“Google Analytics”
Naomh McElhatton
December 2013
Today:
• Intro to Analytics
• Analytics Features
• Understanding Metrics
• Setting up Goals
• Overview
In a Nutshell...
Google Analytics provides you with insight into your website
activity, providing you with information to allow you to
make informed decisions on your website performance,
design & conversion.
It allows you to answer questions such as:
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Is my site content working/ Interesting?
Are customers dropping out from my checkout?
If so where are they going?
Is my online marketing working?
Do PPC (Pay per Click) visits convert more than e-mail
visits?
Benefits of Analytics:
• Target your online audience
• Measure results of your online marketing
activity
• Customise your website for greater
exposure
• Evaluate traffic flow to your website
• Improve your web page quality
Intro to Analytics:
Some of the basic features included in Google
analytics include:
• Map Overlay - helps you understand how to best target
campaigns by geographic region.
• AdWords Integration - which makes it easy to track Pay per
click AdWords campaigns.
• Internal Site Search - allows you to track how people use the
search box on your site. This can information can be used to
feedback product requests to the Buying Team.
• Funnel Visualization - so that you can optimise your checkout
and conversion click- paths (ie make your checkout easier to
use to stop you losing sales).
It is a good idea to use the Dashboard to give you a quick
overview of the important stats or website KPIs that you need
to know/ keep up to date with on a regular basis.
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Analytics Dashboard:
1. Help Centre:
Google Analytics has over 80 reports to help you gauge your
site's performance -- whether by usage metrics, return visit
numbers, or time on page. Analytics is continually releasing new
features and reports, this list changes and grows and these
reports may now be available via a slightly different looking
navigation menu.
2. Admin:
Use the Analytics Admin page to manage your accounts,
properties, views, and users.
3. Date Range:
Graph your report by day, week, month or housr (where
available).
Analytics Dashboard:
4.Customise Dashboard:
Dashboards give you an overview of how your properties are
performing by displaying summaries of different reports as
widgets on a single page. With a dashboard, you can monitor
many metrics at once, so you can quickly check the health of
your accounts or see correlations between different reports.
5. Visits (important for visitor segmentation):
The concept of a visit in Google Analytics is important to
understand since many features, reports, and other metrics
depend on how Analytics calculates this metric.
See below
Visits:
Analytics Dashboard:
6. My Account:
The 'My Account' link takes you to a page listing all your Google
Accounts if there is more than one.
7. Audience:
This section provides information on visitor interaction with your
site, the type of visitors, and information about how they are
viewing your site.
8. Acquisition:
Find out how different offline or online sources sent traffic to your
site. View which sources are driving the most traffic to your site
and spot trends from the provided graphs and charts.
Analytics Dashboard:
9. Behaviour:
These reports are all about the pages in your site and how visitors
interacted with each one.
Use the data here to find time on page, landing and exit page
information, and a navigation summary for pages.
10. Conversion:
If you've set goals for your Analytics account, then you should
see data in these reports. Or if you are an ecommerce website
and have ecommerce tracking enabled you will see the data in
these reports. (we will come to this later).
Understanding Metrics:
Page Views:
• Are recorded every time a web page loads up
correctly.
• In addition if a user refreshes or re-loads as page,
this will be counted as an additional page view.
• Page views are a very different metrics to a visit,
since one visit can result in multiple page views.
Understanding Metrics:
Visit: (also known as a Session)
• Is the period of interaction between your website and
the users’ browser.
• In the case of Google analytics, if a user closes their
browser or window, or
doesn’t actively use their browser for a period of 30
minutes or more (let’s say they go on lunch without
closing their Internet Explorer), then this will end the visit
or session.
• What is important to note however, is that if that person
returns from lunch after the 30 minutes, and continues on
where they left off- i.e. clicking about on your website in
the browser window they have open, then this will start a
new session or visit- and the person will have this
registered as their second visit.
Understanding Metrics:
Visitor:
• Is a uniquely identified user of your website. When a
visitor comes to your site their browser is issued with
a cookie.
• The visitor cookie records a random, unique visitor ID
and also records a time stamp of the users first visit.
• The random visitor ID and the time stamp are
combined to create a unique ID for that visitor.
Understanding Metrics:
Unique Page View:
Represents the number of visits during which that
page was viewed - whether one or more times.
In other words, if a visitor views page A three times
during one visit, Google Analytics will count this as
three page views and one unique page view.
Understanding Metrics:
Unique Visitor:
Is a visitor who has visited your website only once
during the defined time period you are looking at.
If you want to identify the
number of unique visitors or users on your we
bsite over a period, the “Absolute Unique Visit
ors” report, thereby allowing you to ascertain the
number of absolute unique users of your website.
Understanding Metrics:
New v’s Returning:
• Report classifies each visit as coming from either a n
ew visitor or a returning visitor.
• So when someone visits your site for the first time, the visit
is categorized as “Visit from a new visitor.”
• If the person has browsed your website before, the
visit is categorized as “Visit from a returning visitor.”
• If your website has more new visitors then your website is
successful at driving traffic.
• However if you have a higher level of returning visitors,
then your site is engaging enough to ensure that visitors
return to the site on a regular basis.
Understanding Metrics:
Bounce Rate:
Bounce rate is the % of visits that go only
one page before exiting a site.
What is BOUNCE Rate?
Understanding Metrics:
Direct Traffic: occurs when a user accesses your site by
typing the URL or web address directly into their
browser. This also includes those people who have
Bookmarked your web address.
