Tag: google analytics

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Online Marketing

How to use Google Analytics by Aferdita Pacrami CEO 90 Digital

So a huge part of what we do is just analytics so having data there to kind of explain what we do to see if it works to pretty much come up with strategies and everything is led by date. Everything is led by research or ohm, analytics dates, and things like that, so this is cool.

What we’re going to talk about today, specifically focusing on google analytics. It’s widely used analytics platform. It’s pretty, and I guess that’s what you guys are learn who this semester first thing: I’m not really going to go through how to add the tracking code and stuff, like that. That’s that’s kind of basics and Google Analytics itself as well, just really good guides for how to do this, but these a more kind of tips that maybe they might not really tell you about so first thing when you first set up with google analytics account.

You’ve got your account, your property and your main view as a default. You’ve got the all the website date of you now. Something to bear in mind with google analytics. Is that as soon as you set it up, that’s when it starts recording data. So it’s not historic its immediate and, if you add any filters to refuses, then who are likely to that tells good want to let it how to track so it completely changes what it’s trucking.

So so you have a filter soon ignore any visits from the UK. For whatever reason it literally will ignore them. So let’s say today you set up your google analytics tomorrow. You apply this filter, you leave it there for a week, then after week, you’ve removed it. That means that you’ve got a hold of completely different data, and you can see the issues with this because then you’ve got inconsistencies in your data.

So something to remember is whenever you set up, google analytics make sure that you’ve got one completely unfiltered view. This is one where you don’t apply any filters, don’t change anything and it’s their kind of as a backup, because if you make any mistakes with your filters or if you just want some clean data which is really valuable, you want to make sure that’s there and Then you can have your main here with them.

You know if you can filter IP addresses or whatever and then also set up a test where you would test out new filters before you apply because, like I said it’s, it’s immediate. So if you get that wrong, then you’ve got on the clean data so make sure always to have a test view. It’s really the core of using should have or the minimum or through it. You can have up to 25 and you can set it up. However, you want it always the three important ones.

Are your unfiltered view, your main you, where you apply some coracle, turns your document and also test view where you can test out any additional filters. Yes, so the main filter that I would first of all set up his IP filters, um. Yes, whatever business, you have you, you don’t want to track your own visits, because I could end up being misleading if everyone, your team, has come something on your site.

You know dates up, might look really impressive when in reality could be. You know half of the traffic that you’re getting any other filters depend on kind of what you’re. After so, for example, you might want to set up separate these four different other folders on your site, so you can set up these four. You know site.Com /of store and that’s one folder structure or psycho come forward. Slash dog things like that, so to kind of separate um your data into different kind of views and just to dig a bit deeper into filters.

So they’re, pretty easy to add you um analytics, already gives you kind of predefined filters that are the most common ones that you use and again one of the main ones that everyone uses an IP address filter and it’s just excluding your IP address and just a Note on IP addresses – I don’t know if everyone knows this, but a personal internet providers have a dynamic IP addresses. So, for example, if you’ve got whatever intimate you’ve got at home, your IP address will likely change every few months.

Family business providers really offer static. Ip addresses so that’s something to bear in mind when it folks bring our IP addresses. If, for example, you want to build throw your University access are not so sorry tropic, then you can set that up. You can just find out with your IP addresses for your uni and it ignores all traffic on between you guys. But if you want to filter out your home activity, you your best of doing that, maybe with location looking at other ways doing that instead of IP address, because after a few months, you’re going to have a different IP address and best case scenario.

Is you just have to update these filters every few months, which I don’t really recommend because it’s a lot of admin work worst case scenario, these IP addresses get reused by your internet providers, so somebody else subscribe to that entering our package will get your old IP Address now it’s pretty unlikely, but they might end up being a user on your website, so you unknowingly, filtered they’re out there relevant traffic.

If you have any kind of search functionality site, is to set up site search on there. It’s really valuable information because it gives you an insight into what people are looking for when they come onto your site, especially the reason one people would you say, searches, because they haven’t immediately found what they’re looking for and by seeing the keywords after entering – and you Know exactly what they’re interested in and maybe how to make the process easier for them how to make the presence of fondant that page easier for them.

So again, it’s in your main um preferences. That’s what is you just switch on the site, search, tracking, German, beautiful? So in Google this would be your profit ur q and it’s kind of the most used one in a lot of search functionality. Anything after search Q equals Tesco. This is the keyword, research for tesco stores. Some sites have additional filters, so, for example, they’ve got the main search box and then categories, and you can set that up as well, so that you can look at which categories people are selected.

For example, update you select your parameter queues and everything after this parameter is the site search. You can strip that openurl, so you don’t see it in your pointing, and you can also set up a category parameters for the counterpoise. It’s always before an equal sign. For example, here the different categories are English language in french language and very similar to the cube from turkey Ian equals and then um whatever the category.

Is there another thing to make sure to switch on when you’re studying google analytics of this on the demographics reports? So this is typically used for a remarketing data, but it’s also really useful for getting additional data analytics reports again this this future can be found in your few dates on these settings and what it does is when we go into your audience with points you can Actually see the different demographics of users that are coming onto your site and that’s really useful data I mean, in the long term, maybe want to do some surveys with the customers to find out where they are what they’re interested in.

But this is a great start about, because once you have this kind of information, you can really target your website to. You know that you know mainly 25 to 34 year olds, physiol website them and the majority of them are male. Then you have some ideas of how to target them. You also get interests as well. So you can see what else are interested in the way that Google Analytics take statements just by seeing what else are searching for a new database when they go to your site.

So because so many people use google analytics and they also have all the data from search. They could give you this information, but we need to enable um demographics in your setup. So I’m going to go through just some different types of conversions and how you can set up goals. So, first of all, goals are in your view as well are just in your viewing kollam. You can see Bulls there, and this is kind of how it looks like against you.

Some template, wolves and you can use or you can set up your own custom goals. These templates are quite good, but they fit specific purposes. So if you don’t have an e-commerce site, then you may just want to set up your own goal. So I’m going to talk a bit about micro, conversions and before I go into well. How does that are, for you have two different kinds of conversions and your micro, conversions and macro conversions.

A macro conversion is kind of your of the main conversion. It’s your answer. So, if you’re an e-commerce site, it’s the point where somebody ads as an item to the basket and makes approaches they bought a pair of shoes over something that is a macro conversion. Micro conversions are smaller conversions that lead to user to making a purchase. So it could be something like subscribing to your newsletter.

It could be spending more time on your site, so reading descriptions of the shoes reading, reviews um things like this, so things that would lead somebody to making a macro conversion your site and or you can set up with tons of conversions in Google Analytics. And it’s just in a goal set up. Okay, so a an example of a micro conversion would be time on sites. I am assuming that the more time people spend on the side the more the more interest that they are in the content, so the more they’re reading about the products, the services that I’m offer.

So I would look at the average duration on the site and see typically how long people take before they converts before the odds of basket or hook complete a form or whatever. And then I would take an average of kind of how long who was fun before making that macro conversion and I’d set that up visible. So in this case I’m saying if somebody spends five minutes for more on my site, then that’s a goal.

You can also add about you to these goals for monetary value. Um. If you have an e-commerce store, you know kind of you can add some how much each micro and macro go on what the monetary value is there. So, for example, you’ve got different products. You can add a monetary value of exactly how much each product costs curr macro go. So you know this conversion made X amount of money and at the end, just um.

You can select verify the school just to make sure that it works and say that part of a broader topic, but really before you kind of decide on what conversions. What what successes on your site! You need to really identify your business objectives. So if you say you’re a small business with an informational site, what what’s the point of the site, why are you online? What are you trying to accomplish? Are you a lead generator um? Are you a service provider? What is the point of even one? It’s kind of a really big question, so if you’re, if you’re just a blog um, then again I mean maybe you could answer in hypotheticals here, but if you’ve set up a business blog, what do you want to achieve with them? There are loads of different ID butters and links are still very important, though they’re not the most important things.

So if all you’re relying on is getting links for one blog, then it will help a fraction a bit, but not that much, because if you’re constantly getting links from one root domain than those links are less valuable and also it depends on how trust working. What the quality is of the blog, that’s linking out your business site. So if it’s kind of just a wordpress blog, then it adds very little value, whereas if it’s a really strong blog with the consistent following on constantly getting red and those links, you know it’s constantly ranking for its you post them.

That adds a lot more about. You so it’s all, contextual um! Really if you do have a link building campaign kind of wan na um, you want to variety. You don’t want to keep sending links just one place because then it kind of looks like you might have a partnership with this blog. So give you some hypotheticals if you have a business and you’re just adding a block, see that business then some reasons why you might want to do that in some, your blog could potentially help you learn: corn, um long till key phrases.

The way that your business site might not be able to because they’re bit limited in the type of content and they’re, not really targeting informational searches or mainly targeting transaction assertions, a blog is really good for that. So hypothetical ball in that case is just counting number of unique visitors, because the assumption there is that if you are constantly ranking on informational searches on long till key phrases, then you are more likely to get more visitors through to the blog.

But that would be a micro conversion and that would lead to potentially been sending this traffic on your business life by having strong calls to action on the blog. Sometimes the reporting you’ll be highlighting the number of visitors. The blog is generated for your main sites. That’s a new that’d be a good metric yeah. So again, a difference here would be blogs typically have a high bounce rate, because if you’ve got a consistent leadership, then they really just go read your latest post enemy.

They don’t do research, they don’t check out. Other pages um, but what we want to do it if you have a blog on your business site, is trying to move those readers to your business. I to make a transaction or whatever it is. You want them to do if it is spreading awareness for your business again, then you want to kind of measure things off site, um measure, how many people are talking about you in social medias.

There are several social monitoring tools out there um measure, how many people are talking about you, an external site, so not necessarily links but brand mentions. So all kind of awareness, conversions awareness balls would be mainly off your site, another hypothetical for why you might set up a blog is so again what we already talked about. This is to pass conversions to your main site. Um. There isn’t really a blueprint for this.

It’s always depend on what what you want to get out of it. So what your end result is, and once you know your end results you can come up with well, you know you’ve got your macro conversion, which is your end result, and then you can figure out different micro, conversions that lead to user to that end result. So if you do have forms and surveys I mean this – is this: this lie that I’m on now is it could example how to track that um.

I just set up a destination goal so that you get the thank you page of your survey. If there they’ve got a forum, if they’re signing up to an email newsletter or a survey by dealing when you set that up, you want to make sure at the end you send them to a unique URL. Sorry not unique hero, but thank you well so that you can track who has the medicine submitted this and then digging deeper into this? If your survey has several papers you can set up funnels, I think I yep and what funnels do is.

Let’s say your survey has five different pages: um, you know. First page is just kind of finding out about them like seeing if they can onto your survey. If you’ve got a really good survey, then yeah the first page is qualifying them and if they don’t qualify, then you send them to a page. Sir. You know sorry thank you for participating. They don’t follow by check out our other surveys here and you track that as a goalless walks.

You want to see me specifically how many users are coming to site and completing that survey. Arms polyphony, then you’ll get an idea of kind of your user group and when page one is, do you qualify page two is basic questions bundler, but your interest whatever paged me whatever? It is your surveys about so you’ve got five different pages. You set up fun ways in your goal destination, so your and route your destination is the thank you page, the funnels to the destination or each of the pages that lead to the end goal.

When you set this up – and you know if it’s a linear park – PPP they’re all required, if any, are skipped depending on what the user answers them, you know you, some of them won’t be required for then in your reporting. Once this is set up, you can see exactly where your users have dropped off. So if you’ve got a hundred people starting the survey and only 30 people go to the thing to your page, then you can look up.

You know first, how many people qualify for the survey and then at what point did they drop off Anna Vissi? Maybe page three had a very high dropout rate, then um. This is a good application of. Maybe you need to fix them. Maybe the questions are too hard. Maybe you know you know the user, don’t really understand. Maybe your surveys too long and beginning to really only need three pages. Whatever is like that’s the point to test, but yeah, if you do have a servant, you’re collecting that kind of dates are then set a destination ball with funnels when looking at your data, some of the stuff that you might want to do is compare a month On one year on year and stuff, like that, gurgaon alerts – and it’s this really easy from here – you can set date, ranges either manually or on using one of their presets compared to previous periods.

You compared to previous one previous year, whatever something that I would kind of recommend you’re, looking at monthly dates, i’ll break it down by day, you’re looking out yearly data, your best breaking it down by month, because sometimes you can get kind of a normal. These very things you know things change daily, but if they’re comparing year on year on year, what you want to do is to see if there are any seasonal trends for high light.

Anomaly is sometimes, if you get huge spikes or hear excerpts for August, let’s say whereas August in previous years, the so when is kind of roughly the same, and then you can get deep into that investigate, but yeah comparing times is really useful. Just for you know, seeing any improvement or seen seasonality, which is huge monolithic, sometimes you’ll get our traffic going down over the winter, and you know, rankings are still the same.

Everything else is still the same, but yet you’re getting less visitors on your site and instead of freaking out I’m thinking, I need to change my whole strategy. Something’s going wrong. You just compare a year on year and see. Is this normal to do? I get this visits during the winter. Do I get more visits during the autumn on same kind of thing? If your topic is increasing over the summer, you think oh yeah, this is working.

Let’s throw more budget, he thinks it’s working so well, but Chuck first see what patterns are on your data um, because the other thurs you usually do get concert. I’r going to be doing. Please look into that. So you’ve got a huge spike in June. The spike in traffic look at what kind of activity that was what you want. Maybe at some point is that way cause of traffic is that coming from. Is that the right traffic is that brand searches? Is it referrals what’s happening there? That’s where you dig deep and that’s when you can break it down in two days, um being hinter a lot of stuff with just kind of twine of your analytics data.

Something else you can do is use Google’s URL builder for me, and Google Analytics will naturally break down things into different campaign mediums and source and the reason when you would use even all builders if you’ve got a specific company. So it’s saying your university is doing any kind of winter term. Company we’ve got some new voices coming up and being able to promote them, so maybe you’re committing to buy an email by a various social other sites.

