Guide to analytics

Making Sense of Google Analytics

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What is Analytics?

If you have a website and don’t measure how well it’s performing you will not be able to

understand whether it’s working for, or against, your business.

You’d not employ a new salesperson, kit them out with laptop, mobile phone, a tablet,

briefcase full of literature put them in a smart company car, send them out on the road

and not talk to them for a year - and yet thousands of companies do this every day of

every month of every year to their websites.

Analytics is simply a tool that you can use to measure the performance of your website

and Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools used by small businesses.

It enables you to understand who well your website is performing and is free to use -

for most businesses.



Why use Analytics?

The goal of any analytics application is to help you, the website owner understand a whole range of information that’s important.

It’s not just about the number of visits that your site attracts but also about understanding where they go, what they do, how they found your site, the impact of changes that you make, how well your marketing is working for you - and much more.



Getting started with Analytics

The goal of any analytics application is to help you, the website owner, understand a wide range of information that will help you to understand how your website is performing in the real world.

It’s not just about the number of visits that your site attracts but also about understanding where visitors go, what they do whilst they are on your site, how they found your site, the impact of changes that you make, how well your marketing is working for you - and much more.

As previously mentioned, Google Analytics is one of the best tools that a website owner can use. It’s easy to install and the data is presented in a very accessible way, making it easy to navigate and a breeze to understand - once you know where everything is and understand the terminology.

If you don’t have Google Analytics yet then the next few slides will show you how to get started



Setting up AnalyticsThe fist step is to go to www.google.com/analytics and if you already use other Google tools, such as Gmail, then “Sign In” but if you are a first time Google Account holder then click “Create an Account”

www.google.com/analytics



Setting up AnalyticsAfter you have signed up or signed in click on the “Admin” tab and in the “Property” column click on the “Tracking info” option and then “Tracking Code”



Setting up AnalyticsA new screen will open containing the code that you need to paste into every page of your website that you want to measure. There’s also guidance as to where it should go.

There’s also an easy option to email the code to your webmaster if you are not responsible for the management of your website.



Setting up AnalyticsIf you are adding the code yourself, it needs to be added in the section right at the top of each page, between the <head> and </head>



Setting up AnalyticsIf you use a Content Management System, (CMS) such as WordPress, adding the code is even easier. You simply paste your Google Account number into the appropriate box and your CMS does the rest, automatically - even when you create new pages.



Now that Google Analytics has been installed, it’ll start collecting data about the people visiting your website and the next time that you log in, you’ll be taken directly to Analytics home page displaying data about the visitors to your site.



In the top-right corner of your screen you’ll see a start date and end date. The default value is the previous 30 days and the next page shows how you can change this.

Using Analytics - setting the time frame



You can also compare to previous dates

Understanding AnalyticsYou can use the drop-down menu to choose from a number of pre-set options, such as “today”, “yesterday”, “last week” etc .

You can also choose “custom” which enables you to choose a start and finish time of your choosing and even compare periods of time.



Understanding Analytics – Core Stats



Understanding Analytics – Core StatsSessionsTotal number of visits to your website

Page Views Total number of pages viewed for the selected time frame

Avg. Session DurationAverage amount of time that a visitor speds on your website

% New SessionsPercentage of new Vs returning users




UsersTotal number of unique visitors

Pages/SessionAverage pages viewed per visit

Bounce RatePercentage of people who never visit more than the page they landed on




Although it’s good to see a large number of visitors, it’s not so good if those visits are of poor quality, i.e each visitor only spends a short amount of time on the site and only looks at a few pages.

There are no absolutes to compare against because each site is different, if you only have a Home & Contacts page, for example, your Average Pages per Visit can never be more than two and the Average Time on Site will be short, if you have a lot of pages, however, you’d hope that these numbers are quite a bit higher.

To get the best from these metrics you’ll have to understand what the goal of your website is and what visitors have to do to meet those goals. Now, you can start to look at the figures in a meaningful way.




The Bounce Rate measures the visitors who reach your site and leave from the same page that they landed on without clicking on anything or visiting other pages.

Anything below 20% is very good, anything above 45% should be investigated and anything between those two figures is where the majority of websites sit.

Typical reasons for high Bounce Rates include setting an expectation that the site fails to deliver, pages that are slow to load (anything that takes more than 3 seconds to load is considered slow), poor design, unsuitable content, pages not optimised for the smartphone user or visitors arriving from countries that your business doesn’t serve



Understanding Analytics – Visitor Demographics



Understanding Analytics – Visitor Demographics

Visitor Demographics provides a little insight in to the people who have visited your site. As a note of caution, it’s not 100% accurate because the data comes from the third-party services such as DoubleClick cookies (for web traffic) and from anonymous identifiers for mobile apps (i.e., Advertising ID for Android and IDFA for iOS).

Google Analytics does not collect Demographic Information about website visitors.

For some businesses it’s a valuable tool - if you have gender or age specific offers, for example, it can help indicate that you are attracting visits from your target groups.

http://www.google.co.uk/doubleclick/



Understanding Analytics – Visitor Location

Scroll down this page to see the data in list form

Understanding where your visitors come from can help you understand how well your marketing is working for you in the countries that you are targeting.



Understanding Analytics – Visitor Location



Understanding Analytics - Technology

These screens show which web browsers people who visit your website are using.

You can also check which Operating Systems they are using




This tab shows you which Internet Service Provider the visitors to your website are using.

