Google Analytics Intermediate Module Review

This week I continued to improve my skills in google analytics with the intermediate level course, with Chris Mercer at the CXL institute, and again I have to say there that it has been an amazing way to learn more on the advantages when using this platform. The way the course is structured allows you to understand clearly and to have solid knowledge at the end of each module. For me, it has been the best way to reinforce my GA skills.

 So, what this module is about? There are so many more things that we can do with Google Analytics to find the story behind the numbers, so we can connect the dots and validate that what we are thinking is happening or find some new insights about our users. The goal of this course is to upgrade our abilities and take the maximum benefit from the tool.

Let’s start by remembering that good data has always a story but great data tells a story that is naturally there, this is the main goal of using this tool, we go there with some questions, establishing some hypothesis about users behaviors and looking for the answers behind all the collected data so we can confirm what’s happening. So, logically the cleaner our data is the easier is to find the answers.

Assuring us that our database is clean is key, and there are multiple ways of doing it. The first one is filtering out spam, with this measure you can be sure that the information is coming from real users because as you know GA is a platform where you can pull or inject data from, so avoiding bots’ traffic or site referrals known as “Black Hat SEO” that had no value is important. There are several ways of doing it, you can easily activate the bot filtering for in the admin section of your account for almost all views, remember to keep your backup view without it, as it is always important to keep your “raw data” as it’s born. You can take a look in the All traffic > Referrals report to find the sites that don’t make sense and then create a filter for the spam sources that you have found there or the ones you already know. Another way to identify these sites is through the Sources / Medium report by adding as a second dimension the “Hostname” so you can identify the URL’s that are coming to your site.

The next step to continue cleaning your data is to remove the internal hits. In this part you have as well different options to do it, your choice will depend on what’s better for your business because you can do it as specific as you wish. Google analytics has an opt-out add-on, in other words, a Chrome extension or a browser extension which is the simplest way to remove internal traffic. Of course, the goal of the course is to show us many ways of doing one action so, you can also set a filter to exclude a city or even a country if that works for you, also you can exclude the traffic coming from certain IP, in this case, the important thing is that you confirm with you IT team that the IP is static because if it is dynamic you will have to use another option, and finally you can also exclude UTM’s.

Another thing where you should pay attention is to cross-domain tracking. If the user has to go through different sites while completing a goal you have to put attention into this so the sessions can be counted as one instead of two, so make sure to include the other sites that you are working with, this can be the check-out processing or the payment page. In that way, your data will be accurate.

There is one extension that can help you to find if you have these issues and it is the Google Analytics debugger, this add-on helps you to see how GA is working and how are the hits being registered.

And of course, the most important advice that we can have from Chris is to always test but verify, make sure you test in your test views before applying any filter to your production views, once you confirm that it works then you can implement it without the risk of losing valuable information.

After having our data clean and ready, we can start the process to find answers and there are several ways of achieving this, having clear questions and what we are looking for before diving into GA is a great way to start.

The Funnel tracking is one of them and you can set it up through your destination goals, this is a static view that allows you to track the sequence of your events e-commerce or custom reports. Think like the story goals are telling while setting them up, this will enable you to see user’s behavior when completing an action on your site.

Then, there are the Segments which will allow you to analyze a portion of your audience that matches the criteria you need, GA has some predefine segments that you can find by clicking the button “+Add Segment” just aside All Users button. You can also build ads audience from it so you are targeting the same portion you are analyzing. There are also the Custom segments, that will let you confirm some behaviors from your audience like is it Facebook the main source of traffic for women? Or which type of content is working better to make your clients come to your site? in this case, the UTM content segment is not set by default so you can build it through the conditions tab inside the segment builder.

Another way to build a funnel is with the sequences segment builder where you can establish several conditions on a determined order so you can see how many of your users are following this path while completing an action. In this case, the use of regular expressions will help you set the right parameters, like using the correct expression to identify the home page from the rest of the site.

We get to the end this section with the custom reports, the report builder will allow you to create metric groups so you can explore your segments in the most convenient way for you. Once you set up your report you can save it and even share it because this is specific to the user that created it. Also, there exist template reports that you can import from the solutions gallery, just investigate first to be sure that the customized report helps you.

The final section of this module is all about tips and tricks, to keep maximizing the benefits of using GA, making it easier to explore your data and find the answers that you need. A side note, remember to always come to your data with a question or a hypothesis to validate in that way you will have clear what you are looking for, jumping into the data to see what we might found is not the best approach since you don’t know what to find.

