Google Analytics? : Review

When you were younger, did you have those English assignments where you had to summarize a lengthy story? I mean, you are just thinking of how to shorten one of the best things you have ever learnt or read about or heard about?

As I am typing this, I am thinking of the best possible way to present what I learnt this week at CXL Institute.

It was all about Google Analytics this week at my Growth Marketing Minidegree program and I am going to give you a summary on what I learnt. Google analytics is something you must practice in person and not just read about. This is particularly important.

Generally, what analytics does for you is that it helps you measure the how and what you think about the how. It is not just about the number of people who saw your blog post, or number of clicks. It is particularly about behaviors of users. You can measure all sorts of behaviors happening on a site using google analytics. What behaviors are these? It looks at actions the users are taking, the page views, what pages they see first or last and so much more.

Google Analytics has a story to tell. I was introduced to two forms of data which are clean data and great data. To summarize this part, great data is what tells you the story and cleaning your data is what helps you see the story. To clean your data, which is to get clean data, you need to filter out spam and remove internal hits which are internal traffics on your website. In this article, I hope you can fully understand the need for google analytics.

Google analytics essentially does three things for you which are: it collects information, stores information and reports behaviors. Here, the google tag manager collects the data while google analytics then stores and reports it. There are four goals in google analytics and they are: duration, destination, event and pages or screens per session. You are looking to know the duration of time users are spending on each screen, their destination on your page, the actions they are taking, and how many things they are doing per time.

To get started, create an account on analytics.google.com. I learnt how to set up an account, but I cannot take us through all of that right now. You know what to do. *winks* Create your account, explore, and see all that google analytics has to offer. When you create an account, you would see a lot of views that help you get various reports about the behaviors of your users and acquisition of the users which shows you where you users are coming from. Google analytics will only tell you the traffic sources that caused a certain conversion to happen but would not tell you the traffic sources that assisted in the conversion.

“Can I track where my users are coming from with google analytics?” Yes, you can! This is found in our acquisition reports. You get to know the traffic of where your users are coming from down to the browser they use. It is important to know where you traffic is coming from and this would require you setting up a UTM structure in google analytics.

Have you created your analytics account yet? If you have, you will notice there are lots of views. Not to worry, they are all important. The views answer different questions that help you towards your goals or KPIs and the best part is that you can customize these views with filters to ensure that you are getting the right information you need at every point in time.

I would like you to pay attention to the difference between dimensions and metrics as you would come across this. Metrics have to do with numerical values. Now, we have user metrics, revenue metrics and a lot more while dimensions are the categories for the metrics. It shows you how the metrics are broken down. Ideally, each page is a dimension and then you now look through your metrics.

There are different types of reports in google analytics and they include home report, overview reports, table reports, flow report, real time reports, goal reports. What these reports do is that they help you analyze in bits depending on what you are focused on. For instance, the overview report, as the name implies gives you an overview of what has happened within a period, table report is breaking down these happenings and putting them into sections, the real time report allows you to test your link immediately to see if they are working.

When working with google analytics, you need to be focused so as not to get confused. It gets better once you understand how to navigate around it. Some tricks when using google analytics include ensuring you use the dashboard and you save your reports. Just like working on Microsoft word, every step of the way it is important you save your reports so that data is not lost.

As we come to the end of this practical article; (I mean, you need to practice this), I would be introducing you to attribution. An example was given in the course to describe attribution, when a purchase happens, you want to look at what caused the purchase. If users visit Facebook for instance and make a purchase in that same session, Facebook gets attributed the sale. Now, it seems that Facebook caused the result. This pattern is what is known as attribution. Here, when you look at your reports you then see that Facebook helped with a conversion because this purchase was made on Facebook.

 This brings me to the end of this article. Please try your best to check out the google analytics website as this would give you more clarity as to how to use it. Do share your feedbacks with me when you discover the wonder that is Google Analytics.

I am already excited about what I would be sharing next week. Do not forget to stop by and check for the next article.