hit-level" dimension like "Page Title" with a "session-level" metric like "total number of Sessions," wouldn't make sense, since "Page Title" changes with each hit, but the "sessions" count changes with the completion of each session) when data is collected and processed, it can't be changed (if you set a filter to exclude data on a view, that data will be permanently removed during processing from the reports in that view and cannot be recovered) product-level scope: group data associated with a particular product

Google Ads

Google's advertising system that allows businesses to generate text and display ads - Text ads show up next to Google search results by matching keywords you can bid on with users' search queries. - Display ads are advertisements consisting of text, images, animation, or video that show up on a vast collection of websites called the Google Display Network.

"cross-domain tracking"/ "site linking"

set up when have two related websites with different URLs or subdomains that you want to track in a single property, recognize when a user navigates between related websites in the same session need to modify the Analytics tracking code on every page of every site you want to track

"Faster response"

speed up the time it takes to generate a report and are willing to sacrifice more precise metrics

Anatomy of a "hit"

URL string with parameters of useful information about your users, With each user interaction on your website, the Analytics tracking code sends to google analytics, can see that it's passing some useful information to Analytics about the user that triggered the hit if break down URL string - language the user's browser is set to - name of the page they're viewing - screen resolution of the user's device - Analytics ID that associates that hit to the correct Analytics account. - other information like a randomly-generated user identifier so Google Analytics can differentiate between new and returning users

Analytics processes data and stores data for reports

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 configuration settings that allow you to customize how that data is processed (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 processed, it's stored in a database where it CAN'T be changed

User Permissions

assign permissions to other users at the account, property, or view level. Each level inherits permissions from the level above it (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)

Bid adjustments

automatically adjust keyword bids based on a user's device, location, or time of day (if the Google Store opens a temporary location during the holidays to sell merchandise, they might want to add a bid adjustment to increase ad visibility on mobile devices within three miles of the store during the hours of operation) evaluate campaign performance by the device, location, time of day, and remarketing list bid adjustments

create an account

automatically create a property and, within that property, a view for that account each Analytics account can have multiple properties and each property can have multiple views Each 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 (you may want separate properties for different sales regions or brands to easily view 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) each property can have multiple "views"

Session

begins when a user navigates to a page that includes the Google Analytics tracking code, ends after 30 minutes of inactivity (if user returns to a page after session ends, a new session will begin)

website data collection

begins with a snippet of JavaScript tracking code that's included on every web page of the site where you want to collect data, goal of tracking code is to track each user interaction that occurs on your website (simple as loading a page or something more specific like clicking a video play button or a link (Pageviews, Events and Transactions)) 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 to make it easy to track traffic by default. same default tracking code on pages with different domains, Analytics will count these users and sessions separately cross-domain tracking to track users across different domains

"Site Usage"

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

Data Filters

set a filter on a view that can exclude particular data, only include particular data, or modify the data during processing align the data that shows up in your reports with your business needs Filters are "rules" that Google Analytics applies to the data during processing. - filter type is true: Google Analytics will apply the filter - filter type is false: won't apply the filter two reasons you might want to apply filters: - may need to transform the data that shows up in a view (want to include only data from a particular country in a view devoted to reporting on that country OR exclude any internal employee traffic from a view reporting on customer data)

Audience reports

better understand the characteristics of your users (countries, languages, technology, age and gender, engagement and loyalty, and interests) - Active Users report: how many users had at least one session on your site in the last day, seven days, 14 days, and 30 days ("site reach" or "stickiness") - Demographics and Interests reports: age and gender of your users, preferences for certain types of web content like technology, music, travel, or TV (may take a day or two for data to appear in these reports. Demographic reports may not contain any data if your site traffic is very low or your segment is too small) - Geographic reports: "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 ("percent of New Visits" lets you identify potential new markets based on new user traffic to your website, areas that have a high number of conversions (or transactions) but low traffic rates, 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) - Behavior reports: how often users visited and returned to your website, "New vs Returning" report breaks out acquisition, behavior, and conversion goal metrics (can look at this comparison over time to see how audience loyalty may be shifting) - Technology and Mobile reports: what technologies your audience uses to consume your site content, can help fine-tune your site to make sure it's fully functional on different devices and browsers (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). "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. "Devices" report lets you see additional details about the devices used to browse your site. This includes the mobile device name, brand, 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

Solutions Gallery

broad, Google Analytics users can share different types of customizations like dashboards, great place to find dashboard templates that you can import and then customize for your own business

dimension "Country"

can switch between other dimensions like city, continent, and subcontinent dimensions are just ways to categorize metric data like all the metrics for a specific "country" or "device type."