Referrals things like that. The best way to do that to kind of break it up from normal traffic, when your site is to use the URL builder going to create a unique whirl um. That looks something like this one here below that has a UTM source and it’s got all the campaign data. Now this overrides: let’s move one of the tips so, like I said, Google Analytics will already give you the source and medium, but once you set this up this world, it will wonder why puff.

So it is important that you enter this information correctly. You do understand the difference between source and this kind of stuff, because if you get it wrong, then you might get messy dates off so to go through this, but source is actually where this visit is coming from. That could be Facebook that could be google. I could be email, um does our gmail. That could be the actual site. The medium is the type of a visit, so it could be a referral.

It could be a search, organic PPC, email on. Does that make sense, some medium is the type and source is the actual place coming from campaign term is mainly used for paid keywords. Now, there’s no point of setting up your UTM tracking, if you’re doing, if you’re using AdWords, because it’s a lot better, but you can just link up your AdWords account. There is enough Google Analytics. However, if you using any other platforms that aren’t supporting with Google Analytics um the necessary, so that of like maybe um – I’m not a BBC expert, but maybe you’ve got some sort of um search platform.

Um this on social or something you’ve got and they’re finding your ad space in simpler words, that’s what you would amputated, not open on lyrics, just ignore out where it’s just sort of those two up campaign content. Hmm! This is, if you’re doing a split test, um landing page, so if you’ve got so, this is the pager tracking, sulfur, um, AC and papered / business, but you’ve got two different iterations of that page, one that highlights all the modules in the winter.

We are the one that highlights all the activities on the extra connectivities in the winter and you’re tracking, with this particular components who want to campaign sources Facebook’s its referral. But you want to see which one is more popular, the one that talks about the studies or the one that told us about the extracurricular stuff and that’s where you’d under the campaign content here. So here, for example, I would put in um studies.

So that’s person might set this up again for extracurricular tickets as a campaign content. I my campaign name is some point: your toe in your campaign once you’ve set us up in using this unique URL. So if it’s some Facebook they may share using this URL, not just sulfur, is you cable, / business and the same? If you were um, if it’s a PR campaign, it’s somebody else’s linking to you, then give them the UTM like for them to link that way.

So that it struct one traffic comes in through these lengths, then you can see it in your acquisitions section on google analytics. So this URL is what you get when you fill in this form and then let’s say you want to share this on Facebook, let’s just um. Actually, I won’t do it so mess up your analytics, but that’s the page against you with the additional stuff on my url. So all this stuff, UTM source facebook for all campaign winds, return um.

If you share that URL on stop, then anyone that clicks on that link from facebook and lands on this page, you will see it in Google Analytics under the acquisition. Their income pays. Well, anyone could set it up and come I mean you do see some thumb. Let’s set up like this um but yeah. I don’t want to run this exercise if everyone, if your data person knows if this is happening, but if you all click on this link and go to that page, then, when you check out the google analytics, you can see that as a campaign there and see How many visitors that page is sound, but i’ve seen some really interesting examples of spam using this technique to set up segments so um as a default on any report that you’ve got.

You see kind of all sessions that you want to compare it so similar to what I showed you with dates. Comparing month or month or year, you can compare um, for example, all sessions and mobile traffic or um. We can compare all sessions with them, only ones that converted and then you can kind of get um a more in-depth view of your data on segmenting your data like well, and then you can find on any report.

It’s just at the top here. You click on. Choose segments and um there’s a lot here. You can create ring segments as well and you can compare up to four segments, so you can have four different things up here and same with dashboards. If you find there’s a lot of information, Google Analytics, if you find that you’re only interested in some of the information – and you don’t want to keep scrolling here to get those separate reports – you can create dashboards.

If you create multiple dashboards and name them, you know whatever to serve your own age in dashboard, for any kind of referral, dates that you can have the hall here. Really good ones are from really good analysts and you can just add them to your own. Google analytics or modify them and then you can get into you can get them to understand about customizing a lot more by looking at what these other people are doing and kind of Highland customize things, and we have decided a list of good resources on just Google Analytics and analytics and measuring generally um, these top workloads are really good.

One of these is from is a global law, but kaushik Avinash, Kaushik ism. A really good analyst is written several books on um analytics platforms that are really useful, but a lot of the important content of his books is in his blog. Kissmetrics is the platform and they’ve got a really strong load as well. Buna metrics um also analytics has some sorry tips. Google analytics is different courses on how to use on google analytics and other platforms.

So he visit this link. You can see a number of the different courses and they’re all free and you can only get tested on it as well. At the end, if you get her here, I would recommend um using during the fundamentals course first and then going on top Tyga system is a chrome plugin behind a bum troubleshoots, your analytics installation. So if you’re setting up analytics some mistakes that I’ve seen you some, you know if our website is great, we’ve got a ten percent bounce rate, which is it is phenomenal.

It’s really low and unrealistic lilo, and when you look at that, Google Analytics you will actually it got to analytics tracking codes, help so they’re tracking one page twice, and that kind of interferes with how the bounce rate is measured and yeah. A plug-in like this can very easily tell you anything else for me right glad. I could help and thanks for having me today, thank you to all right. Bye-Bye

 

Categories
Online Marketing

Pam Aungst: How to Increase (or Improve) Your Google Analytics Skills

So that’s we’re going to talk about today, Google Analytics. First. I want to start out by saying that there are so many ways to improve upon your Google Atlantic google analytics skill set that we couldn’t possibly cover them all in full today, in this short 30-minute block.

But these slides are chock-full of information. I’r going to do an overview on some focus areas that are really important and you might want to look into each one later so there’s tons of links in these slides to look into each one more later. So I highly encourage you to download the slides. The link is right there and I will show the link again at the end, so I improve your google analytics skills.

I think this quote sums it up nicely. The quote says: the goal is to turn data into information and information into insight, but what’s the difference between data and information and information and insight? Well, basically, data is a bunch of characters and numbers in a maybe semi-organized, but not totally organized manner and data when segmented in a logical way becomes information information when segmented, in a logical way that can answer, questions becomes insight.

For example, do our paid search visitors convert or engage with our site, as well as our organic search visitors, or vice versa? The data, when segmented, in a logical way an organized way that can answer that question can answer that question. It says yes, organic users, bounce. Let’s stay longer and consume more content and the insight that can be gained from that is that we should invest more in SEO.

I’r a big fan of data-driven marketing and investment decisions so that how to turn data into information into insight. But in order to do so effectively, there’s three things that need to happen with your data. One is it needs to be accurate. To is, it needs to be comprehensive and three. It needs to be segmented in a way that can answer questions. So that’s what we’re going to go over today is how to do that in Google.

Analytics improving accuracy were things like these improving comprehensiveness with conversion, tracking and event tracking and segmenting data to answer questions with tips and tricks like these, but first before I dive too deep into any one of those. I want to go. Do a quick overview of account structure because I’m going to use words like property and view along the way, so I want to make sure you know what that means.

If you go into the admin section of your Google Analytics account you’ll see three columns. There’s account property and view one account can have multiple properties usually used for multiple websites and one property or one website can have multiple views where the data is segmented or filtered in some way narrowed in some way. In that view, so just want to make sure that semi clear at this point that one account can have multiple properties, multiple websites and each property can have multiple views.

So now that that’s clear, how do you make your data more accurate? First and foremost, I want to check that your tracking code is implemented properly. This is a this is responsible or incorrectly implemented. Tracking code is responsible for a whole variety of accuracy, issues that may not be immediately apparent in the data, so you definitely want to check that this is done correctly. You need to have one copy, not more than one.

We see that a lot one copy of your Google Analytics tracking code placed in the head section of the website after the opening head tag and before the closing head tag. Ideally right after the opening head tag. But as long as it’s in the head area, it should be okay and to make sure it’s ok, you want to use the Google tag – assistant, Chrome extension. That is quick and easy way to know. If your tracking code is implemented correctly and working properly, you’ll get a simple, sad smiley face if you’re not good and a green happy face if you’re good to go so definitely start with that.

After you’ve checked your tracking code, another accuracy issue you can look for is called self referral traffic. That is where it appears that new incoming traffic is coming from your own domain. So if you go to the acquisition, all traffic referrals menu and you see traffic from your own domain – that’s a problem because sessions are then being double counted that are really the same session within the site and conversion data can be inaccurate.

So if you see that or just to you know, preemptively prevent that you can go into your property settings middle column, in admin and under tracking info you’ll find the referral exclusion list. Just add your own domain name there, and that will take care of that problem. If you have it or prevent it, if you don’t additionally, similarly, you want to, if you are collecting payments on your website, whether it’s ecommerce or any other payment collections going on you’re using third party external payment gateways like PayPal, you also want to add those to The referral exclusion list, because a similar issue can occur when someone goes to PayPal to checkout, and then they come back and Google Analytics can count that as a new entering user.

Our session, I should say for the same user, but it’s really all part of one session for that user. So, if you add the third party payment gateway domain to the referral exclusion list, Google Analytics will then automatically unify the returning visitors quote-unquote new session, with their original session from before they started checkout and treat it as one we’ll have time for a couple. Questions at the end, also sort of similar in nature is, if you have a user journey that crosses several domains.

So let’s say you have a main website, our site comm and you have a courier site, our career site, comm, and it’s very common for users to travel amongst those and back that can cause a similar issue where one user is really interacting in one session. With all your properties, but it looks like in Google Analytics, it can look like multiple sessions per user visit, and that’s just not true. So in this case you want to implement something called cross-domain tracking and there’s a link there.

It does require a little modification to your tracking code, so there’s a link to read more about how exactly to do this. If you need to do this, but the concept is basically that you’re going to use one property, although properties are usually used one per website in this kind of a case. You want to use the same property across all of the domains and then use separate views to segment the traffic out.

You can have one view where you can see it all together, but then you can have separate views for each site as well, and this will avoid accuracy issues by making all the user visits that are hopping amongst domains. Look like brand new visits when really they’re. Just in one session, moving around alright and another thing for accuracy that you want to make sure to do is get your ownself out of there.

Your behavior, your browsing, behavior on your own website, is not representative of your target client, our prospects, behavior on your site and so you’re, going to skew your own site wide average metrics if you’re recording your own behavior and that of your staff. One really easy way to take care of this is the GA opt-out extension for Chrome, just install it activate it, and you will no longer be counted in your Google Analytics metrics.

That’s the easy way, there’s an abbess way. My slides are not changing there. We go advanced way is IP filtering and this happens at the view level in your admin, you go to admin, view filters and you can filter out your own and your team’s own IP addresses from your view. However, if you do, this definitely definitely definitely create another unfiltered backup view whenever you filter anything out of your main view, it’s gone forever.

So if you make a mistake – and it’s really easy to accidentally – you know put a dot in the wrong place or something if you make a mistake that day is gone forever. So definitely always one view. That’s an unfiltered backup view just in case alright. Last, but definitely not least, is referral spam who’s heard of referral spam all right about a third, maybe referrals fan, has a MERS always do they figure out how to spam us in every area of our lives, including your Google Analytics account, spammers have figured out how To send fake traffic hits to Google Analytics accounts and they do it at random.

Just like spammers call you at random or text at random, so you likely have some referral spam in your Google Analytics account, and it’s just to get your attention like this uptime site is just you know, sending fake hits to get you to check them out and Often they will have bought like metrics, like a 100 percent bounce rate, one average page per visit and 0 seconds session duration, so that will really skew your overall metrics you’re trying to learn about your whole site’s bounce rate, your whole site’s average pages per session, etc.

That’s going to get messed up by this type of traffic and it often has those characteristics exactly but referral spam, but some spammers have figured out how to fake those metrics so they’re not just easy to spot like that. So how do you get it out? The referral spam should be filtered out with filters, so again always always always create a backup unfiltered view. If you’re going to try to do this.

But how exactly do you get it out because there’s hundreds of different websites doing this and hundreds of different metrics that they’re sending with their fake traffic? One word Carlos. This guy has got this figured out and you can do it yourself by following his instructions and or you can pay him to do it for you. But he has got this down. Pat he’s related business for himself taking care of referral, spam and google analytics and I’m not affiliated.

I don’t earn any money by recommending him he’s just the best, so either follow his instructions carefully. They’re incredibly complicated, but you can do it yourself if you want to carefully follow the instructions, but so so the pro to this is that it’s free, but you do have to update it manually whenever new spam sources come out, which is pretty much weekly, but you Could sign up for his emails he’ll, send you an email when there’s a new one to add, filter and tell you how to do it or you can pay him.

His current pricing is not published on his website boy. Is we sign up for it? It’s very affordable, so those are your options for getting referral spam out of your Google Analytics account all right, so we talked about a lot of ways to make the data more accurate, so we also want to talk about how to make it more comprehensive and to Segment at answer questions. So let’s talk about comprehensiveness for comprehensiveness.

Of course you want to track all of your actual conversion. Actions as goals or transactions in Google Analytics you’d be surprised how many sites we see from really established brands that are not tracking all of their actual conversion actions in Google Analytics. So this is key and when I say actual conversion actions, this is a pet peeve of mine. Viewed contact page is not a conversion that a conversion is when someone either purchases, something or actually inserts themselves into your sales cycle, somehow using some kind of form fill or something.

So those are the things you want to make sure to track as conversions as goals or transactions in Google Analytics the easy way to track a form is to after submission, redirect that form to a thank you or like confirmation, type URL and set up. What’s called a destination goal in your admin for Google Analytics for that URL super simple and easy for e-commerce transactions. If you’re on WooCommerce you’re.

In luck, they have a plug-in the enhanced e-commerce tracking plugin takes care of this easily. Just install that enable the cameras tracking in your admin in Google Analytics and you’re done now, if you’re not on WooCommerce or you have a really complicated form situation. You can’t use those easy methods here are some links for using Google tag manager to set up both form, fill tracking and e-commerce tracking for your website, so for non conversion actions, but actions that are really important that you want to track.