Search Engine Traffic: indicates any visitors who have
clicked on search results on any search engine results
page (Google/ Bing/ Yahoo). Search Engine traffic
includes both paid and organic search.
Referring Sites are any sites that send traffic to your
site. These could be banner ads or links featured on
blogs, affiliates, or any site that links to your site.
Understanding Metrics:
• You can sometime see referrals from Google. This is
usually referrals from Google groups posts/ Google
Images/ static pages on other Google sites.
• The All Traffic Sources report is particularly helpful
because you can identify your top performing
sources, regardless of whether they are search
engines or sites.
• However, just looking at traffic levels alone will not
provide you with a great deal of information, as a
source which drives a large amount of traffic may
indeed result in poor conversion.
Understanding Metrics:
Content Reports:
There are three main content reports, each of which organises
the data slightly differently. However all of the content reports
are useful at helping us understand how the majority of users
browse your site, what paths they take, what they look at etc.
• The Top Content report lists the web pages that received
traffic in order of the highest amount of page views, and is
useful in helping us to identify the most popular pages on the
site- or the pages which most people visiting the site look at
during their visit. The pages are indicated by their actual URLs
in this report, with the / meaning your Home Page.
• The Content by Title report lists the web pages that received
traffic in order of the highest number of page views- however
in this report the page TITLES are visible- so that you know the
actual page name that was viewed rather than just the URL,
therefore it can be a little easier to interpret.
Understanding Metrics
• The Top Landing Pages report lists all of the
pages through which people entered your
site. You can use this report to monitor the
number of bounces and the bounce rate for
each landing page, a good indicator of
page relevance and effectiveness. The
more relevant the page, the less likely a
visitor will be to bounce.
Understanding Metrics:
Linking Ad Words & Analytics
Keyword Report:
The keywords that people are using to find your site
can offer a wealth of information on the effectiveness
of your campaigns.
Keywords which result in high bounce rates can be
seen as ineffective and an indicator that the keyword
used is not reflective of your product/ the landing
page is not relevant enough in meeting user
expectations.
Setting up Goals:
• Goals allow you to track how many of
your sites visitors perform a particular
action, such as submitting an enquiry
form or purchasing a product online.
• NOTE: In order to set up goals you will
need Admin level Google Analytics
access.
Define YOUR Goal:
You need to define what your goal is:
• If you are running a lead generation site, a
goal will be a successful enquiry submission.
• If you are trying to build up a mailing list your
goal will be a successful email submission.
• If you are running an ecommerce website,
you get special Google Analytics treatment,
with all data being tracked – find out more
information here:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer
/1009612?hl=en
Step by Step:
1. Login to your Analytics account
2. Select “Admin” then “Goals”
Step by Step:
3. Create a Goal
Types of Goals:
Google Analytics can track four different
types of goals:
• Destination: triggered when a set URL is
navigated to, e.g. a thank you page (this
is the most important goal to measure for
maximising ROI)
• Duration: based on the amount of time
spent on a site. These goals are useful for
websites such as blogs or new sites where
the aim is to increase the amount of time
a user engages with the content.
Types of Goals:
• Pages/Screens Per Visit: similar to
duration, these goals are important for
content based websites
• Event: a very versatile format that
allows you to track events such as as
video plays and downloads. This can
be useful if you feel it’s important for
visitors to watch a certain video or
download a PDF.
Step by Step:
As an example we will be tracking a confirmed mailing list signup using a
‘Destination’ based goal.
• Give your goal a memorable name. If you plan on having multiple goals
it’s important to give a clearly identifiable name.
• Select “Destination” under goal type
Click Next Step
Step by Step:
There are three URL options to select under
“Destination”:
1. Equals to: matches your URL exactly as you list it
1. Head match: matches the first part of the URL and
allows for a dynamically generated suffix
e.g. /thanks.cgi?default=3874id=123 (the URL in
red would be the goal used)
2. Regular expression: control tracking based on a
URL meeting specifically set conditions
Step by Step:
Navigate to your thank you page which is
shown after you complete a successful
signup.
If you do not have a thank you page it’s
essential you create one as this will ensure
tracking for all analytics programs is easy to
setup.
If your URL doesn’t have extra
characters/numbers you are fine to use
“Equals to”.
Step by Step:
Add the part of your destination URL
after your root domain. E.g. if your full
URL is www.samplesite.com/thank-you
you will only need to add “/thank-you”
IMPORTANT: you must ensure each
forward slash (/) is added correctly
when using ‘equals to’ as a goal type.
Such as /thank-you/ vs /thank-you ...
otherwise the goal will not track.
Step by Step:
Create Goal!!
Funnels:
• Google Analytics has the ability to track goal
paths using Funnels.
• This is particularly useful for ecommerce sites
whereby you can monitor each stage of the
checkout process to see where customers are
dropping off.
• E.g. If a large proportion of customers leave after
adding products to the cart you could consider
providing a voucher in exchange for an email
address.
• You can then use for an abandonment email
marketing campaign.
Overview:
• Understand what users are doing and
NOT doing.
• Allows you to make informed decisions
about your website.
• Understand if customers are finding you
for your businesses keywords.
• Your website can be amended to meet
the needs of your customers.
Thank you !
naomh@digitaladvertisingni.co.uk
T: @DigitalAdNI / @naomhs
M: 0044 7515 41 55 43