Starting with the dashboards, this tool is used to answer specific questions, you can choose which metrics you want to view at the same time, so if for your question you to compare or take a look of references from several reports this will allow you to do it in the same page. The solutions gallery is also available for this section, again the recommendation before using any template is to read and go through it because they might contain metrics that cannot be processed in your database.

Google Data Studio is another tool that will take your dashboards to the next level making them more attractive and the platform is more flexible with the style adding colors and more possibilities to organize data as it best fits you, templates are available here as well.

Besides this function, GA allows you to save reports; maybe you need to constantly take a look into a certain data configuration so, this feature will make it easier to access this customized report rather than building it every time you need to. The only thing to do is once that you have your report set up you click on the icon at the right up corner to save it and it will be accessible at the Customization > Save reports menu.

Beyond that, you can also set up customized alerts, they can be on a daily or monthly frequency so you can keep an eye on certain data, like sessions for Facebook, sales, goals achieved, etc. These alerts can come through an e-mail or even on your mobile phone.

Channels are another category that you can customize and create new channel grouping since we don’t know exactly how GA classify and report the channels, you can set up your own so you are sure that all social sources are in the social reported number and also with the paid search. You can start setting this up in the admin section at a level view then channel settings. This group will be available for all users that have access to the view, and the new group will be displayed in the channel report as part of the drop-down menu of the primary dimension. This implementation might take up to 24hrs to be visible and you should know that this feature actually will be retroactive and will reorganize your data according to the new channel grouping.  Remember to test your new group in a test view before applying it to the production view, also keep the default channel grouping just in case.

The multi-channel funnel report is another great tip, this report works differently than the standard ones, processed from a different platform it allows you to see how channels work together and identify all the sources users are coming from maybe a user started in Facebook, then came back direct to the site and finally took action when coming from a CPC campaign. This report lets you see the path of traffic sources. Also, it attributes each channel value as they influence a user to convert, which is useful when analyzing your sources to see which platform is better to implement a CPC or a remarketing campaign. The view you get from this report lets you see and validate how your traffic sources are interacting and assisting each conversion with the option of going back in dates with the lookback window.

This report takes us to understand the models of attribution that GA has, meaning how each channel gets the right credit for each conversion. By default, the Source/Medium report uses the last click model, assigning the credit to the last known attributable traffic source, but you cannot see if another source was involved in the user journey.

There are 3 ways of attributing assistance of the conversion:

1. Last click model which as I mentioned before is the method used by default in GA
2. First touch model, meaning that the first traffic source gets all the credit, and
3. Middle touch, which splits the value according to the assistance weight during the flow

The attribution report, is based on a model comparison tool, so it compares the 3 models; use this report to understand how the traffic sources are working, and how valuable they are as they contribute to the users’ conversions.

The next tip is regarding the flexibility of getting data from GA through Google sheets, this will allow you to build your reports outside the platform into a spreadsheet, with the Google Analytics Add-on for Google sheets, which is easy to install. This is an alternative way to pull data from the standard reports and even from the funnels, in this case, the use of the regular expression is required to let the software know where to look for the information if you are not familiar with these expressions as me you can use the dimensions and metrics explorer from Google to get them, and the extra trick is that you can click in each one of the dimensions to have a brief explanation of it. Also, you can schedule an automatic update of the reports making it easier the process of getting your data.

Finally, the section closes with the “Measurement protocol” which is explained in a general perspective to understand how it works and how we can inject data into GA. This protocol helps us to measure offline actions by sending the correspondent hits the platform so we can see them in the reports as well. 

So, as a close to this article I share with you my key takeaways from this module:

• Learn more about the use and implementation of regular expressions or “Regex” as it is mentioned in the module because I think it is very useful to customize and set up some GA features.
• Keep in mind the QIA framework when working with GA this will get you to the answers that you are looking for or at least will give clarity about where to start searching.
• Test but verify, it very important to test everything before applying it in the production views, don’t take unnecessary risks with your data, test first, verify that it works correctly, and then apply it.
• Consider taking a Google Tag Manager training since is a tool that can help you manage your tracking codes and triggers without having to work with your developer each time that you need to inject a tracking code.
• Also, learn about the Google Data Studio tool that can help us make more attractive and dynamic reports.

Thanks again for reading my weekly review as I go through the Growth Marketing mini degree at the CXL Institute. If you are looking for the right place to upscale your digital skills I can tell you that this is the best place to do it, take a look at their site and I’m sure you will find the program that suits your needs as I did. See you next week!