Google Analytics- Crash Course

GOOGLE ANALYTICS TRAINING

Google AnalyticsCRASH COURSE 15 November, 2016


1. Introduction to what we are doing and what we are aren’t

2. Walk through of the google analytics platform

3. Extras needing setup but worth it

4. Application for improving your business activities

5. Kicking off your Google Analytics discovery

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Introduction

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What is Google Analytics?What GA will help you with…

● Where users are coming from

● What they are doing on the website

● What they might be having problems with

● Trends, not individual users

● Tracks page views as people move around, recording extra information about the user (such as location, browser, device)

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What is Google Analytics?What it won’t help you with…

• Exactly what they were looking for, and exactly what they had issues with.

• Are users leaving happy or frustrated?

• It will only tell you what happens on the website, not external factors (TV campaigns etc) unless they are planned correctly (Adwords and campaigns are easier to link)

• Some information may need to be obtained from CMS reports or server level reports (documents) and manually linked up (GA exports are useful here)

• Users in “private browsing” mode or who have blocked Google Analytics (for privacy fears, or because they are tired of ads) won’t be tracked

• It’s JavaScript based, so it won’t track PDF opens either unless using Google Tag Manager

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How best to use itGoogle Analytics is good for two things:

• Regular reporting of key metrics and user behaviour (as a dashboard, emailed to you every Monday morning) – these can then be trended to see if behaviour is changing

• One-off specific analysis, such as answering questions about a campaign or to lead content or technical development

• Always go to Google Analytics with a specific intention

• Best used in conjunction with a plan/strategy

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Walk through

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The Examples

Adelphi Digital Website (adelphi.digital)Goals:

● Generate customer enquiries

● Encourage job applications

● Position Adelphi Digital as an industry leader

OK Games News Site (www.okgames.com.au)Goals:

● Inform people about local gaming news

● Position OK Games as an reputable and transparent source of information

● Encourage people to return to the site regularly


Getting familiar with the interfaceDashboards Dashboards allows you to customise reports that are relevant to continuing improving your website, and will quickly become your go to area. This will be your interface, and is ideal for high level tracking and gaining quick insights.


Getting familiar with the interfaceShortcuts

This area provides quick access to your most frequently accessed reports.

By saving a particular report as a shortcut, everything is saved, including all the configuration and parameters you set.

Ideal for monitoring high priority items, problem areas, and reports you need to access frequently.


Getting familiar with the interfaceIntelligence Events

This looks at patterns and notifies you of trends and issues. You can create custom alerts so you can track key changes that can have a big impact to your organisation.

Some key alerts to set up should be around big increases and decreases in traffic.


Getting familiar with the interfaceReal-time

Real time shows you how many users are visiting your website at that particular moment, and shows you what these visitors are doing in real time.

We highly recommend using this section when you are launching a campaign as it can quickly show you how successful the launch was.


Getting familiar with the interfaceAudience

This area will give you key insights into who is your main audience, where they are coming from, and how they behave on your website.

This will also let you know whether the audience you are aiming to target is interacting with your website or not.


Getting familiar with the interfaceAcquisition

This will show you how your audience is finding your website and where they are coming from.

It will also show you which medium is contributing the most to users finding your website.


Getting familiar with the interfaceBehaviour

This area gives you insights on what users are doing once they land on your website.

Are they leaving immediately? Are they exploring? Which pages are they exploring? The behaviour section will give all these answers to you.


Getting familiar with the interfaceConversions

In this area, we set up goals for your organisation. For example, if the key goal of your website is for users to submit an application we can track this here.


Audience Demographics

This area will provide insights on the age and gender of your users. For example, the OK Games website aims at targeting 25-35 year old gamers, and is achieving just this.

However, if it was appealing to a younger demographic, it would be an indication that the website would need to look at why this is happening.


Audience Geo

Provides insights on location and language. This can be drilled down to region and city area.


Audience Mobile

This area provides insights on which devices are being used to access your website.

The Adelphi Digital website receives mostly hits on desktop, which is expected as we can assume users are looking at our website during work hours.


Audience Users Flow

Gives you an initial insight on what users are doing once they visit your website.

More detailed insights can be gained under “behaviour”


AcquisitionOverview

This area gives you a quick overview of the top channels that are sending users to your website.

