The Importance of Google Analytics

As we know, digital marketing is essential for the success of any business nowadays, so it is important that we understand the structure of Google Analytics and how to use it. Just how important? Worldwide, nearly 4.5 million companies use Google Analytics, and of the 21 million websites that use analytics software, nearly 16million of those sites use Google Analytics, which translates to a market share of 75.6%.  By now, each and every person reading this blog post should be on the same page as this baby.

As demonstrated, Google Analytics is the most utilized analytics tool in the world, so let’s start slow and move into the basics.

How it Works:

To begin utilizing Google Analytics and start tracking a website, you have to create a Google Analytics account which you can do here. Once that is all set up, it is important to understand the importance of the JavaScript tracking code. This code is what enables analytics users to track information from the search browser like the language of the browser, type of browser, session (period of time that a user is on the website), and the device and operating system used. Without the tracking code, you will have not be able to collect data. This data is then aggregated into criteria in Google Analytics and processed; however, once the data is processed there is no changing that data, so include everything you think you are going to need beforehand! So, all the right data is included, we can create 3 different views: Raw data, test view, and master view. The first processes all the data no matter what, the next provides a test location for all your configured settings in Google Analytics, and the master view includes the data you will be tracking. All these views and filters fall under a single Property or all the pages that your tracking code is installed on.

Understanding Analytics Reports:

Now that we understand how Google Analytics works, how is the data stored and processed? All the data is processed and stored into separate reports: real-time, audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions. Let’s break them down.

Real-Time Reports: Offers a look into live user behavior on your website, including where your users are coming from and if they are converting

Audience Reports: Demonstrate the key demographics of our users like age, gender, location, et. It also tells us how engaged users are and if they are new or returning users.

Acquisition Reports: Explains which channels brought users to your site. For example, organic (unpaid search), cost per click (paid), referral (traffic from another site), and social (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

Behavior Reports: Includes how users engaged with your site including the pages they viewed, landing and exit pages, even the terms that your users searched on the site.

Conversion Reports: Allows you to track website goals based on your business objective. Specifically, a goal represents a completed activity or a conversion that leads to the success of your website/business.

Without reports, we have no data, and without data, we have no way to measure the success of our website, so buckle up, it’s time to get into the advanced portion of Google Analytics.

Tracking Campaigns:

To track your campaigns, it is important to include specific tracking tags (extra bits of information that are added to the URL links of your online material). The various tags that you can use to track said data are medium, source, campaign, content, and term. These tags help give you specific information about your campaign like where the user came from (web page or link) or how your message was sent to your user (CPC, organic, etc). To build these URL tags, the URL builder must be used, feel free to check out how to use the URL builder to create your tags here.

 Data Collection:

Now that we understand how the JavaScript tracking code functions, we can get into how data is collected from your website. With each user interaction with the site, the tracking code sends out a “hit” to Google Analytics. The hit is just a URL string that provides us with information about the user as we discussed earlier. There are three types of basic hits: Pageview hits; triggers when the user loads the webpage with a tracking code, event hits; tracks when users interact with certain elements of your website, like playing a video, and transaction hits; pass on data regarding e-commerce purchases. These hits provide businesses the information necessary to identify and analyze website locations that bring the least/most value to the company and then adjust its site accordingly.

On the topic of data collection, you can configure your website with advanced filters on views to make your data more readable in reports. You can also create custom dimensions and metrics to make the data you are searching for easier to track and analyze. Briefly, dimensions are attributes of your data like in the location report, “city” would be a dimension while metrics are quantitative measurements, the data you see in Google Analytics like conversion rate.

Once you successfully configure your Google Analytics account, you will be able to collect and analyze data quickly and efficiently.

Data Segmentation:

Segmentation offers a way to view a subset of data in a report, it gives insight into specific areas in which Google Analytics users want to explore. There are two types of segments: user segments, which can span multiple sessions (90days) and session segments, which are confined to the behavior in a single session. Click on the segments link to understand the ways you can utilize these segments. Overall, segments are extremely powerful because they allow Google Analytics users to compare multiple categories across a single report. For example, you can compare segments of users who purchased with segments that didn’t to see what influenced the purchase (or not).

Other Important Advanced Techniques:

There are plenty of other advanced techniques worth mentioning, for the sake of simplicity, I am going to briefly explain one final technique.

Multi-Channel Funnel Reports: Explains what role prior marketing activities played in the conversion process and offers insight into the amount it time it took for a conversion to take place. As stated in the name, this is trackable across all digital channels: Paid and organic search, referral sites, email campaigns, etc. Multi-channel reports enable us to measure whether the campaigns for your business have been successful and gain insight into what channels work for your company.

Google Merchandise Store Demo Account:

Now it is my turn to demonstrate what the beginners and advanced Google Analytics courses have taught me. The Google Merchandise Demo Account can do any of the following things to improve their business.

1.     The goal “purchase completed” has a very low conversion rate at the cart page (19.51%). This tells marketing consultants a few things; the first being the overall design of the cart page could be inefficient leading to a high bounce rate at 80.49% from the page. If our users can’t find their way around the cart page, then they will be more inclined to leave the cart page rather than continue with the purchase. It’s important to note, that of the 1589 users who accessed their carts, 1279 of them left at the cart page. For the future, I suggest closely managing the number of times users spend on the cart page to see if the low conversion from the cart page to the billing and shipping page on average is modest or long. Long would indicate potential problems with the cart page itself while modest would indicate a possible normality (the cart page naturally may have a low conversion rate). The merchandise store could then improve its cart page leading to more conversions and a continuation to the next part of the funnel.

2. Looking at the referral section in all traffic, the source “mall.googleplex.com” had an influx of 1365 users with a bounce rate of only 11.46%, meaning that when being referred from this google site, only 11.46% of users exited the site without meaningful action. I would recommend setting up a custom segment to track what makes this referral site so successful compared to other referral sites like “Analytics.Google.com” in terms of bounce rate. This would give the merchandise store team insight on what they could do to make other referral sites more effective, potentially leading to more event actions, engagement, and conversion.

Google Analytics Matters:

If there is one thing that should be taken from this article, is how useful it is to marketers nowadays. With the ability to analyze and control how our users discover, engage, exit, and view our websites, businesses have all the control at their fingertips. We can use reports to gain valuable insight into our target market, and tailor our content to that target market. With nearly complete control of the price, product, place, and promotion, there is no excuse why a business shouldn't thrive if they have advanced knowledge of Google Analytics. Until next time, I'll leave you with this entertaining picture of The Rock reminding you that Google Analytics is a must in this digital age. Happy marketing!