You can track those with something called event tracking, so anything that’s an important action to track, but is not someone actually purchasing or inserting themselves in your sales cycle should be tracked as an event which can be viewed under the behavior menu and then events – and we Don’t have time to go through exact how to set this up so it gave you links, but here are some ideas for what you might want to track.

Article views there’s links there for YouTube and Vimeo Mail clicks on mail to links. Click-To-Call links, outbound links, clicks on images or other elements. Those can all be tracked with tag manager, event tracking and I do recommend tag manager over inline JavaScript because it’s just too easy for inline JavaScript to get accidentally overwritten and removed. So if you’re going to do this, please use tag manager all right.

Last but not least in our quest to have accurate, comprehensive and accurate and comprehensive data and data that we can segment to answer. Questions is segmenting data Tannis for questions. My favorite segmentation trick is called secondary dimensions. You can think of this as secondary columns. It’s an easier word to remember so, if I’m looking at our reports and I’m like our careers page gets a lot of traffic, I wonder where all that traffic to that page is coming from.

I can click into that page and very quickly. With this little drop down, you may not have noticed before right at the top of the results, I can very quickly add a secondary column of information and break it down by whatever I’m curious about there’s a lot of options in there. In this case, I was curious about the source or source medium, meaning the source and type of traffic that was coming to that page.

I just quickly used that drop-down to add source medium. Now I have a second column showing me the breakdown that I was curious about, and my question is answered very quickly. Similarly to break down data in a way that can answer questions you might want to use custom segments. This is something that will apply a filter of sorts like a lens to view all the Google Analytics reports through. So when you have this segment on, you can click around to any Google Analytics report and it will show you the stats just for that segment.

For example, we have multiple careers pages in our careers section on the site and if I wanted to view any and all of the Google Analytics reports, but only about the careers section of the site, I can create a segment for the career section of the site. At the top of most of the reports, you’ll see a button that says, add segments you put in the name of the segment, go to conditions, to specify the condition that you want the segment to have, and then say what it is in this case page contains Careers, you say that, and now all of your Google Analytics reports will show you information just through that lens.

So that’s pretty handy and you can even do it for multiple segments at once. You can look. I can do the same thing for the resources section of our site and apply them both at once and view all the reports in Google Analytics through those two lenses at the same time and compare them stacked right over each other. It’s pretty handy, if you find yourself using the same secondary dimension options or the same custom segments all the time and just constantly having to apply them, apply them apply them over and over again, you may want to look into custom reports.

This way you can create a report that will stay there and be that way configured that way all the time in the custom report. So you go to customization and you set up a custom report. It can look a little confusing, especially with things like. What’s a metric what’s a dimension, so this slide you might want to have handy. If you try to do this as a cheat sheet of short of sorts, the dimension is basically the first column.

Whatever data you want in the first column and then the metrics are the numbers that you want to come in the subsequent columns and then the filter is that lens that you want to see it through? If you want to narrow this report to only a certain type of data, and then your custom report will be available to you at all times, and you can even schedule it to be sent by email, just like you can with standard reports and last but not Least, custom dashboards are another very handy way to break down data in a way that can answer, questions and visualize it.

So you can go to the customization section and hit add dashboard, and you can either start with a blank canvas and start adding widgets of your own to it or you can go to the gallery and see if there’s something similar to what you’re. Looking for already there very well maybe, and then you can just tweak it a little bit and that’s a lot faster, but that’s definitely something to consider as well, so to recap to turn data into information into insight.

You want to make sure your data is comprehensive. Accurate and can segment it in a way that can answer questions, and this quick overview showed you some tidbits on how to do that today and if you again, if we want to download the slides the link, is there and there’s plenty of links in the slides For further reading on each topic – and we do thank you – we do have about two minutes for questions.

Those five minutes for questions. There was one over here. First, if that’s important for accuracy – oh okay, all right, so the question was about sites that have that render, with both www and non dub dub dub. Do you need to have like two different Google Analytics accounts? The best practice would be to actually have one redirect to the other, because if you don’t that’s duplicate content, which is not great for SEO purposes, so you want to just pick a primary.

Have it all redirect one way or the other and then just set up your google analytics the one way technically it can show both, but it’s the best practice for a variety of reasons. To just have it one way, other questions? Okay, so the question was: do we use any other tools, other than Google Analytics, that can capture data that perhaps Google Analytics doesn’t show? Yes, Google Analytics is amazing, in-depth tool, but it can’t show certain things, especially metrics from other platforms.

Like you know, social media platforms have their own metrics and whatnot, so we do like a variety of dashboard tools for that. This is one that we use a lot imports from Google Analytics, as well as a whole variety of others. Clip folio is another good one and on the high end for really complicated stuff, tableau is pricey, but great for that. Second, one is clip folio KL IP fol, io, okay. So the question was about referral spam, see it a lot curious if there’s an actual like detriment, SEO why’s to having that happening on your site or if it’s just like a harmless Kito that doesn’t pay.

It is like an annoying mosquito that doesn’t bite. There’s no SEO penalty, it’s not real traffic right right, you can filter it out and then they do constantly change their domains and then yeah, I’m not going to repeat that. That’s why Carlos’s emails are really helpful because he’s on top of that, like you, wouldn’t believe so as soon as there’s a new one, if you really want to do it yourself and keep updating your filters and keep on top of it he’ll, let you know the Moment a new one is found ah great question: when making websites for clients should you put Google, should you create their Google Analytics property in your own account or create a separate account for them? I would highly recommend the second option, create their own account for them or let them create their account and let you know what the number is and let them technically legally intellectual property, wise, whatever they own their data or they should own their data and I’ve seen Horror Story after Horror, Story of clients trying to get a hold of their own Google Analytics data from a web developer that vanished or won’t give it to them or was extorting them.

I actually was on a conference call where a web developer tried to extort money out of a client to give them ownership of their Google Analytics data. It was insane and unethical and just awful just let them have their own account. We have time for more questions. If anyone else has any I’ll also be at the, I feel like there might be hands up, I’m not really singing there. We go sorry. It was a little hard to hear any kind of data.

That is ah, okay, so question: is there any kind of data that maybe Google Analytics doesn’t measure yet but is in demand and we see coming in the future? Yes, I think the biggest thing in demand right now is proper cross device and cross blog attribution and Google Analytics is making baby steps in getting better at that. But they’ve got a long way to go. I mean it is a multi device, multi browser world multi IP, you know and we’re in advertisers who are spending a lot of money, advertising or trying to figure out their funnels of what’s working between impression, click, actions on the site and conversion and sale.

And you know, users coming back days later from a different device, is just it’s something they haven’t gotten good enough at yet, but seem to be trying to and hopefully well one more question. If anyone has question again, I feel like there might be hands that I can’t see. Thank you for pointing oh sorry, we’ll try to do both really fast yeah. So the question was about. Is there a service that builds in? You know you’re kind of predetermined conversion funnel tracking, for you sort of I mean every business is different.

I think the closest thing that comes to that is HubSpot. They, you know, they show you that you know per contact journey and a nice neat funnel ish type of way sort of pre-designed, or they make it easy to design they’re the ones that come top of mind for the ones that come closest to something sort of Pre done for funnel tracking. Yes, that’s one good question: how often do I recommend checking your Google Analytics? I’d say that checking and analyzing, or two totally different things.

You know checking into it to make sure all the data is flowing through and it looks like you know: nothing’s broken and traffic numbers have disappeared, it’s a good thing to do on a regular basis, but they also have alerts for that. You can set up alerts. So that, if all of a sudden you have zero hits when you usually have 100 hits a day, it will alert you for an analysis that really depends on the volume of traffic on this site, a site that gets a total of 200 visits over a whole Month, you’re not really going to learn anything by looking at that daily or weekly.

You might as well just do month over month, but if you get 20,000 visits a day, you can really analyze things day over day and in between you know. Maybe if you get 2,000 visits a month, so you might want to check it weekly and there’s no exact formula, but it’s kind of relative to how the popularity it’s the amount of data, because you need a certain amount of data for analysis to be statistically significant.

So yeah it kind of scales up with as traffic skills up the frequency of which monthly minimum for any site, even the smallest volume site for sure so I’ll, be at the happiness part which has moved to RB 145. Remember that right by the kids camp. Thank you so much for joining me today.

 

Categories
Online Marketing

Pam Aungst: How to Improve Your Google Analytics Skills

The quote says: the goal is to turn data into information and information into insight. So, what’s the difference, though, between data and information and information and insight? Well, data is just a bunch of characters, really letters numbers not necessarily organized in any meaningful way.

So that’s data, but when you do organize them in a meaningful way, you then have information and with information you can gain insight by using the data if it’s structured in the right way to answer questions, for example, question: do organic search visitors engage with our website. More so than paid search you well, the gobbly gook of data and letters and numbers is not in any particular order to that question, but structured in the right way and the right type of report.

That question can be answered. Yes, organic users, bounce let’s stay longer and consume more content and the insight that can be gained from that is then more in our SEO. So that’s why it’s worth, but I’m getting better at google analytics so that you can turn your data into information and your information into real actionable business insight that will actually help you make more money or achieve more of your goals, whatever they are.

So to do that to turn data into information and information into insight, specifically within Google Analytics, the information needs to be three, it needs to be accurate needs to be comprehensive and it needs to be segmented in a way. Those are the three types of things I’m going to do my best to show you how to do today. So we’re going to talk about how to make your data more accurate by doing things like checking your tracking code implementation to make sure that you’re the data.

That’s being collected is accurate, removing self-referral issues and I’ll explain what that means cross them. Fucking I’ll explain with all of these things mean removing internal traffic and removing referral spam. Well, we’ll talk about making your data more comprehensive through version tracking and event tracking and we’ll talk about how your data to answer questions through secondary dimensions, custom segments, custom, dashboards, that’s a lot! So, let’s get right to it, but before we get ready to attack, I want to make sure that this thing is clear, because I’m going to refer to things like account and prop sure it quickly touch upon what the difference between those are so in Google Analytics.

If you go into your admin, section you’ll see three columns and very lightly. At the top and gray, it says account property and you, so the difference is that one Google Analytics account, which is really just associated like with your your email address their Google email that you log, in with one account, can host data for multiple website. That’s the second column, and then one website can have multiple it’s kind of sliced and diced and reported on in different ways.

The one account can have multiple properties typically means multiple websites, and then one website or one property can have multiple views to slice and dice. The data and that kind of makes sense. Okay, so, let’s get to making your data more accurate first and foremost definitely check your tracking code implementation. The proper way to implement Google Analytics tracking code on a website is that a single copy of the tracking code must be placed before closing head tag, ideally right after the opening head tag.

So before the closing one. Ideally right after the opening head tag in the header of site, it’s a very common thing. Actually, two copies of the Google Analytics tracking script to get injected into the website. The original web developer of a site may have manually, put it into the template, and then someone else added just go to your website view source and make sure you only have one and that it is before the closing head tag.

Ideally, right after the closing head tag, even easier, though this Chrome extension called Google tag assistant and just see if you so you install that Chrome extension go to your website and then run that tag assistant and see if you get a red frowny face or a Green smiley face hey so make sure, and actually, even if you visually vote through the view source thing in the browser, I’d still recommend doing this, because just looking at it won’t tell you if it’s missing like a comma or a period or something that your eye, They miss and it’s not actually working correctly communicating with the server correctly so highly recommend Google tag assistant for checking the implementation of the code all right next up in the eath realm.

We’re going to talk about self referral issues, so self-referrals destiny’s. Look at your referral sources, which is supposed to tell you traffic from your own website coming to your own website. That’s how the sessions being double counted, conversion, tracking accuracy, issues, all sorts of issues, and you don’t want to see so if you see that or even if you don’t as a pre-emptive measure, it’s a good thing to filter out referral self pearl traffic.

Alright, maybe shouldn’t say, filter out, you want to add your own domain name to what’s called the referral exclusions list, so in that admin interface under the property column on in the middle, there is something under the tracking info header, something called referral exclusion. What main name there so that you don’t have self referral issues but, like so weed glue data that shouldn’t be excluding or deleting? No.

So it’s saying to Google Analytics if you see one session that is already on my website and then for some reason, that session boom entry and double count. It’s just going to you know, buckle pieces and put them back together and you actually want to do this. To a pal or if you have you’re integrating your site with like a Shopify, cart or something it leaves to go in it other sessions from especially problematic, because then all of the sales and the revenue numbers you have that’s not where they originally came from, and You can’t learn much from that.

You need CEO, paid search, social media. You need to know exactly where they did come from the first place, not that they keep gave you money. So you want to add your third party external payment gateways to the referral. Well, alright. Next up in the accuracy category is cross-domain tracking. So what that means is, if you pull website, but users that tend to travel, but so in this very simplistic example, it says our site, comm our career site, comm and then our site comm.

So if someone goes to your main site, but then you have like a separate careers website and they go there, but then they come back that can lead to similar issues to what I was just talking about before too, because it’s really the same user. And it’s really the same session, but it’s going to get counted as new people coming in and then another coming in and vice-versa. So you can set up cross-domain tracking to avoid those issues and real quick overview of what that looks like in cross-domain tracking the whole way property code.

Animal individual properties are for individual websites in Google Analytics, but there it to the same property code on multiple different called a linker plug-in. It’s just a little additional piece of script and that link will tell you more about it that then you can actually put the same property tracking code on multiple different websites and it’s good in this use case. Because then you won’t have the sessions being split and divided.

It will all look the same. They’ll know. Google Analytics will know that it’s the same user traveling amongst multiple web sites and then you can set up separate views base that property into this website. Only this website all so you can see it. However, you want use case where typically proud. Individual properties are individual, with point use case where it does act but makes sense to have one.

Google Analytics property be used on multiple websites. Alright and another item is removing internal traffic, so yourself, your ha, your freelancers. Those users will use your certainly reflect that of your actual prospects. Your users only then X, users, the better, which is the ones you really want to learn about. So you want to get your self and your team’s date, which of your website, out of your account easiest way to do that again: a Chrome extension, this one’s called the Google Analytics opt-out add-on.

