Dive Deep Into Basics Of Google Analytics — Review

First, I would like to start and point out that this article is review of what I’ve learned in my first course at CXL Institute — Google Analytics Basics.

With this course I’ve started my journey towards my minidegree in Digital Analytics with some of the best professionals in this field — Chris Mercer (Co-Founder of MeasurementMarketing.io), Charles Farina (Head of Innovation — Adswerve), Fred Pike (Managing director @ Northwoods), Jeff Sauer (Digital Marketing Speaker, Professor & Google Analytics Consultant), Michele Kiss (Senior Partner @ Analytics Demystified), and many other professionals in this field that I’ll be mentioning in the coming articles.

So, let’s dive…

Let’s face it, in this ever-evolving digital world, every business, big or small, in order to succeed and not be left behind must implement robust marketing strategy in place, that’s a MUST. After you’ve implemented that, being able to read those numbers and see the story they are telling you is a HUGE advantage, that’s where Google Analytics comes in place, as well as some other tools that will help you see the bigger picture of your marketing efforts.

Every report in Google Analytics will give you an answer on certain questions and every number will tell you a story behind them. But what I’ve learned here in this course, and I would like to point out because I think it’s important to know is that Google Analytics (GA from this point onward) does three things primarily: Number one — it collects information’s, number two — it stores those information’s and finally, number three — reports those information’s.

Out of those three things, storing data is what GA does the best, and primarily we should use GA for that. At other two things GA is good, but I would not say the best and there is other tools that Google has built to help us collect information’s and than reports them.

What tool we should use to collect data is Google Tag Manager (GTM). GTM will collect info and then it will send to GA that will store then. The best thing with GTM is that we can fully customize the way we collect info, but more about that in my coming articles.

GA has bunch of reports that will help us see the bigger picture behind our marketing efforts and in this article I will focus on GA reports primarily, but again, I would not say that GA is the best in reporting data, and tool that we should use for reporting and visualization of data is Google Data Studio(GDS). Again, I will talk more about GDS in the coming articles.

So, to summarize, we can customize the way we collect data with GTM, that will then send those info to GA and GDS will pull those information’s and make beautiful dashboards and reports that we can than use to actually get the answers we really need in order to continue further our marketing efforts.

At first look GA may look very confusing, especially for people who never used it before, therefore let’s cover next GA structure.

Every GA have an account that you will create first once you start using it. Account set up is very basic, all you need to do is give it a name for that account, click some fields if you want to allow Google to track you or not. Further, every account may have multiple properties and each property needs to have at least one view.

Now, very important to note is to set up the right way your properties, and that of course depends on how you want to get the reports of your business.

So here I will take an example from Chris Mercer — Instructor of the course I’m taking. Let’s say you have yoursite.com in one property and shop.yoursite.com in another property. This is two different domains, and you may think that they should be in two different properties but fundamentally they are the same, right, the same business and they should point and report to the same property in order to get all data on reports from one property.

Now we covered the very basics of setting up the account and properties, next is GA kind of reports that exist, how you can use them and what kind of questions they answer.

Google Analytics Reports:

1. Real-Time Reports
2. Audience Reports
3. Acquisition Reports
4. Behavior Reports
5. Conversion Reports

First on our list is Real-Time Reports. Long story short, this report and his submenus reports are there mainly for testing stuff and as their name say, they are reporting in real time. We can use them to test and see immediately (few seconds more or less) if something is working or not, so if we have active users on our website or we just gave a visit to our own website we should basically see if GA is tracking properly or not. So to summarize, we shouldn’t use real-time reports to adapt our marketing efforts but only for the testing part.

Now, another very important thing to mention while we are on the reports section…Regardless of what report we are using (Real-Time Reports, Audience Reports, Acquisition Reports, Behavior Reports, Conversion Reports) we can do segmentation which is very powerful feature GA allows us to do, and I will do my best to explain why :)

There is two ways we can do segmentation, let’s say I’m in Audience Report (Overview submenu, see picture below):

I clicked on “Choose segment from list” and now I can answer more specific questions like choose to see only Converters, or to see only users who purchased on my website, et cetera, you get my point…

Another way is to use the search bar and write whatever you’d like to get answered (location, traffic, et cetera).

My point is that you can add multiple segments (not only one) and get the answer you want.

Before I even started my journey here at CXL Institute I had my GA Account but somehow whenever I’m there I didn’t know what questions I should ask myself before I take a look at reports, now though, it’s much more clearer to me and I’m aware that before I even visit my GA account it is very important to know what kind of questions I should ask and then try to look for an answer and story behind all those numbers and reports.

With that being said let’s continue with reports :)

Next on our list is Audience Reports.

This report will give us an answer on who are my users. But before we get to answer that question it’s important to understand what GA means by users and that’s Client ID. Client ID is GA’s way of tracking individuals on our website or Mob App…

So if you see that you’ve had dozens or even thousands of users on your website or Mob App, that doesn’t really mean that you’ve had that much traffic because if I visit your website from my laptop and then later I visit the same page but this time from my phone and then later from my tablet, GA will store that as a three different Client’s ID and now you see three different users but fundamentally that was only one user (me :) ), right, but from three different devices or even browsers. So that’s how you can see not so accurate data. Hopefully this makes sense :)

Next on our list is Acquisition Reports.

This reports answers very simple questions and that is where my users are coming from.

If you remember segmentation part where we spoke how to get more specific answers once you apply segments, well you can use that here and get answered some really useful questions.

One of the reports that you’d probably use the most here is Source/Medium Report (Acquisition — All Traffic — Source/Medium, see pic below). But really depends on your business and again what kind of answers you are looking for. But here basically you can see from where they are coming the most and from where they are coming the least so you can adapt your marketing efforts accordingly.

I won’t write much about Acquisition reports because remember this is the GA Basics Overview :) but another thing to note is that if you don’t see the data from your Google Ads (paid marketing efforts from Google platform) and Search Console (SEO) it might be the case that you haven’t linked them with GA and gave permission to them to show data in GA.

Next on our list is Behavior Reports.

These reports will give us an answer on another very simple question but very valuable and that is what actions are my users taking.

Using these reports, you can see what are the landing pages that my users visit first, and of course you can see the quantity, actually the numbers… What are the most visited landing pages or least visited landing pages as well as what are the last (not least :) ) pages your users visit before they close the session.

So once you understand the story behind the data you can act accordingly.

And the last on our list but certainly not the least :) Conversions Reports.

These reports will give us an answer on probably the most important question and that’s RESULTS of all our marketing efforts.

So, this would be the end of my first article regarding Google Analytics — The Basics.

I must say that I’ve covered only a small part of this first course of many more to come at CXL Institute in order to get my mini-degree in Digital Analytics and that Chris said a whole lot more, and this article would be HUGE if I’ve covered everything, therefore if you are interested in Digital Analytics this is definitely the step you should take!

See you next time :)