Data Import

combine this offline data to the hit data that Analytics collects from your website, include your own business-specific data you collected independently to give you more context and insight in your reports you'll need to set up these data configuration rules prior to your data being processed (Once data has been processed, you can't retroactively apply configuration settings to that data)

All Campaigns" report in the "Acquisition" section under "Campaigns"

compare incoming traffic from your various marketing campaigns campaign name shows the source and medium data that you entered secondary dimension such as "ad content" to verify the other campaign tags you added (view the primary dimension of "Source/Medium" broken down by the "content" tag you added to your links) to see which promotions were most effective at driving people to the website

Tracking a Website

create a Google Analytics account, add a small piece of Javascript tracking code to each page on your site, collect anonymous information about how that user interacted with the page every time a user visits a webpage

"Greater Precision"

data to be more accurate and don't mind the additional response time

"goal funnel"

data visualization of the different steps needed to complete the goal, helps you identify where users are dropping out of the conversion process (Ecommerce businesses could use 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.) see if users are dropping off on their way to the confirmation page only use destination goal

How to create a measurement plan

define your business objectives (macro- and micro-conversions) and how you expect to measure those outcomes, way for you to align your business objectives with your Google Analytics configuration settings, overall business objective, different strategies that support that objective, and tactics that will help you achieve your strategies (each tactic will have key performance indicators (or KPIs) that help you measure your macro- or micro-conversions), document the data that is most important to your business "macro" conversions: represent the broader goals of your business (key actions that users take on websites that fulfill your business objectives like making a purchase), usually measure the tactics that support your various strategies "micro" conversions: nudge users closer to your macro-conversions (smaller goals that bring users closer to your main objectives such as signing up for an email coupon or a new product notification), help you better understand the user behavior that leads to macro conversions

Transforming data using configuration rules

determine how your data will be processed (data filters, goals, data grouping, Custom Dimensions, Custom Metrics, and imported data that can help you better define and analyze the data in your reports)

Filters in your configuration settings

determine what data you want to include in the reports for each view (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)

Google Analytics Account

determines how data is collected from your websites and manages who can access that data (you would create separate Analytics accounts for distinct businesses or business units)

multiple filters to a view

each filter will be applied in the order they appear in your filter settings. So if you have two filters, the data will pass through the first filter before passing through the second.

Campaigns

how well our various Google Ads campaigns are performing, organizes Google Ads campaigns using the names assigned, benefits of linking Google Ads with Analytics top of the report you can switch between desktop, mobile, and tablet metrics to view the performance of campaigns across different devices use the Acquisition metrics to see how the clicks for each campaign and the total amount paid for those clicks (CPC shows the average cost for each click, user engagement under behavior, conversions has conversion rate, the number of actual goal completions, and how much these conversions were ultimately worth to your business for each Google Ads campaign)

Test View

if we configure something incorrectly, we may inadvertently lose data we want to collect

"campaign tagging"

extra bits of information that you add to the URL links of your online marketing or advertising materials, how Marketing campaigns are tracked in Google Analytics can know which people came to your site through your various marketing activities (Google Store has 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)

Dashboards

flexible and may be used for different purposes (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) add widget name and select a visualization type (number, timeline, a map, a table, pie chart, or bar graph)

Keywords

how well keywords and individual ads are performing (bringing in a lot of traffic but has a high bounce rate, it might indicate a disconnect between the ad and landing page content OR keyword with a high conversion rate but low number of impressions (or number of times an ad was shown), you may want to raise your bid for that keyword, so the ad is shown more often and reaches a larger audience) add "Device Category" as a secondary dimension to break out these keywords by the kinds of devices that users were on when they clicked your ad and visited your site

Event Tracking

know if users are engaging with your website and performing intended actions (clicks on the global navigation bar to better understand how users navigate their website), need separate event tracking for each element or state you wish to track (videos are both played and paused, you will need to set up separate event tracking for the play and pause states of the button) user clicks on the Google Merchandise Store's navigation for "Bags" five times in a single session: - Total Events are calculated as the total number of interactions with the tracked element (total number of link clicks for that event will be "five") - Unique Events are how many users have triggered that event (number of Unique Events will be counted as "one") associated actions to view the various interaction states that were tracked for a Category in one place tracking outbound link clicks that lead away from your site (Google Merchandise Store has a live chat button in their top navigation bar that opens a pop-up window when clicked. However, this pop-up window was implemented by a third-party vendor and goes to a different URL that the Google Analytics tracking code won't track by default) goal is to increase engagement, you'll want to focus on tracking actions that demonstrate how users navigate your site and interact with your content

Views

lets you set Google Analytics "Goals" 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.

2. Defining Sessions

measures periods where groups user hits based on the time in which they were generated Examples: - user visited homepage of Google Merchandise Store and left immediately without clicking on anything then Google Analytics will record one "pageview" hit for that user in a single session - user lands on the homepage of Google Merchandise Store. session begins with a "pageview" hit. Then the user clicks the play button for a video that is being tracked with event tracking. This triggers an "event" hit. Google Analytics will record two hits for that user in that session: a "pageview" hit for the home page, and an "event" hit for clicking the play button. - user visits the store and lands on homepage. immediately open a new tab in their browser to view another website and they spend more than 30 minutes on that site. Then they go back to the tab with the Google Merchandise Store and click the play button on the video. Google Analytics will record two separate sessions for that user. first session will include a "pageview" hit and the second session will include an "event" hit, since the first session will have timed out, while the user was viewing the second tab. sessions time out after thirty minutes of inactivity by default, you can change this setting in your configurations (goal to get users to watch videos may not want sessions to timeout after thirty minutes. They can extend session timeout to the average watch time of the videos on the site) organized data by session: calculate number of the metrics that show up in your reports (sessions, pages per session, average session duration, and bounce rate)

