Google Analytics: What You Need to Know

Whether you own an eCommerce store, publish blogs about cooking, or operate a lead-generation site, there's one's thing in common: understanding your audience is crucial to the success of your website. Utilizing Google Analytics can help you make informed decisions about how to reach new and existing customers. If you're wondering how you can get started or learn more, keep reading as I will be giving an overview of Google Analytics for Beginners, Advanced and writing a report about what I learned from the Google Merchandise Store Demo Account in today's article.

In marketing, these three words describe the basic stages of customer interaction in a typical 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.

With Google Analytics, we can analyze these stages more in-depth to learn about what online behavior let to what purchases and make use of this data to make better-informed decisions about how to reach new and existing customers. As we move forward, it's important to understand that the data and information we can gather from Google Analytics can help us target these different stages.

Google Analytics Course Overview for Beginners

If you want to understand your audience and improve your marketing strategy it's important to become comfortable with Google Analytics (GA). It can seem to be a daunting task but in the section below I have simplified the beginner course into four parts: Intro to GA, Interface, Reports, and Campaign and Conversion tracking. Let's begin!

Intro to Google Analytics

How it works, in three steps: Create a Google Analytics account, add tracking code, learn about your audience. Every time a user visits a webpage, the tracking code collects information from the browser about how the user interacted with the page. The code packages the data and sends it to Google Analytics and groups the activity into a "session". A session begins when the user navigates to a page and ends when they leave or if there are 30 minutes of inactivity. The data includes information about: language, type of browser, device, operating system, and traffic source. To further customize the data, you can create filters and focus on regions of interest.

Interface

The interface can be broken down into dashboards, reports, and widgets. Dashboards enable you to create a collection of metrics and reports that are of high importance. Reports include realtime, audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions. Below is an example of what it looks like when you open up your Google Analytics homepage.

Reports

All of these reports are useful but the three sections that contain the most useful information are the acquisition, audience, and behavior. As a marketer, becoming comfortable with these three reports can help you form insights from data and help measure your marketing efforts. For example, in your audience tab, you can analyze your audience's demographics, interests, and behavior. In the behavior tab, you can visualize the behavior flow of your site and site speed.

Campaign and Conversion Tracking

There are many ways to advertise and these ads can take various forms like banner ads, text ads on search results, or social media campaigns. With so many options, how do you track these results? On Google Analytics you can utilize campaign tags. Campaign tags are extra pieces of info you add to the URL of your marketing material. By using a campaign tag, Google Analytics will extract data that will help you understand the user and their behavior in context with your campaign. Google Analytics will help you create campaign tags using their URL Builder.

Google Analytics Advanced Course Overview

Now that we've covered the basics, let's dive into Google Analytics, advanced. Much like the previous section of this article, I'm going to be providing an overview of the advanced course for Google Analytics. I will be covering the course in four units: Data Collection and Processing, Setting up Data Collection, Advanced analysis tools, and Advanced Marketing tools.

Data Collection and Processing

With every user interaction on your website, the tracking code sends a "hit" to Google Analytics. A "hit" can be described as a URL string with parameters of useful info about the user. Why is this important? A hit contains info we can use to decipher the language of the browser, name of the page, screen resolution of the user's device and analytics ID. Among a hit, there are three common types:

• Pageview hits: when a user loads a webpage with the tracking code.
• Event hits: tracks every time a user interacts with website elements. For example, a play button or product.
• Transaction hits: tracks info about eCommerce purchases like product purchase, transaction ID and SKU's.

Among this feature, you can further organize the gathered information into new vs existing users, sessions, store and generate reports, and create a measurement plan.

Setting up Data Collection and Configuration

There are many ways you can manage your data collection and accounts. Google recommends users set up at atleast three views for each property: "Raw Data" view, "Test" view, and a "Master" view. Below is a visual example of the levels of organization.

If you are a marketing agency and manage multiple different companies Google Analytics accounts you can further organize your accounts as shown below.

If you use Analytics to manage different websites under one organization you can set user permissions and create different views based upon different permissions. An example would be different permissions based on different departments: Sales, Marketing and Production.

Advanced Analysis Tools

Advanced Google Analytics tools include segmenting data for insight, analyzing data by channel, and analyzing by the audience.

• Segment data for insight: a way to view a subset of data in a report. You can create user segment or session segments. As a user segment example, you can build a user segment that shows data for only a specific age range, date range, gender and any combination of these. As a session example, these segments are restricted to user behavior within a single session.
• Analyzing data by channel: this tool can be used to analyze your data by your different channels. For example, if you had a landing page that you ran a campaign for you could analyze your paid search channel vs organic search.
• Analyzing data by audience: a way to view data based upon audience groupings. You can further segment your audience into active users, cohorts, demographics, interests, behavior and more.

Advanced Marketing Tools

As one of analytics powerful tools, remarketing is a tool that lets you target ad content to users who have previously visited your website.

How does this work? You can use remarketing to show them relevant ads on the Google Display Network, apps, or on google search oto bring them back to your website and help them make a purchase. You can define your audience and set how long these previous visitors are eligible to be remarketed to. It can be targeted from 1 to 540 days from the initial site visit. Remarketing allows you to define and re-engage users who to didn't convert or make a purchase.

As apart of Google Analytics courses, Google also offers its Google Merchandise Store Demo Account. Among analyzing the store demo account by Trend of Sessions by Top Default Channel Grouping, I discovered that the bounce rate for display is 79% vs the referral channel being 24%. Investigating further, the main source of referral traffic is through an email referral. My recommendation is that the Google Merchandise store further leverages their email referral efforts due to the low bounce rate percentage and re-evaluates other metrics to see if display ads are beneficial to their campaign. As a rule of thumb, a bounce rate from 41-55% is average and a bounce rate from 26-40% is excellent.

After reading this article I hope you, as a marketer, business professional or future website owner can leverage Google Analytics' tools to make better-informed business decisions in order to connect with your new or existing customers.

Remember your ABC's.....

Acquisition. Behavior. Conversion.

Judd Bobin