In most cases this information is of limited value. However, there may be times when individual companies can be identified - providing an opportunity for some follow up activity, although you'll still not be able to identify individuals.



Understanding Analytics - TechnologyThese screens show which devices are being used to access your website - and how the users of each type of device are using your website




This screen breaks down the mobile devices so that you can see which specific devices are being used to access your website



Understanding Analytics – User Flow

User Flow helps you to understand how website visitors are moving through your site (green) - and where they are leaving your site (red)

Use this menu to choose the metric you want to monitor



Understanding Analytics – Acquisition

The Acquisition Tab shows you where the visitors to your website came from.

Any search engine that has the tag /organic means that the traffic has come from the free results whilst google/cpc highlights traffic that has come from a Google Ads campaign.

A Source with a /referral means that the visit came from a click on a link on the website listed - you might be advertising on a particular site, for example



Understanding Analytics – Acquisition

Clicking on the “Referrals” link filters out all other sources of traffic and just displays the results of clicks on links published on other websites - if your site relies on extensive advertising for traffic then this will be particularly useful because you can use the stats to measure how successful the visits have been.



Understanding Analytics – Content

The information held under the “Site Content” menu will show you how popular/unpopular all of the pages on your website are, and provide a valuable insight in to how each page is being used.

A page with a lot of content that has a short Average Time on Page indicates that there’s a problem with the page, for example



Understanding Analytics – ContentThe Landing Pages and Exit Pages show you which page was the first one that visitors arrived on (Landing) and the last page they were looking at before they left your site (Exit)

Because of the way that the search engines work not all visits will start from your home page and the Landing Pages info may give you a good indication as to how your SEO is performing



Understanding Analytics – Site SpeedThe average internet user has a short attention span and pages that take longer than 3 seconds to open are unlikely to be successful and may lead to people leaving your site.

Google, like web users, does not like slow pages and websites with pages that take longer than 3 seconds to open are likely to be pushed down the results, no matter how well optimised they are.



Understanding Analytics – Site SpeedMoving on from the “Overview” you can check the performance of each page of your website, and if you have poorly performing pages “Speed Suggestions” will provide you and/or your web developers with ideas for speeding things up



Understanding Analytics – Site SpeedAs you can see, none of the pages here have a speed issue - however, Google has still found a number of things that could be implemented to make them even faster.

Clicking on each of the suggestions will open a list of ideas for each page



Understanding Analytics – Site Speed



Understanding Analytics – Events

Google Analytics is great for tracking visits to actual pages, but if your pages have things that visitors can do, download files, subscribe to newsletters, watch videos etc. then you need to understand “Events”.

You should make a list of every action that you want to measure and then you, or your web developer, has to add a specific piece of code to each action.

Once the code has been added, Google can track the events and the data will be found in this section of Analytics.

There’s more information about the code required on the Google Analytics Developers website

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide



Understanding Analytics – Experiments

When developing a new website - or updating an existing one, it can be quite difficult to settle on a design, different people have different ideas about images, colours, fonts, layout etc. It’s almost impossible to reach an objective conclusion in such a subjective arena.

Google Experiments allow you to create up to 6 variations of a page and allow website visitors to use the pages, Google will serve the variations to your visitors and measure how they are using the different pages and will show you which pages are the ones with the best rate of success.

You can see a video that demonstrates Google Experiments on the next page



http://youtube.com/v/TGrujIh2H0I

http://youtube.com/v/TGrujIh2H0I



Understanding Analytics – In Page

Google’s In-Page Analytics actually shows you where visitors to your site are clicking so that you can determine the best places to put links.

It also has a tool that will enable you to view your website through different sized screens so that you can ensure that visitors to your site see what you want them to see.



Understanding Analytics – Goals

Google Analytics allow you to create up to 20 goals. A Goal can be many things, it could simply count the number of people who make it to your “contacts” page, it could track newsletter subscriptions, online purchases, downloads etc.

When you have Goals set up, a column is added to the right of all Stats screens, enabling you to measure and understand how your website is performing based on your aims for your site,



Understanding Analytics – Conversions

To set Goals, go to the Admin tab at the top of the page and click on “Goals” in the RH (View) column and click on the icon




Select the type of Goal that you want to set.

If none of the template options meet your needs then you can use the “Custom” optionto build your own Goal.

The next page will show you where the Goal results feature in your Analytics pages.






Understanding Analytics – Custom Reports

Google Analytics presents the user with a vast amount of data. However, a lot of it may not be relevant to you and so you should consider setting up a Custom Report

Go to the “Customisation” tab at the top of your screen and click on “New Custom Report”

Work through the screens to add the data that isrelevant to your business and click “Save”.

At the next screen you’ll have the option to have yourreport automatically emailed to you (and others) using the “Email” tab



Understanding Analytics – Custom Reports

Your email can be set up to send to as many people as you like, at a frequency of your choosing.

You can also choose how the data is received, Excel Spreadsheet, CSV or PDF for example.

Now, instead of having to remember to login to Analytics, the data that’s important to you is in your inbox at the frequency of your choosing



Understanding Analytics – Have a go

I’ve covered the key metrics in this presentation, however Google Analytics provides much more information - if there’s a metric that I’ve not explained, just explore yourself to see what else is available.

A lot of screens have a “Help” option that’s accessed by clicking on the mortar board in the RH corner and Analytics has its own, dedicated “Help” channel that’s accessed through the Settings Cog in the top right of your screen



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Guide to analytics