If you go to the Chrome extension story, you add this Google Analytics add-on and enable it set that your now not counted in Google Analytics when you go to your own website, but since we’re on our own website and now we’re not counted about either. So we shouldn’t be doing that. So that’s the easiest way you can also filter out by IP and if you have a static IP and you know what it it I’m in section and filter out your I for your freelancers home office or whatever it may be changed.

One quick note about filtering: if you do this or any other kind, eight an unfiltered view as a backup. Should you go into the admin and you use the actual filtering capability on a view or property anything once you’ve filtered data out it’s gone forever and if you make a little mistake and accidentally filter out more than just that, one IP address that you meant to Filter out or whatever it may be, that data is gone forever, so always always always make a view again account.

One account can have multiple properties, mozart, a single property, can have multiple views. So your one website, google analytics tracking code, can be sliced and diced into multiple views. If you’re going to filter out your IP address from your main view, make sure to also create a backup view that has no filters whatsoever just in case, because it definitely happens that mistakes are made when filters are created, and you want that unfiltered backup view.

Alright. Last, but certainly not least, is referral spam. How many people have heard of referral spam – okay, alright, maybe a third or so annoying right yeah. So, for those that aren’t aware, spammers have figured out how to spam us in almost every area of our lives or cell phones or email or regular phones, whatever direct mail, it’s like you’re just hit with spam all the time, and now it can even happen.

Inside of your Google Analytics account, so spammers have figured out how to send what is essentially fake traffic to your Google Analytics account making it look like someone visited your website from their website like the making it look like they referred traffic to you when they really Didn’t they just want you their website to show up in your referrals? Great often just so. You click on that link and check it out, and it really works because every single person that I’ve talked to that spots it like what is that I don’t know I’ve.

Never heard of that they’re sending us traffic, let me check it out it, it could be, it could be so it could be dangerous to check it out. One of the tell-tale signs. That’s not always there, but one of the tell-tale signs of a referral source being referral. Spam is a 100 percent bounce rate, a perfect 1.0 average pages per session and a zero second zero minute, zero hour average session duration, that’s kind of a telltale sign that it’s bot traffic, all those families referral have gotten really good at actually spoofing those numbers as Well, so it won’t always look like that.

So how do you filter it out if it’s there’s no ill sign again, always always filter this out, but she’s got pretend to be an expert at this. He is the expert at it. You can. If you want, you can follow his instructions for how to do, because this is what happens as soon as you figure out which one so he’s not happy wants to filter out his blog. So that’s the DIY. They maintain your own for free. That way.

The service to take care of it then yeah, you use them yeah. So it’s it’s worth it sometime pay you get that done, so not easy to get your numbers, but it’s important to do so because it does skew the site-wide averages. If you’re, Oh, your boss, your clients or whatever that you don’t have its session duration and all the spot traffic’s coming in and messing that up for your site, wide averages, then you know or to achieve your goals and to know.

What’s what part of what and what’s not so alright, that’s how to make a home base make your data some ways to make it more comprehensive, first of all, conversion tracking! If a lot of you probably have this set up over anybody, if you don’t definitely want to convert which mine, I mean like a real act, someone has done an action to either give you money or you or it may be order or visiting the cotton.

Not a conversion that is not an action that turned someone that converted. I don’t consider that a conversion and it’s a little bit of a peep, that I see that a lot so or spending a certain amount of time on them hurts themselves to elite. But if they filled out a form or made a purchase so that you can learn more about what’s working, it’s on your website, so form tracking is one of the most common things we have to track.

So how do you do that? The eat URL and then, if it does, you can go into Google Analytics end up a goal for to get to that information. Url is you know index that was a complete, so so that’s the easy way that doesn’t work for so you may have to do it another way, which is through tag manager. Sorry, I was looking for this one. Actually I’ll go back to this first, so formfields the easy way. Thank You page confirmation, URL, ecommerce tracking is another thing.

You definitely want to track and the easy way to do that would be Commerce tracking me. We gave money, there was a transaction and revenue easy way in this world of Commerce. There is a plugin for WooCommerce the enhanced e-commerce tracking plug-in take care of that, for you, that’s the really easy way so advanced ways that you can’t just simply redirect to a Thank You URL or for e-commerce tracking, where you can’t just simply use the route visit.

These URLs here, basically, both of them use Google tag manager to complete those goals, but they’re a lot more complicated than the first two options. So if you can inform redirect it to a Thank You, URL setup done, you can for you. If you can use the WooCommerce extension, just do that and be done, but if you have to those are links that you can consult the more all right. So there may be other actions that you want to track.

That aren’t true conversions, but are very important actions and that are part of convert and become a weed. What you want to use to track those actions is event tracking, so event tracking can be used to track pretty much anything. That’s not already tracked by default analytics such as article views you can use for YouTube and there’s no stress you hit someone good-o, whether they pause the article or play the article all the way through and so on, make clicks on mail call links or outbound link Actions that aren’t tracked by default by Google Analytics, but you can set up with and clicked on images or other elements.

It’s just any really anything else and knowing, if they click travel from one page to another within your site. But it doesn’t tell you page, they click or if they clicked in with so that’s very interesting and for event tracking. But again those aren’t convergent feed. So I recommend those actions be tracked at defense and actual conversions or say as goals. No conversions all right last but not least, and it’s firehoses, how does segment your data to and questions alright my feet, it’s a very simple thing called second name, but it’s a simple thing: if basically well so here’s a use case for it.

If I’m looking and this actually happy making these slides, I was looking at our data and I’m like our careers page, is one of our top most popular landing pages. I wonder where all the traffic is coming from to that page. So I wanted to know my traffic source – it’s not for my whole site, but just that page. So I clicked into that page drill down to that page and by default. It didn’t tell me this second column here, but secondary dimensions, a quick, nickname or think tricky.

This is, it adds a secondary column to the report that you’re looking at to break down the data further from what you’re already looking at so you’ve got your careers page that I drilled into already, and then this drop down that says secondary dimension. It’s at the top of pretty much every report, yeah in Google Analytics secondary dimension. It adds a secondary column and you pick what you want to break it down by so I said, source medium of the traffic and the type of the traffic and so boom boom.

Like to where the traffic was coming from to that page by adding a que a secondary column, that’s my favorite, quick and dirty trick for segmenting data to answer a question on the fly very quickly. But sometimes you may need to look at a whole variety of different reports, but still like for a single thing. So if you need to look at like all the reports that are in Google Analytics but through a lens like us, just a certain type of traffic, just a certain region, just a certain section of the site.

But you want to curious about all of it. For just that type custom segments is really handy that so that allows you to view all of the filtered lens that you set up. It’s a for example again with our careers section and I can create a segment view activity on our careers pages through all the different kinds of reports that are in there, but I want. I don’t want to see the whole site’s stats. I just want to see the stats for the careers section on all the different reports, so to do that, I create a custom segment, so I give it a name at the top about most.

First of all, I hit eggs. Add segments so you’ll see this. It also at the top of pretty much every report is that drop-down type thing there. That will typically say all users, but you can hit add segments and create a new segment, and so I gave it a name career section of site, and then you tell it under conditions what you want turn it by. What do you want that lens? To be that you’re going to look at all the reports through so I said, filter by page URL career and then I’m able to see any report on the whole Google Analytics through that lens of just people who went to the careers section any careers page.

But now those are the metrics I’m looking at and nothing else is in there again. You could do that for a certain region, certain browser certain anything anything you want to just filter it down to you, create a custom segments, apply the segment. Look at all the reports through that segment and then you can do mobile. So if I wanted to compare users of the careers section of the site to users of the resources, I can create those two segments and put them play with the whole.

Google PageSpeed algorithm update things, we’ve been making segments for us mobile traffic and us desktop traffic for pants that want to measure the page speed of us users, mobile versus death, and then we can look at all reports through those two lenses at the same pretty cool. But custom segments you have to apply them every time you go in or remember to take them off to you know. Remember that you’re looking at things through a very off, so there are a temporary lens that you put on to look at things through, and you have to remember to take them off or put them on again if you’re, using the same custom set we’re putting it On all the time you may want to make a custom report instead, custom reports are great for slicing and dicing data in a way that answers your specific questions and your specific way so under the custom tab, which is on, like the left menu column, the two Custom reports and create a custom report, give it a name and select what you want to be on the report.

Now one thing: that’s kind of confused dimensions versus metrics and then, when you try to narrow you can put a metric there. It’s the easy way to remember what the dimensions, basically, the thing that you want think what do I want in the first two that so hopefully that helps you. Do you miss the fun language and any issues you may run in building a custom report? Dimension. First column, column and then filters or whatever you want to narrow the traffic just organic traffic.

I want just painters traffic that, whatever you want it to just show you that would be the filter and custom reports are pretty like standard reports. They can be schedules without you automatically, so you have to go in and look at them all the time handy, all right last way in beta chain so similar to the custom reports that we just talked about quicker way of seeing a lot of little snippets time.

You can build a custom dashboard, so it’s great for, like quick checking on things, just kind of quick overviews of a variety of hand-picked metrics. That may not be on the same report elsewhere in Google Analytics on custom dashboards. You can start with a again there in the customization section, so, on the left hand, column go to customizations custom dashboards. You can start with a blank or there’s.

This thing called the solutions gallery for Google Analytics. That has a lot of pre-built dashboards that are pretty and edit them. So that’s the typically there’s, probably one kind of simple go browse through there and see if there’s a dashboard close enough to what you need and then just make widgets for whatever metric you’re curious about and just build your little squares into your dashboard.

That will allow you to quickly check in on over alright, so to summarize, typically turn data into information by our hosts a lot of different to you. I know that was quick. That was a lot. I am going to go to the happiness bar in this, but I think we have a few minutes for five minutes for questions now sure. So the question for those who can hear is about sharing. So if you create a custom, dashboard, custom segment and custom report, how do you share it with others? So certain things are tied to your account and certain things are tight.

Most of those things we talked about are tied to your account, though. So if you have access to a client’s property using your account and they have properties in their account, if you create, for example, custom segments and that won’t automatically be in their account, but you can share it with them, they actually just have to import it. So when you go to the customization section where you made it in the first place, they’ll be a share.

Url gives you a share. Button sorry gives you a URL to send to them to import the custom thing that you made and then it’s in their account. As well so different things are tied to different levels, so check out the documentation for exactly what types. What but custom reports in custom segments are two things that I know they’re tied to the account level dashboards on top my head, I’m actually blanking on that.

I think it’s also the account level but double check their documentation. To be sure, we haven’t shared those as much as we do the segment mm-hmm excellent questions. Okay, for those who couldn’t hear the questions were about, I did where’d. You go for additional training to go really in depth with all these things and where whether to implement Google Analytics code directly or through Google tag manager.

So, first of all, the training there’s a lot of resources out there I mean for quick setups of a single thing. There, Google Analytics, oh and documentation, is pretty good. I put a lot of links in there today. They also, though, have the Google Analytics Academy. So you can read articles like it’s an actual course that Google themselves that puts out for getting trained on Google Analytics and there’s a certification you can take, which is actually, I think, a good learning experience.

Even if you don’t need to be certified, you go it’s like an open book test so to just go through that certification practice with the open book thing is pretty educational and then, of course, there’s online courses like everywhere, but I usually tell people to start with This straight from Google resources and then as far as implementing the code directly or through tag manager tag manager is not easy or intuitive to learn.

But if someone is comfortable tracking scripts, page speed up to politely but to injector, if you can but its, I don’t want a negligible difference, but it’s a not a huge difference. So if you have to put it in the header, yes, there is WordPress plugins. That will help you set up tag manager, there’s one in particular um or ourselves. It looks like Duracell, but it’s not sort of tell there’s a Google Analytics, your Google tag manager plug-in by Tom door or something alright.

I think yeah, maybe one more one, more question. Okay, if sorry, I didn’t catch all of that domain, that forwards to another domain like a automatically redirects okay. So if you have one URL that automatically redirects to another URL, you don’t need Google Analytics code on both because essentially no user ever actually that’s the first one. So you really would just be you know tracking everything on the second one.

Oh, it should add it to the referral exclusion list. I believe if it automatically redirects, it actually won’t show up, and you won’t need to do that – certainly double check on me and Lokhande, because I haven’t dealt with that that much, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t actually show up as as a referral source when, during A 301 redirect, so I don’t think you would have to but again preemptively.

It’s always a good idea to add things there that you know you don’t want counted or that sessions you wanted unified. So you could do it as a pre-emptive measure, but I don’t think you have to how do you see search keywords, excellent question, you kind of can’t anymore, unfortunately, not in Google Analytics so several years ago, Google for reasons they claim we’re to do with privacy and Security they’re totally debatable anyway.

They they took the keyword data for so like keywords from search engines that were sending traffic, which keywords were people using to send traffic to you. They took that data and anonymized, most of it into a bucket. That just says not provided so the keywords reports still in there, but you won’t see much in it. It just attributes everything to not provide it, but there’s another tool that Google puts out called search, console, formerly known as webmaster tools.

I know I know of where they can give it to you there and not there like yeah. So there’s a lot of background and conspiracy theories about that, but unfortunately that’s the way. It is that’s it today. So that’s all the time I have right here. I will go to the happiness bar and answer any other questions. Anyone has thank you so much for joining me. I hope this was helpful.

 

Categories
Online Marketing

Aaron Eden – Google Analytics Introduction

How many of you have actually like had to install it and set it up and all those other things? Are you just a user of it? I guess that was more question that you had questions yeah have you had to actually install it yourself, very cool of it all right.

So then, I’m going to glaze over the installation, part of it a little bit i’ll go through quickly, just so that folks, that haven’t haven’t done that can kind of see how that’s done and then and then we’ll go. What i’m going to do is kind of walk you guys through the setup and installation what are some of the benefits of using google analytics for your website? How to read the dashboard report and a couple of the other kind of big reports that you end up using quite a bit how to set up goals on the website and how to use the root.

