The Right Way To Use Google Analytics And What Things You Can Measure Using It?
If you want to have a deep dive into the ‘why’ of your business, Google Analytics is a go-to place for you. If you can’t set up your Google Analytics properly, you might end up losing lots of opportunities that would have helped you make the strategic and the right decision. So, if you haven’t set it up yet, it’s high time for you to set it up!
This week I’ve finished the course ‘Google Analytics for Beginners’ from the ‘Digital Analytics’ mini degree at CXL Institute. Chris Mercer, the co-founder at Measurement Marketing, conducted this course and he helped to understand the right way to measure the data, why it is important, and how to analyze the data in a strategic way to find the right answer.
Let’s Learn What Does Google Analytics Do
Google Tag Manager collects the data, Google Analytics stores the collected data, and Google Data Studio reports the data.
Google Analytics helps you answer the four key questions: ‘Who Are My Users’, ‘Where Are My Users Coming From’, ‘What Actions Are The Users Taking’, ‘What Are The Results Of Those Actions’. And you’ll find the answers to these four questions right under the AABC section of the GA dashboard consecutively: Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion.
Account, Property, and View - What Are Those?
There are more than lots of things you can do inside Google Analytics. But first thing first. You need to understand how to set up the accounts, property, and views inside Google Analytics and what’s the best way to do so!
Google Account is basically the master area where you’ll find all the properties and views inside. And the property is what holds your domain and tracks your whole site inside. With the new Google Analytics 4 rolling inside, you’ll have two properties under your account: Universal Google Analytics & Google Analytics 4.?
What’s interesting about GA is the view section. So, here’s the breakdown: You can have multiple views under one property, and it can go up to 25 views under one property.
Pro-Tip: First, before you apply any filter to your views, always make sure to have a backup view, where you can always refer to. And, also do have a testing view where you can test anything. The last one is your ultimate go-to point, have the production view separately, which you’ll check all the time to measure your data.
You can customize your view the way you want using the Filters settings inside. Goals are another strongest thing that you can set to have the right amount of data that you need for your business.
Realtime Report: What’s The Big Deal In It?
A real-time report allows you to check the data in real-time. It doesn’t help you make a decision, but while you test things out, it helps you debug and troubleshoot if there’s anything wrong and if the data is being collected and stored properly or not.?
So, use it only while you are testing. Depending on your business needs, you might need it sometimes, but in most cases, you won’t need it.
Filters: Which Things Can You Customize Using It?
Filters will help you customize the way you view the data. If you aren’t implementing it yet, it’s a must for you! We always need to understand the story behind the data, and filters simplify the way we see the data.
You can use filters to include the domain names from where the traffic comes from in case you have multiple sources for the data.
You can use filters to only measure your YouTube data only so that you can measure the data that is coming solely from YouTube.?
You can use filters to combine all the scattered data coming to your site. You can even convert all the sources & searches in a lowercase format so that you don’t get lost while searching for them (‘Cause Google Analytics is case-sensitive and it treats uppercases and lowercases differently).
Traffic: How Can You Measure Those?
You can measure your traffic right under acquisition, and you can check which sources your traffic is coming from. And, what’s the medium for the traffic. You can even track if your traffic is coming from any referral/partner.?
However, sometimes, your traffic source won’t be displayed properly, as you might have traffic from Facebook Ads, Facebook Share, or Emails, or from any other sources that google couldn’t track. How do you customize your traffic to have better data for those?
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There are two options for you: Set up UTM parameters for the links you share, Customize Filters to show the traffic combinedly.
Setting up UTM parameters is quite easy and you can set it up easily by finding UTM Builders online. There are 5 portions inside an UTM parameter: UTM Source, UTM Medium, UTM Campaign, UTM Term, and UTM Content.
By the way, if you don’t know what UTM stands for Urgent Tracking Module.
Goals: What’s The Significance Of These?
You’ll find the goals under the ‘Views’ section, and there are 4 types of Goals:
The goal depends on how your business generates leads, acquires customers, and measures success. You need to keep in mind the ‘ACE’ formula while measuring goals.
ACE = Acquire, Complete, Engage.
You need to understand at what stage you acquire the customer, track if they’re engaging, and then if they are completing the goal that you’ve set up primarily. You can even set up funnels inside your google analytics to track how many people are completing the funnels per session.
You can track if people are going to the destination URL that you’re setting up, and for how long they’ve been going from one page to another and engaging. How many pages are they viewing per session, and how many events they’ve been a part of - everything can be checked.
Keep in mind that the duration doesn’t work if your visitor lands on a single page and leaves from there. It only triggers an action when the visitor goes from one page to another. Duration basically measures the timestamp in between and gives data according to those.
Event Goals come with three things: Event Category, Event Action, Event Label.
Ecommerce: What Can You Measure In It?
If your business is e-commerce based or has some transactions in place inside, make sure to enable the e-commerce property in it. There are two types of e-commerce functionality that you can enable: Standard Ecommerce Reporting & Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting.
You can check how many orders were there, how many purchases were made, how much revenue you generated from which source, how many people abandoned the cart, how people went into the cart and lots of things inside this property. Don’t ever miss this feature if you're planning for bringing in e-commerce functionalities inside your website. It’s revolutionary!
Analyzing Reports:
Even if you can see one single dashboard under Google Analytics, if you can’t deep dive inside, you’ll never know how many things you can do inside it. And, never fall into the trap of data, find the relative comparison of your data, see which one is working better or worse than the other, and bring in the story from the data.
The last thing while Analyzing the reports, make sure to follow the QIA framework. Ask the question, find the information, and always make sure to take the actions from what you find. This is HUGE! Unless you take the action there’s no point in having it.
Personal Insights:
This Analytics for Beginners course was a real eye-opener for me and I got to know so many things that I never even thought of. Even if it says it’s a course for beginners, I think it’s way much more than that. I can now make strategic decisions based on what I learned and go in a systematic way to analyze the data and find the story behind it.