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