All the goals reporting throughout Google Analytics how to set up Site Search if your, if your site has search capabilities, how to get those searches that customers are performing into the Google Analytics data and then a little bit on traffic sources and funnel visualization. If we’ve got enough time we’ll see how how long this takes, I don’t know so I want this to be. This is not intended to be a presentation, so I want it to be sort of interactive and that kind of thing.

So if you guys have questions throughout feel free to ask them, and I tried to sort of prioritize the order we go through things in so that if we run out of time, then we at least got through some some valuable items. So I’m going to do is start by googling living, so this is the the normal just dashboard page. That’s taking google analytics and you know being a bi person. You know, I think, a lot of people start out by looking at how many visits they get to their website.

Oh good and you’d like like. Oh look, I pumped up my visits. I’r doing good and really you know that’s that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Right understanding how many people are coming to your website doesn’t really tell you a whole life left, but actually getting to the point where you can measure how much money you’re making as a result of those people coming to your website or where what areas of your Website or difficult for those customers to use being able to actually enable change and make your website better as a result of the data is really where you want to try and get with this.

So you can see that at the beginning, when you first come in here, you get you get that standard sort of overview of who’s visiting your website and or how many people are visiting your website on each day. You get some general data about how many of those how many actual people are visiting versus how many times they came to your site, I’ll dive deeper into this later, i’m just kind of quickly going through this apartment.

How many pages have actually been viewed on your website average? How many pages each person is looking at on your website? How much time they’re spending bounce rate is really an important metric. This is how many people came. Your website looked at a single page and left, so obviously you didn’t engage them or or your page, it could be depending on how your business is set up that that’s exactly what you want right so just depends on your website, but most websites.

You want to pull people, I didn’t, engage them and having them hit. Multiple pages is a good thing, so you want to read that bounce rate and then there and I’m a question yep, there’s like if you like, sometimes I’ll, go to a site by accident. I’ll, be there literally like a second or less yes. Does that actually count? Does that all get tracks like it’s? Not, it doesn’t discard those results. Yeah that would get counted name you’d have a really low time on site.

Yeah affect their bounce rain right, it’s so in that example, that tells the site owner. So there was some reason you found that website right, you yeah you excited or something else, or you found the link through somebody else’s website, whatever that was, it had the wrong. It was wrong for you right again, so what I thought it was going to be. Was it what it was exactly so so the value of that site owner in seeing that that happened is that he can.

He can actually look and see where you came from and trying to figure out why there was a disconnect between what you thought you were going to get and what you got yeah like I manone tab appeaser that gives you results yeah, so so the set up For google analytics is actually pretty straightforward. So when you, when you go into google analytics and you set up a new website, it actually will generate a snippet of code for you super yeah.

It will actually generate us a snippet of code for you. You can see down here when you create a new account and so literally to set up google analytics tracking for my website. I copy and paste that code into the bottom of the bottom of the page. So you know, if you’re, using using any sort of templating system, you stick it into the template, so so it appears in every single page. If, for some reason, there’s something ages, you don’t want tragic and just leave it out of those pages and you won’t get tracking there’s, definitely some advanced things that you can do with this code, but I’m not going to go into that in this.

In this talk, really the basis is grab this code and stick it in your website and now you’ve got recording, really actually very detailed and robust reporting any questions on that before I move fast cool. So, let’s see we did set up. Let’s go a little bit deeper on the dashboard so again back to so I’m looking at my my audience overview report and you can see that I’ve got some additional demographics about the people that are visiting my website where there which countries they’re coming from which operating Systems and computers they’re, using whether they’re coming in from a mobile browser, we’ve got a lot of really good detail here.

What I want to show you guys is that you know when you get to the point where, where you’ve got, where you’ve got goals set up inside of Google Analytics right. So so now i’m looking at a US or the world map that shows where my visitors are coming from see most of mine are coming from the u.S. I’ve got a few from Canada. What happens when I want to go up here to my goal set, so I have to find some specific goals on my website that are important important for me.

So you can see gold number one viewed the pricing page. So if they came to my website and fiddled around did a bunch of stuff and then eventually viewed my pricing page, that’s good for me. I want to track how many people are getting that page, so that can help make that better right. If ninety percent of the people never come to the pricing page, then I’m doing something wrong until I need to adjust that, so you can see that that number one goal one percent of my users are making that goal.

Looking at my pricing page number two is that they actually full number two listed on periods that they actually paid for the service, and you can see it’s point: zero four percent of the users and then the number of people that looks like these two goals are Actually broken, how many people view the registration page and view the basic registration page doesn’t show. So that’s basically, you know for this website.

You’ve been a landing page, that kind of promotes what the product is and then that pricing page that I was just talking about. If so, now that that goal for few pricing would have been hit by me coming to this web page, and if I had hit the sign up now, there’s that’s the basic sign up goal and then, if you completed it completed this process that you would have Paid for the product and there’d be another another goal it in there, and I think this is this.

Account is like ten dollars a month, so it would actually track ten dollars a month or ten dollars in revenue at that point in time, there’s also controls with one goal: they’re all separate goals and I’ll show you the funnel a little bit later on. What’s that, why do you do that separate to the one? Well, so the the way that Google Analytics has funnel recording setup and goal reporting set up their separate, although the goals actually feed into the funnel so i’ll just show you really quick, so it makes sense.

It’s easier to see a picture. They move everything around recently everything points, so you actually so the funnels wrong right anyway. The if I could find the stupid thing I’ll show it to you, but the the goals actually end up being steps in the funnel so they’re they’re related and when you go all every single report weld on every single. But most of the reports that are in here you can see goal set one up here at the top, where I can hit that so pretty much.

Every report allows you to filter by whole set so by setting up with the goals you you enable the visibility on all of those different reports to slice by those gold steps versus going to a separate, funnel report. That shows you how many people are are painting each one of those steps right. So it’s giving you additional additional dimensions to kind of be able to slice the data mine. So let’s see here, so let me walk you guys through how to set up a goal.

So when you come in here, there’s little options: gear up in the upper right hand corner you can see under profiles. I’ve got assets, goals, users, filters or profile settings, so I’m going to go into my goals. So here are those exact same goals that I that I showed you a second ago. Google analytics allows you to set up four different sets of five goals. This is really just a way for you to organize.

They don’t have any other meaning than other than to organize them in the sense you you saw in those in those reports where it says, goals that one, if I met gold set to set up I’d, be able to flip onto that. You can kind of toggle between them, so it just makes the reports a little bit cleaner and I stop so I’m going to go ahead and set up a new goal, but so so actually I’ve got some some new things on here that I haven’t.

I haven’t set up goals for do that, so part of the reasons that some of my metrics are really sucking on that last on that last screen is that I I don’t have stopped sort of promoting the scheduling part of this and I’ve started promoting this book. So he can’t get past the homepage Google Analytics just took over my cool, it’s cool, except when you don’t expect it, it’s going to go all right, something new.

Apparently, if you have google analytics loaded in chrome at the same time, while you visit the web page it’ll pop itself over wow, so so on on this landing page, let’s say that I want to. I want to set it up so that whenever you hit this hit, this go button and it takes you over to the second screen that I wanted to track that. So so I’m going to say, you know book sign up, say it’s an active goal.

You can either set up a URL destination goal, so literally this is just simply copying and pasting the URL. Actually, I just realize that’s a bad example, so let’s say that it was I wanted. I want to track the goal for whether the customer came and hit my frequently asked questions page, but we not something I would really care about, but do it anyway, so literally, all I’m doing is is copying from the URL.

The page that I want, you don’t have to copy the entire domain and you paste that into the goal URL and if you wanted to you, could give it a dollar in value if it had one. In this case, you know that I could, I could actually say, that’s that’s worth a dollar to be, because that’s a support call that I didn’t have to take, because they went to my frequently asked questions whatever, whatever that’s worth to your business, so I can go In here and set it up as a dollar, and then you can tell it whether this goal is part of the funnel or not.

So this goes back to the question David was asking before when you set, the goals are actually aligned directly to the phones. So I’m not going to set this in the phone and you be. I’ve got a new bull in there. So now, if I go back to any other reports, apparently it doesn’t take effect right away, make sure what’s up yeah, it takes a little while for it to process the data forget about that in here.

So so anyway. So now I’ve got a new goal in there. That’s that’s tracking that after Google does its processing I’ll get some some retroactive data about how many people have actually hit that goal and then just like the rest of these, I could I can slice and dice any of the reports by which goals the customers have Hit anybody have any questions about the goals. Now, that’s it’s really, it’s pretty straightforward to set them up.

I guess actually, I could show you some of the other in setting up to they fill out a form by just putting in the one like the paging fixin to what I’m done filling out the form right exactly it’s literally, but like the easiest way to do It is just to walk through the process yourself and then, wherever you end up, that’s the spot. You want to track copy that URL and you’re done alright. So the next thing that that you’ll want to fill probably pretty valuable, especially once you’ve got your goal set up, is to get into the traffic sources.

Reports hear the traffic sources, so these traffic source reports basically show you where customers are coming from when they come to your website. So, in this case, for this website, you can see that have about half of my traffic is coming from search engines about thirty. Five percent is coming from other websites that have links back to me. Fifteen percent are coming from. It would actually just typed it into the address bar or you know, maybe maybe it was from an email or something like that and then last is.

Is campaigns I’ll show you how to how to actually set up campaigns, but this could be a search engine marketing campaign. It could be an email campaign. You can completely designee all of your own campaigns through the whole thing, but this really gives me a breakdown of where my visitors are coming from. So you can see in this case. That here are. Some of the here are some of the search terms that people are actually typing into Google or other search engines before they get to my website.

This really helps you on the SEO side of things, to figure out how people are finding you. If specific words are driving a lot of traffic to your website, then maybe you should be focused on on two things: making sure that you’ve got the content to cover. You know that when they do come to you, because of that search term, that you got content that is relevant to what that search was and then on the flip side being able to optimize further for that search term dive a little deeper into this.

So the all traffic report Michael sets there now, so the whole traffic report is going to break this down by website, so you can see that all of the traffic that I’ve got coming in from google. This is all you know, search traffic. You can see how much time those people are spending on the site compared to what the other visitors are spending on the site, as well as how many of those people were new, so you might have websites that are driving a lot of repeat visitors.

This is your way to be able to tell that and then again back to that st. Bounce rate as before, how many of those people are coming in and just jumping right out. So you can see that, based on this my website, I want to have a low bounce rate, and so, if I search if I search through this, you can see that that some of these, obviously some of these with low hits, probably not go, be aware. So you can see that these two, these two people that I pulled in from the 60-second marketer website they came in.

They served around 13 different pages. They spent 12 minutes on the website and one of them was a returning person and they didn’t bounce. They all navigated around right, so in in the in this case. For my business, these people are really valuable. There’s been a lot of time on the website, so I need to find out why they came across and how I can do more of that on that on that website or on other websites that are like it one more example so, but you can see like The these answers com, referrals from yahoo getting a lot of visits, but they’re really not not looking around on the site, much they’re not doing much once they’re there.

A lot of them are new people, but most of just come in the feed. So in that case, I probably want to reduce the amount of time that I’m spending answering yahoo answers unless there’s some other benefit to it. So in that case I know that I keep doing it because I’m actually getting links back in, and so it helps on the search engine side of things. So it’s worth it, but you have to base to analyze that for your business and figure out, what’s going to what you know, whether that’s valuable or tomorrow, again back to being able to track my goals.

So I can actually see now that I switched to the goals view I could actually see which of these has has monetary value to my business. So those saying those same goal, tracking dollar amounts and those kinds of things right now with really low sales. The most valuable stuff is going in direct people that are either either getting emails or that I’ve been a person that went in signed up for the service.

Whatever the case may be, those ones are actually most valuable, probably bad example, because it’s not millions of dollars but hopefully get the idea. Not really it’s going to be different, my business, the one thing you do have is, I find it there’s a benchmarking report. There used to be a benchmarking I’ll see if I can find it for you, there’s a there’s, a benchmarking report, that’s in here where, if you opt into their service google in the in the oh, you know what i’ll just go back to the overview.

Really quick. Just so, I can show you here David here’s that here’s the funnel thing that I could not find the minute ago kept on the bit. I think maybe they took the benchmarking out. They used to have these type of benchmarking report where they would automatically would automatically click. You know it’s collecting this data for lots of other websites, and so you basically would give it a demographic that your website is in and then it would show you some benchmark data against other websites that are similar to your own.

So at least you can kind of get an idea of whether you’re in the right, ballpark or not, but it’s in it varies a lot and it looks like they discontinued it completely. So I don’t know I’ll dig a little bit i’ll see if I can find it for you, alright, so the let’s see I want to dig into the traffic sources just a little bit. So I mentioned before that you can track here, Revere different marketing campaigns, and – and these don’t have to be – these – don’t have to be a google as sem by or a Facebook ad or those kinds of things.

This could be as simple as wanting wanting to put a link on somebody else’s website and wanting to track how many people came specifically from that one and tie that, together with an email that was that had the same topic. So I guess what I’m saying by that is that you can create your own campaigns completely, and they can really be made up of any sorts of media that you’re that that you might utilize.

You can see in here that I created one campaign. It drove three visits: two pages per visit, etc. When I click it on that campaign, you’ll actually see that it now drills into the sources and mediums section, and I can tell that that that this coupon code that I gave out to people was given on this startups com website and that that’s it. That’s as deep as I went with that, let me show you: is there any way you like to go in and change the number manually like to reflect someone who calls you or something like this one looks at your site and ecology would makes a purchase or Something, no you wouldn’t do that.

You could remember what I mentioned, that you can sort of tweak the code that you put into your web page. You could actually sort of hack that apart and create yourself a little page that you could hit whenever you get a phone call and like that page would keep it. Give you a call, so you could kind of work around it manually, but it doesn’t. Google doesn’t have a way to just so the so Google has this URL builder.