Adelphi Digital’s site receives most of its traffic from organic search, and needs to grow traffic through social media channels.


AcquisitionAll traffic

Gives further details on how users are accessing your website. Here you can find the top referring sites, sources and medium.


AcquisitionSocial

In this area, you can see which social media networks are the most effective at generating traffic to your website.

Ok Games generates content that is shared through social media, especially Facebook.


AcquisitionCampaigns

Campaigns can be used to more easily track how your different media activity is tracking, both paid and unpaid.

This will allow you to get a better understanding of the ROI for each medium.

More details on how to make the best of use of campaign and how to track will be covered later in the presentation.


BehaviorBehavior Flow

This gives a detailed view of how users generally navigate your website. This part particularly will show you whether users are finding the information they need and how they are finding it.


BehaviorSite Content

This area shows you the detail of which pages are being visited the most, which pages are the most common exit ones.

It will allow you to do an objective assessment of the content available, and can assist you in making informed decisions when deciding to remove existing content from the site.


BehaviorSite Search

This area will allow you to understand the search terms people use to find content once they are on your website.

This is particularly helpful to continue developing and improving on your taxonomy.

For example, if your organisation uses a lot of internal jargon in the content, you can find which common keywords are being used to find said content and ensure it surfaces a lot quicker.


BehaviorEvents

When setting up your website, we recommend you set up the tracking of particular events.

This can be clicking a particular button, clicking on a particular link, submitting a form, etc.

This is best paired with Google Tag Manager, which will allow you to track a number of events across your website, including how many users are accessing pdfs.


Extras

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Campaigns • What are campaigns?

• How to create a campaign?

• Campaign + Conversions = Effectiveness of Campaign

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What are campaigns?They allow us to check the response to a promotion type activity. Categorises the inbound traffic. Can be used for:

• Newsletter ie. Outbound materials

• Social promotion (facebook, twitter, etc) ie. sharing a link on twitter, facebook

• Advertising ie. Job advertisement

Part of the “Acquisition” dimension of GA

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How do you create them We could almost do a crash course on this… so in brief:

• Query strings to URL that links back to your sitehttp://www.yoursite.com?query_string=value

• Use the tools provided by google to build ithttps://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/

Outcome: GA will read the different “Tags” in the url and track that in analytics

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http://www.yoursite.com?query_string=value

https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/


How do you create them

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Effectiveness of CampaignCampaign + Conversions = Effectiveness of Campaign

Campaigns when combined with some conversion goals shows how effective a campaign was. This can help deciding on “promotion” strategy

Conversion Goals are specific set of actions we want the user to perform our website. Such as:

• Submit a contact us form

• Click through to certain page

• Subscribe to a newsletter

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Search console (Webmaster tool)

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Quick snapshot how the website is doing


Webmaster tool / Search console● How your website looks

in search results• Looks and feel

(Text and images in search result) - data highlighter

• See how Rich snippets/ Rich cards are displayed

• Which link to “demote”


Webmaster tool / Search console● Get info on how google is

crawling your website• This is where google

gives feedback on what is wrong on the website

• See how many links on your website has been indexed

• What are the keywords captured from your website.. Which are more significant


Application

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Key reports

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Report Recap Uses

Dashboards Collection of saved “widgets”

Your interface - good for high level tracking. Quick insights. Regular go-to area

Shortcuts Saved reports Monitor high priority items, problem areas, things you need to report on frequently

Real time Watch interactions as they happen

Effectiveness of campaigns, monitoring performance/load

Audience Demographics Personas development + approach validation

Acquisition How users got to the website

Critical for reporting on marketing mix/ ROI

Events/Behaviour Interaction tracking/mapping

Looking for trends/patterns or inconsistencies (Google Tag Manager)

Conversions Goals and ecommerce Effectiveness of IA/process and content


Key reports continued

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Report Recap Uses

Campaigns URLs to track campaign performance

Track/measure performance of marketing mix and specific activities (ie. singular emails, billboards etc)

Search terms Capture what search terms people are searching for

Fuel for a gap analysis + perfect for finessing content + help optimise IA

Search console Previously webmaster tool - shows what google is crawling on your site and how

Key for SEO or option to demote/hide links

Data & Analytics

Google Analytics- Crash Course