"Goals"

metrics based on the number of goals you've configured and will only show up if you've set up goals in Google Analytics

"Summary" view in full report

of the dimension categorized by Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion metrics easier to interpret metrics in marketing funnel

sampling

percent of sessions that the report is based on, only analyze a sample of the data collected, returns an estimate of the exact count based on a sample of your data

All Web Site Data

raw, unchanged data you collected for the property recommend changing the name to "Raw data," so you'll know that the data hasn't been filtered

Managing multiple accounts or properties

straightforward account: one Organization (which is optional), one account, and one property (For every property, we recommend you set up at least three views: a "Raw Data" view, a "Test" view, and a "Master" view) may need multiple organizations, accounts, or properties, and additional views (agency managing marketing for multiple companies at once, you can set up different Organizations for each company with separate Google Analytics accounts under each Organization) multiple properties under each Analytics account (view data from their website and data from their mobile app in separate properties to analyze each data set independently. recommend tracking each company's website, mobile app, or other device in a separate property)

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 (website)

"conversion rate"

total number of conversions, as well as the percentage of users that converted conversion rate is above 0, which means we'll be able to track data

digital analytics

track what online behavior led to purchases and use that data to make informed decisions about how to reach new and existing customers could collect and analyze data from their online advertising campaigns to see which are most effective and expand those marketing efforts how users progress through their online shopping cart

Channels report

traffic gets grouped in the Display channel when Google Ads or Google Marketing Platform campaigns are served on the Google Display Network, traffic gets grouped in the Paid Search channel when advertise using Google Search Conversions menu shows the goals set up by the Google Merchandise Store

"Ecommerce"

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

3. Joining Google Analytics data with other sources

two ways to add data from external systems using the measurement protocol and linking to other Google accounts: - send data from any web-connected device like point-of-sale systems or web-connected kiosks to Google Analytics, if you want to collect data from a system outside of Google, you must pass the data collection hits manually in a URL string - defines how to construct your hits using a customized tracking ID and send those hits to your designated Google Analytics account can also link data from other Google marketing tools like Google Ads, AdSense, or the Google Search Console (information like Google Ads clicks, impressions, and cost data to be viewed in your Analytics account)

1. New vs. Returning Users

user arrives on a page with tracking code, Google Analytics creates a random, unique ID that gets associated with the user's browser cookie. each unique ID to be a unique user. - "new user": Every time a new ID is detected - "returning user": existing ID information will be lost if a user clears or has blocked that cookie in their web browser (new unique ID the next time a browser loads a tracked web page and user will be new) identify users over multiple sessions, as long as the sessions happen in the same browser on the same device (to track users across devices, you'll need to turn on the User ID feature)

Goals

valuable way to track conversions, or business objectives, from your website (how many users signed up for an email newsletter, or how many users purchased a product)

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.

Referrals Report

view your traffic organized by which sites have linked to yours 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 to show 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

ecommerce tracking

wanted to track actual revenue made from purchases

Segmentation

way to view a subset of data in a report, ability to add multiple segments to a single report for comparison (users who made a purchase with those that didn't, to better understand what influences people to buy OR specific traffic source like paid search and compare that to sessions that originated from email campaigns to see which types of users each source delivers) - User Segments: can span multiple sessions with a maximum date range of 90 days (shows data only for a specific age range, date range, gender, or a combination) - Session Segments: user behavior within a single session (Goal users completed during the session or the amount of revenue a user generated) Both user and session segments can be built using dimensions, metrics, session dates, and even sequences of user actions

Traffic Source

what brought users to the site in the first place (search engine, an advertisement they clicked on, or an email marketing campaign)

Multi-Channel Funnel reports/ MCF

what role prior marketing activities played in the conversion process, time it took to go from initial interest to purchase, interactions across virtually all digital channels including paid and organic search, referral sites, affiliates, social networks, and email campaigns, need to have first set up Goals or Ecommerce "assisted conversion": channel that contributed to a conversion prior to the final interaction Overview report: Store's total conversions, click-assisted, impression-assisted, and rich media-assisted conversions lookback window: 1 to 90 days, determine the period of time prior to conversion used in the report. Assisted Conversions report: total number and monetary value of assisted sales and conversions broken out by channel, The higher these numbers, the more the channel helped assist with conversions. can break this out by the Day of Conversion, the Day Before Conversion, and the Path Position (number of interactions involved in the conversion) Top Conversions Paths report: conversions and conversion value grouped by the channel combinations that led to conversion Time Lag report: conversions grouped by the number of days it took from initial interest to conversion Path Length report: how many interactions on average it took to convert and how much each series of interactions was worth

see what views are currently available for a property

when you first create a property, Analytics automatically sets up an unfiltered view called "All Web Site Data"

secondary dimension

you can also add another dimension to the table for even more specific analysis (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)