That’s intended for building your own, your own marketing campaigns. So let’s, let’s say that I want to. I want to drive customers directly to my pricing page, so I’m going to paste that URL into the URL box here the source. Let’s, let’s say that I’m going to I’m going to I’m going to send out an email blast out to a whole bunch of different people and I’m going to try to drive them to this as part of the website so on there.

I want to track my campaign sources, MailChimp literally. What you’re typing in the boxes here is what’s going to show up in the reports, literally a case-sensitive everything, so you can. You can make up any sort of any values you want for any of these boxes. To be able to track your marketing campaigns, so in this case it’s an it’s an email campaign and I don’t have any search words that I want to track for it campaign content.

Let’s say that I was doing I’m going to do an a/b test with my email and send out one batch to one set of customers in a different email to another batch restrooms. So this is my email, one and, and my campaign name is whatever 99 discount rate. So what happens when I, when I put all this information in is, is Google’s actually going to generate a URL for me that you can see that it all it’s doing is simply taking the values that I typed in the boxes and putting them into this into This URL and what happens is when, when I send this URL out via email to my customers, when they click on that, it actually tells Google to track that campaign in that way, and so literally by by giving this special link up now, I’m going to get Campaign data back in that portion of google analytics just like this, so I can actually show that stock of the show up right away.

It’s valuable! The one thing that you can’t see with this example, which I should have probably set up a different example. So so in this, let’s just say it’s the signal: let’s say that this new email that i’m going to send out right now is part of that same campaign from before. So i’m running a i’m running a banner ad on startups calm and i’m also going to email, a bunch of people with the same offer and so by by putting that same campaign name into this box as the one that I used for startups com.

What happens? Is you see this overall campaign here that I can drill into and if I was to click on this and I had some of the some of the items from my email campaign, you would see those both listed here. You see startup stock cotton deal and the email campaign, so you can actually roll those all up to the same campaign and see which blog is driving driving the most sales for your for your website.

What any questions at this point any! Are there any other? So I’ve been talking specifically about like e-commerce websites and where you’re trying to do sales on the page, do any of you have any examples of things that, where you’re not quite sure how this might fit with what you’re trying to do exactly yeah. So, based on that, you could track the QR code scans to just like anything else. Okay site search was the last topic that I wanted to hit.

We can drill into any other areas that you guys want so site search. Is your ability to see? I don’t know if I’ve got any data in here to show you guys, because I actually just enable it last week. So what site search does is if you’ve got a page, so here’s here’s the blog for that same website. So I’ve got this. I’ve got the search box over here on the right, so people can search through all of my different blog posts.

So if I want to be able to attract mean Google Analytics how many of those searches people are doing on there, so the value the value to you in being able to do that is that the the searches that people are performing lets. You know what kind of content they’re looking for. So if, if you see that people are searching for specific types of content on your website – and you don’t have any content for it – that you can use this data actually go into create content to support that.

You know in the case of an e-commerce website where maybe you got products that you’re selling on there. You see that people are searching for a specific type of product, and you don’t have that product, then maybe you want to consider offering it so kind of goes. Both ways with products and blog content and there’s good to think so so in order to be able to track your your searches we have to do is again go back to this back to this options box on the top right and under.

I think it’s your profile settings you’ll, you’ll, see this site search settings section down at the bottom, and so all you need to do is say I do want to track site search and when you go over to whatever the area is where perform the searches notice. That I typed the word games in here in the search and I pressed enter to get the results. But what happens is up on the URL? The query string was automatically billed and you can see s equals games up here.

So that tells me that the parameter s which is searched in this case is what what’s going to hold that value, and so literally, all you have to do is a do, track, site, search and then type the letter or the set of letters that popped up In your search string at the top into this box and tell it to strip all the other query parameters out, so you don’t end up with 12 other. If there’s other parameters that are in there, you don’t want those to end up in your Google Analytics reports.

For search, so you tell to just strip them all out and then I say apply and literally it’s as easy as that and now I can now I can see the types of types of searches that customers are performing on my website. Yeah there was yes and for the google analytics site search. Sorry, I’m trying to find it under query parameter nothing in the query, parameter box. You want to put whatever that. Whatever that letter was that showed up in the URL at the top so would adjust.

The letter is what it’s your show of this, or it may not be a letter. It might be a set of lenders, yes cool. So, in your case, if we searched her yeah yeah, you just grab the word. The word search term sticking in the query parameter felt the strip all the other garbage out of your done this one I this one doesn’t seem to go back through the data retro actively. So the point where you turn on that that reporting capability in Google on the links to get data from that point forward, but I don’t think it will give you historical yeah that was just WordPress.

It literally works with any with as long as the as long as the search term gets put into a query string in the page, it’ll work. So Aries said WordPress, like you talk a little bit about with different content management systems. WordPress people do are there any particular best practices of gotchas with respect to different console management systems, specifically for the site search just sit overall, google analytics like yes, so i’m not i’m not familiar with with to my most of the stuff.

I’ve Ducks been with WordPress, but I know that I suspect you most probably got similarly, then you can actually let me actually show you so I’ve got a I’ve got a plugin for wordpress that I absolutely love for google analytics and i’m sure it’s your mind. So the other kind of purple business we probably have some similar things right place. It’s called ultimate GA, google analytics so remember. I was talking before about taking that snippet of JavaScript code from Google and putting it into your web page.

With this plug-in, you don’t even have to do that. You literally just get your account ID and put it in here and and you’re finished. The some of the reasons that I like this one is that it allows you to ignore when admins are logged into the WordPress site. So I won’t see data about my visits to the website, so it doesn’t get inflated by my use and then it’s also got the ability to track track external links.

So it’ll change the links around on your website when they’re pointed somewhere else and let you see in Google and Google Analytics it’ll actually show up as an outbound link. So you can actually see when you’re sending traffic away from your website at Google Analytics as well, and then the same thing. I’ve downloads that any time there’s an object to download it will insert itself in between. So you can see how many people are downloading those items from your website and do you combine that lick with some other SEO plugins or any other tools to get to maximize? It is try and think of other things where it’s valuable, there’s a little areas where, where you can actually track other events that are going on.

Oh, I see you have all in one SEO right there, yeah, okay, oh you meant specifically for SEO yeah. Just you know getting them to work together, see ya. You know you optimize the page for a certain kind of results, but then you read what happens yeah exactly yes, so with the all-in-one SEO, plugin is pretty pretty simple. Actually, it literally just gives you a spot in your blog post to be able to make sure that you’ve got the right title and description and meta keywords.

There’s a couple other ones: I’ve seen that are pretty powerful where, where it will actually ask you what the search term is that you’re, targeting with this blog post and we’ll go into some other analysis for you and sit, and let you know whether, whether that’s something You should be targeting or each pick a different term and that kind of stuff I haven’t been using it on here, but in fact I think we’ve got it on the gangplank website.

Show that really quick yeah see ya this WordPress SEO. You know that’s going succulent yeah, so this one, you can say what what search term are you targeting with this blog post and then it’ll, it’ll, analyze, the post and all the pieces of content ready to? Let you know whether your your page title in this case? Doesn’t actually match the search term you’re going after so because they’re not alive you’re, probably going to get weaker results on that.

But then you can see down here. It’s the same kind of stuff. That was in the other one. The title in the description and the keywords and those kinds of things, so this one will give you a little bit more detailed on detail on the analysis and then you can actually set up to advanced things like redirecting the page to other places safely. Other pieces that are poor for SEO any other questions. I guess that’s it or should I had to keep it interacted? It’s got a mess.

Oh gosh, the second trainer holy week. The presentation you can show you

 

Categories
Online Marketing

Web Analytics – Getting Started

What is that? Ok, basically, when you’ve got a website, people go to it and they interact on there. All of that information is trackable. Google analytics allows you to use another free service from google to track how many people are coming to your website. How long they’re gone there, what pages they’re going to what type of browser they’re using where they’re from and so on and so forth? There’s so much information it really could take hours for me to go through it all.

The basic thing I want you use article is that if you’ve got a business and you’ve got a website – and you do not have Google Analytics or some sort of analytics program, you’re, basically running a business without a cash register, both the web sites, even Wars and Analytics because without analytics on there, you really have no idea. What’s going on on your website. Ok, you can anecdotally talk to people and hey.

What do you thinking? I would say? Oh, it looks really pretty, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how much time they’re actually spend on the website, where they’re going to on the website. If they’re accomplishing goals such as filling out, the web form clicking on the phone number if they’re on a mobile phone, what search keywords they typed into Google to get to your website what referring web sites are sending traffic to you? You have no idea about any of this, and Google Analytics is really easy to set up.

Like I said, it’s a free account there’s a little bit of JavaScript code that you need to put into your pages and boom. You start tracking. All this information. You need to get this set up today, if you don’t already have now, if you do have it there’s a lot of things about analytics that can make you think that you’re looking at important information when, in fact, nothing’s really coming out of the scope, the biggest One is that this is visitors.

You might get excited that you’ve got 10,000 people coming to your website each month, but what, if all 10,000 of those people have no interest in anything that your website has to offer, and they leave immediately, is anything well that traffic is worthless to you. So while visitor number is nice and it makes you feel good when it going up – it’s not necessarily important, but you also want to look at our few other factors, one of them being bounce rate.

Now this is a tricky number. What happens is when someone comes to your website and then they hit the back button and they leave your website. That’s counted as a bounce. Well, so, what’s happening here in one way: that’s not good. It means that they come to your website and whatever they were. Looking for wasn’t there, your website did not deliver on something that they need, so they lend. On the other hand, they came to your website.

They saw your phone number, they called you and became a customer. Well, in that case, it’s just fine that they’ve bounced off your website. Maybe they closed the browser right then, and that’s now called a mouse, but you know you can still look at bounce rates and get an idea, especially if you’re doing like a paid Google pay-per-click campaign, your bounce rate is really high. Then that tells you that you need to either tweak what keywords you’re bidding on or you took the content on your website, so a little bit insights there.

But at the end of the day, the most important things that you need to be tracking our conversions on your website, what our conversions, what conversions are? Really anything you want them to be the most obvious one. Is they go to your contact form? They fill out the form and they hit submit. You can set up google analytics to track that as a goal and therefore a conversion, and then you can see hey.

Somebody did a search on Google for this keyword. They came to the site that went to X, amount of pages, and then they filled out that web form, and that gives you insight into going wow. Okay, if that’s converting them, we need to do more content on that. If you’re doing a paid advertising campaign same exact thing, if there’s a referral site, so let’s say it’s basically any site: that’s not a search engine, let’s say Yelp Facebook! You know any any any type of website.

That’s out there, that’s not or Bing or Yahoo. Sending you traffic and that stuff’s converting – and you should reach out to that website and figure out how you can be better positioned on there, so you can get even more business out of it. Maybe you need to find out the five websites that are similar, that site and make sure you’re on them and you’re set up correctly, because something on that site is triggering people to come to your site and then become your customers.

So that’s that’s. Google analytics in a very brief nutshell, as I said there is a limitless amount of things that you can do on analytics, it’s tracking a ton of stuff. I recommend, if you really want to learn this stuff, you know obviously go sign up. Get a google analytics account going, you know, set it up on your website. There’s a ton of books, the big one that I like is from a google or name Avinash.

Is she I’ll even put some information over here? You know what books to get, but he walks you through what are important to look at how to create reports that you can give executives that have actionable data. You really want to be getting on this, like I said if your business owner and you’re not doing Google Analytics you’re flying blind right now, all that money, you’re spending on aunt being online is worthless because you’re not taking any action as far as what’s happening.

It’s a living, breathing organism, traffic changes with the seasons, so you need to be ready for these changes and get content ready and then be able to track what content was actually effective in making you money. So you can spend more time enough it on that. My emails right there comments are down below. Let me know what you think: what did I miss? I’r sure it was a ton, but you know that’s where that’s where we got ta start.

This is Friday. So congratulations until next time, rock on Oh

 

Categories
Online Marketing

Discoverability & Analytics

Your PWA is still a webpage that customers can find in their usual ways. You want to apply reasonable search engine optimization and ensure the page is available to search engines. You can use JavaScript on your pages and Google will index it as long as you follow some best practices. You can use the fetch as Google tool from the Google webmasters site to see how your app looks when crawled discoverability helps get customers to your site.

But how can you measure their behaviors once they get there? That’s where analytics comes in Google Analytics is a service that collects processes and reports, data about an applications, use patterns and performance. Adding Google Analytics to a web application enables the collection of data like visitor traffic, user agent, the user’s location, etc. This data is sent to Google Analytics servers where it’s processed.

The reports are available in the Google Analytics web interface and through a reporting API, Google Analytics is free and highly customisable. Integrating Google Analytics is simple. First, you must create a Google Analytics account. Each account has properties, and these aren’t JavaScript properties, but refer to individual applications or websites. Google Analytics then generates a tracking snippet for each property.

This is a piece of JavaScript that you pasted into your page. It sends data to the Google Analytics back-end. You can also use the analytics library to create custom analytics, such as tracking specific user actions or tracking push notifications. I want to say a bit more about properties. An account has properties that represent individual collections of data. These properties have property, IDs, also called tracking IDs.

That identify them to Google Analytics if an account represents a company. One property in that account might represent the company’s website, while another property might represent the company’s mobile application. If you only have one app, the simplest scenario is to create a single Google Analytics, account and add a single property to that account. This is the key part of the tracking snippet.

The entire snippet needs to be pasted into every page. You want to track at a high level when this script runs. It creates an async script tag that downloads analytics AS the analytics library it defines the GA function called the command queue. It creates a tracker that gathers user data and it sends this data as a pageview hit via HTTP request to Google Analytics. This data is analyzed in stored in your analytics account.

In addition to the data gathered by tracker creation, the page view event allows Google Analytics to infer what pages the user is visiting, how long they are visiting them and in what order for simpler applications. This is the only coding required note. You can replace analytics GS with analytics underscore debug KS for console debugging. Using this version will log detailed messages to the console for each hit, sent it also logs warnings and errors for your tracking code.

