Google Analytics: A Brief Introduction to Get Started

To get to the highest step you need to step on the first one. Yes! and that's the basics understanding of the architecture that will give you a proper idea about how to use this tool, GOOGLE ANALYTICS.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.

Why choose Google Analytics??

 ---> You can track activities people do when they’re on your website.

 ---> It provides valuable insights data that can help you to shape the success strategy of your business.

 --->It helps you to analyze in-depth detail about the visitors visiting your website.

 How they are interacting with your website

 --->You can find the most popular pages as well as pages that don’t get traffic on your website.

 Let us now move on to its architecture:

 COLLECTION---------->CONFIGURATION----------->PROCESSING--------->REPORTING

 1.)Collection

 The data that Google Analytics uses to provide all the information in your reports comes from these below-mentioned sources:

 -->The HTTP request of the user

-->Browser/system information

-->First-party cookies

 2.)Configuration

 --->It is the setting you apply to customize the data being collected i. e setting up the rules for data processing.

---> It includes configuring Google Analytics features like setting up goals, applying filters, and creating custom dimensions.

 3.)Processing

Google Analytics processes collected data in the following three steps.

 – New Vs Returning Users

 – Sessions

 – Other data sources

 4.)Reporting

 Reporting provides access to all the processed data in the form of infographics through the web interface and also allows you to get the processed data through reporting API.

 How Google Analytics collects data?

1. Create an account on Google Analytics.

 2.We will get a javascript block of code to paste it on the pages of your website.

 Note: Google analytics track data of those pages only that have tracking code. Pages that do not have tracking code Google Analytics will not track data of those pages.

If your website is built on WordPress, you need have to copy it on each page just paste it in the header section.

 1. Track user activity.

 2. Collects information from Browser, operating system, traffic source, language etc.

 3. every time a user visits your website it triggers.

 Google Analytics Metrics Structure

Google Analytics uses ABC metric structure for most of the reports. 

 Where A stands for Acquisition Metrics, B stands for Behavior Metrics, and C stands for Conversion Metrics.

 Let’s discuss each metrics separately:

 Acquisition Metrics: These metrics focus on the number of users coming to your website.

·       Users

·       New Users

·       Sessions

 Behaviour Metrics: These metrics focus on how well users are interacting with your website.

·       Bounce Rate

·       Pages / Sessions

·       Avg. Session Duration

Conversion Metrics: These metrics focus on the Goals defined by you...

·       Goal Conversion Rate

·       Goal Completions

·       Goal Value

 Types of reports in Google Analytics:

 1. Predefined/Default Reports

 2. Custom Reports

 3.Saved Reports

 Pre-Defined Or Default Reports are available in the Reports section in Google Analytics and Custom & Saved Reports are available in the “Customization Section”.

 Predefined / Default Reports are further categorized into

1.     Real-Time Reports

2.     Audience Reports

3.     Acquisition Reports

4.     Behavior Reports

5.     Conversion Reports

Real-time Reports

 Real-time report show you live users, events & goals occurring on your website.

This helps You to test that whether your tracking code is working properly or not.

The real-time report is further divided into:-

Out of which Content, Event and Conversion report are quite useful.

Content Report shows pages that are mostly visited, pages that are getting fewer users, also pages that are not tracked by Google Analytics.

Event Reports will show live events getting tracked in Google Analytics property.

Only Interaction Events will be counted in Active Users.

Conversion Report will show the goal occurred in real-time.

 If your goals are not getting tracked in real-time here, they will not be visible in your normal reports.

 Audience Reports:

As the name suggests Audience Reports will answer queries related to “Users: Properties”. Detailed information about the user.

You will get all the answer related to your user like:

·       From where the user is?

·       active users on your website? (daily/weekly/monthly)

·       What are the age/gender statistics?

·       Interest of users

·       Device they are using.

·       User is returning or new user.

·       & so on…

You can get an ample amount of information about your user when he/she visits your website.

The audience report is further divided into:

·       Overview Report ·       Audiences Report

·       User Explorer Report ·       Demographics & Interests Report

·       Geo Report ·       Technology Report

·       Behavior Report ·       Mobile Report

·       Custom Report ·       Cohort Analysis Report

·       User flow Report ·       Lifetime Value Report

·       Benchmarking Report ·       Active Users Report

Each report of your audience is important because your audience will help you to grow and become known.

Acquisition Reports

Acquisition Reports in Google Analytics will answer question-related to “Users: While entering the website”. How they visited your website.

 Some of the queries can be resolved here

·       Where did you acquire users from?

·       What was the Channel?

·       What were the keywords/search queries of acquired users?

·       What was the cost of acquisition?

·       & so on…

 It focuses on “How you acquired users” & information related to it.

 Types of reports available in Acquisition Reports :

1.) Overview Report

2.) All Traffic Report

3.) Adwords Report

4.) Search Console Report 

5.) Social Report

6.) Campaign Report

 Traffic report will give you stats related to the different source, medium, channels, referrals & treemaps.

You can track from where the user came or are coming.

 Behaviour Report:

Behaviour reports in Google Analytics will answer questions related to “Users: After entering your website”.

Mean How they interact with your website data and content.

These reports help you understand the engagement metrics.

Some of the answer you will get from here about your site content:

·       Which pages do visitor visit most on your website?

·       What is the page load time for the user?

·       What do users search on your site?

·       Which page user enter or leave the website?

·       & so on…

 Behaviour Report is further classified into:

Out of this site, the content report is useful according to me.

Site Content Report gives the stats about the pages visited by users.

Like:

·       What are the pageviews of pages

·       Landing and exit pages

·       Pages that have more time spend on

·       Which pages have more bounce rates?

 Conversion Reports

Conversion Reports in Google Analytics will answer the question related to the “Goals” defined by you.

To see this report first, you have to define a goal or Enable & Implement E-commerce or Enhanced E-commerce Tracking.

Some of the questions answered by these reports are

·       Goal Conversion Rate of your website

·       How much time does the user take to convert as a client?

·       Channels used by the user before converting?

·       Information about transaction rate & revenue?

This report is further divided into :

 Out of these Multi-Channel Funnels Report are an actual gold mine for every digital analyst.

·       The time in days it took for conversion to occur.

·       The different channels users interacted before converting

·       The number of channel interaction before a conversion

·       & more

Customized Reports in Google Analytics:

Every campaign that you run has different goals & KPIs.

You should create custom reports as they are much more powerful than pre-defined reports.

You can simply create a customised report as per your need. All you have to do is go to Customization > custom reports & click on create one.

After you create one customized report you can directly import the ones available or you can manually put the metrics.

 Saved Reports in Google Analytics

Saved Reports will help you faster to access those reports you need often.

You can click the “Save” icon on any pre-defined or custom report.

These reports now will appear in the Customization Section.

 I hope you understood the overview of Google Analytics, its inner workings, and the discussed features.

This blog provides a good quick start for anyone looking to push the platform to its limits.

 https://www.digishuffle.com/blogs/google-analytics-reports/

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