The data is sent to Google Analytics backend where it is processed into reports. These reports are available through the Google Analytics dashboard. Here is the audience overview interface. Here you can see general information such as page view, records bounce rate, ratio of new and returning visitors and other statistics. You can also see specific information like a visitor’s language, country, city, browser operating system, service provider, screen resolution and device.

Here we are looking at the user City, it’s also possible to view the analytics information in real time. This interface allows you to see hits as they occur on your site. I encourage you to take some time and explore there’s an extensive set of features in the dashboard. You should explore the standard reports and look at creating your own. Knowing how to use analytics for improving your business or increasing revenue is a skill within itself.

Fortunately, the Google Analytics Academy offers a free set of online courses. Google Analytics supports custom events that allow fine, grained analysis of user behavior. This code uses the G a command Q, which is defined in the tracking snippet. The send command is used to send an analytics event. Values associated with the event are as parameters. These values represent the event, category event, action and event label.

All of these are arbitrary and used to organize events. These custom events allow us to deeply understand user interactions with our site. For example, here we are sending a view more event. This might be used to indicate that the user has viewed an item from our site. The event label tells us that it was a premium product. I mentioned earlier that you might use events to track push notifications.

You can add events to fire when users subscribe or unsubscribe to push notifications as well as when there is an error in a subscription process. This can give you an understanding of how many users are subscribing or unsubscribing to your app here. We send a subscribe event, letting us know that a user has subscribed to our notifications. Let’s talk about what happens when analytics meets service workers, they won’t work without a little help.

That’s because the service worker script runs on its own thread and doesn’t have access to the GA command queue object established by the tracking snippet code on the main thread. It also requires the window object. Service workers must use the measurement protocol API instead of the command Q. This is a simple set of HTTP parameters documented at the Google Analytics site. Here’s an example of recording when the user closes a push notification.

The service worker manages the notification lifecycle, so it receives a notification close event when the event fires, the service worker, sends a hit via post with tracking ID custom event parameters and the required parameters for the API. Remember that we don’t want this service worker to shut down before we complete the post, so we wrap this code in event. Wait until since hits are effectively HTTP requests, they can’t be sent if the user is offline using service worker and indexeddb hits can be stored when users are offline and sent it a later time when they have reconnected.

Fortunately, the SW offline, google analytics and PM package abstracts this process for us to integrate offline analytics, install the package in your project with the npm install command. Then, in the service worker script import, the offline, google analytics import, je and initialize. The google and google analytics object. This adds a fetch event handler to the serviceworker that only listens for requests made to the Google Analytics domain.

The handler attempts to send Google Analytics normally if the network request fails, it will be stored in indexdb. Instead, the stored hits will be resent when online. You can test this behavior by enabling offline mode in developer tools and then triggering Google Analytics hits on your app indexdb will show a list of urls that represent the unsent hit requests. You may need to click the Refresh icon inside the indexdb interface to see them.

If you disable offline mode and refresh the page, you should see that the urls are cleared indicating that they have been sent now. It’s your turn. Go to the analytics API lab in there. You will create an account, add analytics to an app look at the results and make this work in a progressive web, app good luck and have fun if you’re an instructor. This final slide links to more information on analytics.

If you’re a student, these links can be found in your textbook. You may want to use these while you are working on the lab. There are additional slides at the end of this presentation that show the major analytic screens and explain how to get there, use these to deepen your knowledge or create live demonstrations. You

 

Categories
Online Marketing

Navigating Google Analytics: Behavior Report

I help troubleshoot issues that are holding them back from making gaining new clients and making more money. So today we are going to be looking at the behavior report in Google. Analytics Google Analytics is one of my favorite tools, but it’s definitely underutilized when it comes to understanding how people use your website and where you can improve on it.

So sit back and let’s look at the behavior tab and see how people are moving through your website and now we’ve lined it in the behavior tab of Google Analytics under the overview right now – and I just want to point out that I do have my date Range as January 1 to present day so it’s nice to look at a big chunk of data. You can also look at you know a month depending on what you are looking for, and so you can get a good idea just from this overview.

Of what pages people are. Are your most traffic pages on your website, so in this example, and not surprisingly, the home page is the most trafficked page, and so you can look at all of that and see how people are you know what pages people are going to ok, so this tool Is called behavior flow and it’s similar to the audience flow, but this one, I think, is my favorite, and so you can. You know once again set different parameters and I like the landing page, though, because it’s going to tell you what page people are starting on.

Your website and how they are moving through your website, so it’s very similar, but this is really you know. People are starting out on this page, and this is how they’re moving through, and so you know once again, you can move through all the data like we were before and you can see you know if they start with the end up on this page, then this Percentage is dropping off and this percentage is staying on.

So it’s really useful data. So if you have one page where people are really I’m dropping off from a lot, then you can figure out. You know work to try to be strategic and see if you can change that bounce rate on that page, so that way, they’re staying on there, okay and then next we can look at the site content and so once again, that’s just going to give you. You know what your most popular pages are and we’ll go into this when we talk about goals, but you can see what your bounce rate is for an individual page, and so you know like the sign-in page right here, the not surprisingly, the bounce rate is pretty Low because people are probably going to sign in and purchase something and that’s the same with the payment, so you want those to be low and they are, and so you know, if there’s a page that has a really high bounce rate, I’m trying to find one Of course, there’s not very many most of these pages and this test date, I have fairly low bounce rates, but okay, there was some 150 okay.

So let’s say that we wanted to to try to get this bounce right up, and so basically it looks like this is a search query, and so maybe what can you do if people are searching to make their search a little better, a little more user-friendly so That way, your bounce rate decreases, and then the other nice pick thing is that you can also see what pages people are leaving your site on or exiting on. So you know, it seems like the home page is well, lots of people are entering there.

People are also leaving there, and so that’s just one of those things you always want to think about is what are people learning when they reach your website, so they know who you are, what you do and are you giving them all of the information so that Way, they want to say run on your site, okay and then the last one. Is I’m just going to talk really quickly about site speed and you can look to see what pages I might be taking a long time to load and see if you can get those specific pages to load quicker because the longer someone so like the home page? It’s showing that it’s a pretty slow load, and so how could you make it load faster? So that way, people are going to be more inclined to you stay on the page because they have a good experience, and so those are just a few ways that you can use all of this data data under the behavior tab and not talk today.

Apparently, but it’s great data to look at and kind of play around with and think about how you could use it to be more strategic in your business.

 

Categories
Online Marketing

MDi TV – What are advanced segments in Google Analytics?

Give you a bit of a an inside view into how you can segment your traffic and find useful bits of information to help you develop and improve your marketing campaigns before I kick off on a highlight our ecobuild tweet up on the 21st of March. At the event will be recording MDI TV at the event.

So, if you want to be included in the in the episode, please do tweeters are poorly creative or, if you’re, doing something interesting at the show. You’ve got seminar where your habits of product demonstrations or whatever it may be. Let us know – and we will try and get some article footage and include you in an episode that rounds up. You could build as part of the MDI TV series. The other thing I just want to quickly mention is our SEO workshop on 19th of April.

If you want to know more about how to increase the visibility of your website search engines, how to use Google Analytics to measure your efforts and looking at how to develop content as well. So that’s a workshop for building product manufactured marketers within part of my faction. Companies, if you go to the website bit ly /em di events 2012 and you can book your places, they’re more, the merrier, that’s all 90th of April here at Milton Keynes right.

Ok, let’s kick off advanced segments. What are the prime segments well in analytics? You’ll? Be able to break down your visitor data into more meaningful data, things that you really want to find out and a good way of explaining. That is, if you’re reporting or agencies or you’re in to report you on a monthly basis, visitor data to your website. You may see over a period of time that your visitor levels look something like this and that little bump there is a campaign or something that you did offline, that caused lots of people to come to your website.

What could find segments does is really breaks down. All of this area here into other bits of data, so one of the examples might be mobile traffic, so something in there will be over traffic. So there’s a portion of visits that come from mobiles. There may be search engine traffic which looks something like this, and then there might be returning visitors that looks like this, so it’s identifying the various different segments as part of the whole aggregated number of visits are come to your website, so in analytics, you’ve got a Set number of predefined segments and I’ll go through each of those explain what they are if you’re going to your analytics and at the top you’ve got advanced segments.

If you click on that on the left-hand side, you’ll you’ll see this list and first segment is new new visits. So what we’re looking at here is all your visits. What percentage of those visits are new visits and this kind of helps you identify how many new people are coming to your website in a relative time period so every month you may want to look at how many new visitors have come to your website returning visit.

So how many people come back within four weeks or six months or 12 months have come back to your website for more information? This is particularly useful for those of you got blogs, develop case studies on a regular basis, new stories, you may even have a login area, so you want to see how many people keep coming back to your website to login for more information or read more information. The next one is paid so paid visits.

If you, those of you who are doing pay-per-click advertising, this is the bucket or the segment and they falls into non-paid – is organic traffic from search, so you can see or split up also traffic by paid and non page. You can also do this through the search report itself and then you’ve got your to sort of traffic search and referral sort of breakdown. All of these visits into just search is it so this one we said earlier was searched.

So just show me, the number of people with all visits have come to my website from a search engine then you’ve got referral. Referral is referrals from other websites and some of those could be social media sites. It could be supply chain, partner websites that they’ve got a link from their website to yours. We could be directories so they fall under the referral traffic. You might want to segment with all traffic on a regular basis if you’re starting to do lots of advertising or you’ve started to do more directory advertising.

So you might want to segment that traffic and just view over a period of time. Is it getting better? Is it less? Is it the same and the quality of traffic that’s coming from those websites? Most importantly, and I’m very important, I always kind of mention that can anything to do with conversions is important. This is where leads are generated. This is where goals happen. On your website, this is the conversion, so here’s all of your visits and what you want to do is just take the amount of visits, though in conversion, so it might be some.

This might be a very small percentage of visits that actually turn into leads or subscribe for more information or download, PDFs or subscribe or login for cad drawings of sexual or it might be somewhere around here. But you need to send meant it out. You need to understand: is it getting better? It’s other ways of improving the number of people that sign up for things and download more information, one very popular one there that is becoming more and more power more.

We do it as well is mobile traffic mobile traffic, as a percentage of all of your visits could range from somewhere like one percent, or it could be as much as five or ten percent. Depending on your audience, one client that we have their percentage of mobile tropical hovers around five percent, which is pretty high, considering that the industry that we’re in the type of people, whether they’re office based or on-site base, usually most of the time it’s on-site engineers that Are visiting the website from a mobile device or a tablet device, so one that is, I may talk about in another episode on how and what to look out for final set.

One is non bumps. People have viewed more than one page. Remember. The bounce is basically someone, who’s come to your website, landed on a page and then left the site, and I always kind of have to say a bit of advice. Bounce rate for blogs is, and if you want, because people come to your blog, read one post and an a-league, so you know get worrying about your bounce rate, for your blog is, is not really a big issue.

It’s more of your product pages or your main internal website, page that you want to look up. Ok, so there’s standard and advanced segments in analytics. However, there’s a custom set of advanced segments I like to use on our clients, websites that give us a bit more information as to you, activeness of marketing campaigns that we develop so okay, the first one is brand keywords and if you go back to another episode Of MDI TV, where I talked about the difference between brandon non brand within search engines brand before mind you quickly is those visitors have come to your website from a search engine having typed in your company name or your product name or some sort brand name or Better employee, something that’s connected with the company non-brand – is those who have mentioned or search for no crime, in particular no product, name in particular no employee, so very generic blue stuff.

So, for example, an online keyword might be timber decking, it might be rain water harvesting. For education sector no particular brand names, the other segments really is campaigns and segmenting all of this data into campaigns. So what we want to do is take out our campaign data and we can see then something that may look like that. Email campaign, one email campaign to direct mail campaign three and segmenting that data and I’m going to look at – did they stay on the side or pages? Did they view? Did they then go to sign up for more information that they go and download brochures? So segmenting? Your campaigns is absolutely crucial in assessing how well they’ve performed.

I don’t wan na like. Is that the number of keywords that people use within search engines to get your site and look at other volumes? So how many visits have come from someone that resented one word into a search engine? How many you’ve come from entering two words? Three words: four words by words, and it helps you assess the long tail as you’re. Very it’s a complex procedure. Settle, you need to know a bit of a boxful regex to kind of set up and band segments in that way.

If you want to know more, please do email me or call us or tweet me quite happily give you a tutorial but again go back to the workshop. If you want to learn more of that, please do a tender workshop, social media traffic, look at your social media, honey; no, just look at twitter com as part of the referral or Facebook. What you need to do is create a segment of Twitter, Facebook, HootSuite linkedin, mobile facebook, tweet deck.

All sorts of referrals are linked to social medias, already delicious stumbleupon. All these websites that are part of the social media, social media platforms, the next one brand loyal visitors, one. I like one that people don’t really talk about, but I particularly like because I want to know how many people come to the. For example, the poorly created website, if typed in a poorly creative company name to google, they come to the website and they consume more than three pages of information and they stick around on the site for more than two minutes.

Let’s say, and they end up downloading one of our ebooks for me, that sort of visitor is a really good visit and I want to know how many of those visitors come to my website and monthly basis. It might really only be one or two but they’re the kind of visitors that I want on my website. I want the people that come to my website, time and time again. They read lots of content. They stick around. They share it with in legal team.

They share articles on Twitter, they download our ebooks. They subscribe to my newsletters all of that kind of stuff. It is what I want to know, and he only maybe two or three a month, but I need to know that two or three are maintained and all of a sudden, if I lose all those, I need to develop more good content. Finally, location, one of our clients particularly focus on developing business driving traffic, getting orders from a particular location.

So it’s a facilities. Management company in London really wants to target the London area so i’ll send st. Men all the traffic that comes to the website from london. So i’ll look at what pages will they land on what have a type into google to get to the website fun? Optimizing the website for facilities management company in London. I want to know that the number of visitors are coming to the website are increasing and they’re, consuming more content and they’re also subscribing to the blog and they’re, also sending in inquiries as well.

So hopefully, that kind of explains a little bit about advanced segments and how they can help. You understand all of that visitor data, so just looking at visit a visitor data and going fifteen thousand visits on a monthly basis, great the websites doing well. My advice would be to just dig a little bit deeper break that data down into small chunks and maybe just pick a few segments here in there and start optimizing will start developing campaigns targeting force regions or social media campaigns.

Again, if you’d like to know more, please do tweeter that poor, you’re creative I’ve got want more information on our tweet up or the workshop, and please do letters night. So let us get next time. Thanks.

 

Categories
Online Marketing

Google Analytics New Dashboard Overview

You’ll have to look through the admin and select the site.

You can select all the different sites up here. Okay, so just go through it, it’s good! This is a lot more of a visual type tool now with the new dashboard that Google’s released probably dumbing it down a little bit for the everyday user, which is probably a smart thing for Google to do so. Anyway, it’s basically giving you a snapshot of the behavior of your website over the past 14. You can get you can do it from daily to 90 days, where you can create your own preset ranges of dates of time, so this basically, this first panel tells you how many users you’ve had in the last 28 days.

Nukid you can upper 290. How many sessions, so that’s how many different sessions from those users, the bounce rate, bounce rate is it depends on what sort of site you have. The bounce rates are usually one page views or less so one page views and that’s it. So that’s how many people go to your site and then just look over the front page without going further and it’s usually fairly high a good website.

I mean this is not to say that this is a good thing, but most websites, even the best of them. 40 to 50 percent and depends on industry, and it also depends what you display a page and when. If you display all your updates on your homepage, then maybe that is not a reason for people to delt dive deeper from on most occasions and what’s the average duration 42 seconds, you know that’s not very long, but anyway, that will change.

If I changed it to seven seven days to 28 as ninety days, it’s all the old changes now this is the time of day now in your Google Analytics in the admin section, you’ve got to make sure they’ve got the right time zone set, but and then Then this will be valid data, so this shows, when most people view the website now this websites in Australia. So this will be recorded for Sydney time so you’ll see that it gets.

It gets data in the evenings in the afternoon, and you know by the time everyone gets to work. It’s usually a little bit quieter, okay, and then it tells you what active you should have got on the site right at that time. Here is the sources, the traffic, organic referral, social media? Other you get also your acquisition reports. You can also dive deeper into those and learn more in this plenty of articles on YouTube.

You know if you wanted to get more information on acquisitions or audience overview is how to build. The audience overview in Google. Analytics would be a thing in searching in YouTube, and then you would then you would change the dates for that. You want to get rid of results in YouTube to the last year, so you want to get the latest version of analytics and that’s how you search for everything online through YouTube or through through Google search.

I always if I’m searching to something in particular information on something I always go into the tools that tells me more information here anytime past year, the same as on Google on Google on YouTube as well as Google search. I always do that. It’s just a habit. You get into and it makes a big difference because who wants to get information? That’s all with information changing so rapidly, and then you get to your referrals.

You know it depends what industry you’re in and where you get most your traffic from and then from the country I mean obviously from Australia is going to get most of their viewership from Australia. But I know for as an example, she gets quite from all over the world and active users how that’s trending over a period of Thailand, and you can look into the active user report. I’r not going to go deep right into it on how to build goals and values, and all that sort of stuff and conversions, that’s something you can search for online and you can test and then see how that goes.

And then this tells you up here, tells you okay, it’s always the week is always harder percent. That tells you how many people returned, how many people are returning from those and then by the devices. As you can see today, you know three or four years ago mobile was twenty to thirty percent. Now it’s fifty percent and that’s why all of our websites work on mobile phones as well and tablets are still fairly low, and then it gives you the most popular pages over that period of time.

You can also create pages report. You can also customize your dashboard on what other things you’d like to see on there and there’s also some also some pre-built dashboards. So it’s all about recognizing and understanding your user behavior, and then you use this in concert with the Google search console, which gives you some deeper understanding of where your appearing in search results, what keywords or that sort of stuff.

So there I thought I’d just share a little bit of an overview of the new Google Analytics home dashboard, that’s available now for all users. Thank you and have a good day.

 

Categories
Online Marketing

Google Analytics Sign Up Tutorial – How To Increase Website Traffic

Google Analytics Google Analytics is a free online tool that allows you to grade and monitor the traffic on your website. In today’s competitive marketplace, the Internet is taken over from yellow page ads and is the first place your customers turn to when looking for your products or services, most business owners are content to be in the 50 % of business owners that actually own a website and Are just simply happy to have a website and don’t actually take advantage of the huge marketing potential that their website has kudos to you for taking time for digging deeper and getting one up in your competition.

So what kind of data can we get from Google Analytics? We can tell exactly where traffic’s coming from. Is it coming from Facebook? Is it coming from Google search? Is it coming from a marketing campaign that we’re doing or possibly a newspaper article that printed a an article on our business and we want to know if that’s driving traffic what’s working? What’s not, we get to have a real picture with that data of how we need to improve and continually increase our traffic to the marketing machine, which is your website, so I will cover exactly how to set up Google Analytics if you do not already have it Set up and I’ll go through step by step and have you up and running in a matter of a few minutes.

Okay, in order to get yourself, a Google Analytics account. The first thing you must have is a gmail account. So if you already have a gmail account, you can simply step this or skip this first step here, where I’m just showing people how to sign up for a gmail account will be very short and sweet and then, shortly after we’ll dive into the Google Analytics sign Up so anyways, just simply I’ve got Google open here I will type in Gmail and do a search and at the top here comes up Gmail and if you do not already have an eye, we will simply create an account.

Ask you to fill in all your personal details here: choose a username password. You know the deal, feel it fill in all that stuff I’ll just quickly. Do that and then pop right back into the article. Okay welcome back simply agree to the Terms of Service. Okay, once you have your gmail account created you, you are now you have a actual Google account with a username and password, and the next thing you want to do is go to the Google search bar and type in Google Analytics and right at the top here.

You’ll see Google Analytics, I’m just simply going to click on that and we’re taken to this page and it’s at analytics.Google.Com, for whatever reason, if you didn’t get here through through the search, you can just simply type in analytics.Google.Com for this page over on the right here. You’ll see sign up start using Google Analytics, we will click on sign up and it’s a new account. What would you like to track? It asks you if you want to track a web site or a mobile app we’re tracking a web site, which is the default setting tracking method.

The only thing we we need to fill out are these these boxes here right now, so the account name. So I’m just simply going to use a landscaping website you can type in whatever key in whatever you want. It’s just a simple title for for your website, not terribly important website, name, I’m again just putting a landscape website and the website URL and the landscaping website that I built on was so whatever your URL is, or your website address, so Karan oops.

I spelt that wrong car on desk top.Com. So yours will be you know: Tom’s painting, calm or whatever your URL is that you selected and built your website with the tutorial industry. Category select one we are in business and industrial markets, I’m just going to select. You can read through those find one that’s most suitable to your business reporting in timezone United States, and we are eastern time zone where I am just select your correct time zone and then it lists a bunch of different things.

You might want to read through these that you share with Google. They recommend it, I’m just going to leave them ticked off, but if you want to unpick them, that’s up to you and then we will click on get tracking ID. So once we click on that this Terms of Service pops up first thing you want to do at the top here. Select your country, the United States is already pre-populated, so I’ll. Select that and then click on.

I accept now the thing there’s a whole bunch of technical jargon and lines of code here that might scare you don’t worry about that. What we’re looking for is this tracking ID you’re just simply going to click hold and drag copy. You know copy and paste that from the UA and then all those numbers to the last last number there copy that line right there and you’ll see what we’ll do with that next. So next thing I want you to do – is open up your website and then get into your WordPress dashboard, so simply hover over the title.

Click on dashboard, once you’ve signed in from your WordPress admin panel – and here we are in the next thing we want to do – is add a plugin so to add a plug-in again. We just simply hover down to plugins and slide over to add new. Now the plug-in we’re looking for is called Google Analytics, and it should be this right now. Currently it’s this purple one and we will click on install. Now it’s got over 600,000 active installs installing and then don’t forget to click on activate okay.

So now that is activated. The next thing we want to do is go down to settings hover over settings and then just slide to the right and you’ll see Google Analytics now, click on Google Analytics and simply here web property ID that line of letters and digits that we copied before we’re. Just simply going to paste that right in there and then click on Save Changes. Awesome. You just installed Google Analytics on your website, so it wasn’t that hard I’d only to go to a couple minutes.

So now, if we go back to our Google Analytics, you can see at the top here. It says admin, that’s where we grab that code and just basically did our quick setup. Next thing we want to do is go over to reporting click on reporting and keep in mind that it’s going to take 24 to 48 hours before you usually 24 hours before you start collecting data. But if you go to this tab here, where it says real time, click on real time, click on an overview and we’re just going to things.

This is a new account will just simply access out, but they have lots of little helpful articles and whatnot. Here you can follow along, but we’ll exit that out and go back to our website hover over your site; name: click on visit site; let’s click on a couple of pages: let’s click on our landscaping page and then we’ll click on our contact. Page, let’s go over and see what’s happening here in real time, so you can actually see in real time there.

Now we’re on the contact page, there’s those pages that I clicked you can see where I’m located and yeah and yeah. It tells you right now how many people are on your website and that’s just the real-time data. So if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of Google Analytics, like I say it takes 24 to 48 hours before it starts, recording and reporting data that you’ll have daily data stats to look at and then you would simply go down to audience overview right Now we don’t again, we don’t have any data on this because we just installed the script, but it will keep track you can you can change.

You know your date range. It will tell you how many users you had what their average you know pages per session. How many pages that are looking at how long they’re staying on your website? Let’s say you wanted to look at what pages they’re actually looking at you would go down to behavior and then site content and then all pages. I find this a very helpful useful one. Actually, this isn’t too helpful right now, because again we don’t have any data on this.

We’ve just installed this, but again that was behavior site content, all pages and it will list. You know each page how long they’ve been on that page and just give you an idea where people are actually spending time on your website. Another interesting one is acquisition, so if you click on acquisition, then overview, it will give you a breakdown. You know how many people are actually came in today or this month or whatever, whatever period of time you select from social from actual organic meaning, you know from Bing or Google search any other sites that might link to you.

If there’s a you know a news article or something about your business, and then you see them coming from that news article, it would show up here excellent information again, there’s an ad word section. If you do, advertising gives you data on on your ads and what kind of time those people are spending on your on your website, where they’re going lots of stuff for you to play with on the left-hand side here, but again, those are some of the main Ones that I quickly reference are the the real time I will check just to see how people are interacting with a site overview.

Just gives you a broad overview of lots of important data points acquisition. Where is our traffic coming from and then again? Finally, at the bottom here that was right, behavior, site content and all pages there’s a few other things in here like site speed a few little interesting little data points that you can check out later on so anyways I’ll. Let you play with that and again the web’s, a great reference if you’re looking to that to know how to use any of these specific points.

Just simply, Google YouTube it. You’ll you’ll find lots of answers out there. So that’s it for setting up Google Analytics. You will have all the necessary information at your fingertips to know how your customers are interacting with your website. Ok, so I have one request of you: it’s a homework question and it’s about bounce rate. Now a lot of you first-timers are thinking. Okay, what’s Tom talking about bounce rate makes no sense, it’s a term that the search engines came out with that, or I should say, Google, and in analytics it’s a very important term, that you need to study, measure and try and improve bounce rate.

What is bounce rate my homework question? You is, first of all, you got to try and find it in your analytics. It’s not hard. It’s a couple clicks and you’ll be on the bounce rate and what is bounce rate? It is a measurement of how many people come to your page or your website. Whatever page is Lena on your website and then click back, they don’t proceed any further. They don’t click through to a second page.

So basically, it’s telling Google your websites boring, and they don’t want to provide boring content in their search results. So it’s important that you have a great sort of great bounce rate. A great bounce rate is the lower the score, the better so generally anything below 65 % is what you’re aiming for or lower I’ve had some websites in the you know, 70 % 71 still perform not too bad, but they could be a lot better.

The all my websites, the ones that are 65 % or lower you know great – they they just continually gain traffic, so that’s something to shoot for. So in the comments section below, I got a question for you. Please tell me what your bounce rate is. If you can just leave that in the comment section below that’d be great, and I do encourage comments, if you have any questions, I can be reached there or at the Tom towel com contact form.

If you have a question that shouldn’t be in the you know, public section below one want to personally talk to me. I’r always make myself available and we’ll get back to you. Okay, for you, Keener’s in the crowd that are looking for some more information on google analytics. You can go to my website at Tom Telecom, slash traffic, that’s Tom, tattled, comm, slash traffic and you will find all four modules actually that you will be able to take advantage of, but under the Google Analytics one I will include references to the various resources that I use where I learn my information about Google Analytics and you’ll be able to take advantage.

That too, I have some of the follow some of the top people in the industry and anyway, so I encourage you to check it out. One other important thing is: I really appreciate it for those of you if you did find this article or this article series, the least bit helpful if you benefited from it, I really appreciate it for those of you that take the time to like or subscribe, so In the bottom right hand corner there, you will see a little Tom towel logo in the very bottom corner, if you simply click on that and it pops.

So you can subscribe to my blog now. What benefits you, if you subscribe to my blog I’ll, be coming out with more useful information like this to help you and your business lots of free, valuable information that I’ll keep updated. I promise – and I really appreciate if you subscribe to my blog and secondly, the thumbs up just below here, if you wouldn’t mind hitting that, if you did find this useful, it really helps my blog.

It really helps me continue to stay motivated to keep putting out this content. So again, thank you for that. Ok, so that concludes this module on Google Analytics, and I encourage you to check out my second module that will help you with your small business and the second module is on keywords: