Beginners Guide to Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a must-have tool if you plan to do anything substantial online. It provides you with essential information on not just your results like sales, conversions, leads, etc but also how you got them. Being able to collect and analyze all your company’s relevant data will provide you with insights and actions that you would not have been able to come up with otherwise. 

Famous management consultant Peter Drucker once said “ you can’t manage what you can’t measure” so I will be going over a novice level overview of Google Analytics so you can begin measuring what’s important to you and getting actionable insights. 

The way this overview will flow is by first understanding the backend hierarchy of a Google Analytics set up, then moving to the major reporting segments and what information they provide, after that will be the different types of traffic that your account will record, then understanding the results of different goals/events, and lastly how to analyze reports.

Accounts, Properties, and Views

In the backend of Google analytics is where you will set up the structure of your different accounts, properties, and views. 

Accounts

An account is going to be the overarching business or reason for your analytics. If you are doing this internally for a company that you work for you will only have one account for that company. If you are an analytics consultant or freelancer, you will have multiple accounts for each of the different businesses. 

Properties

The easiest way to think about properties is that they are buckets for data. All related domains for your company should point to the same property so you can see cross-domain interactions. 

An example to help illustrate let’s say you have your main website (site.com) that pushes users to your Shopify site (shop.site.com) when they make a purchase, and then back to site.com after the purchase is completed. If you set these domains into different properties, you wouldn’t be able to easily track the interactions between them. 

Views

Views are where you will spend most of your time in Google analytics because they are used to tell stories and answer specific questions about the data from the property.

By creating specific views and filters you will be able to manipulate your properties data to highlight certain areas of interest that you are looking into. This can be for specific segments of your users, channels being used, or just for formatting data in Google Analytics to make it easier to interpret. 

Two important facts about views to keep in mind are that 1) they don’t work retroactively. So any data collected before the view was created won’t be shown. 2) they permanently alter the data of that view so when it’s done it’s done. That’s why it’s important to have a backup view with nothing done to it.

Major Reports

The five major reports that data falls into in Google Analytics are Realtime, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion. Data from these reports are shown in three different ways: an overview, a table, or flow visualization.

Overview

Table

Flow

Realtime reports do exactly as they sound. They show in realtime what is going on on your website. These reports are great for testing and making sure everything is working on your site. If you create a new view or goal you can then go on the site and see if you pop up in the realtime report. 

Audience reports help show who your users are. Using these reports, you can find out your visitors’ demographics, interests, geography, what devices they were on when on your site, etc. 

Acquisition reports help answer the question “where are my users coming from?”. These reports show data such as:

• Traffic - sources they are coming from 
• Campaigns - what’s driving the traffic to where
• Channels - all sources of your traffic (organic, search, direct, referral, etc)
• Any paid advertising campaigns

Behavior reports show what actions your visitors are taking on your site. This can be what landing pages they are seeing first, what pages they saw last before leaving, or specific events like filling out a form or watching a video.

Conversion reports tell what the results are of all your users’ actions. This is where your goals (specific actions that you want people to take) would show up. It is also where can you see your funnel visualization and goal flow to see your customer journey and where fallout happens.

Understanding Results with Goals

You want to set up goals so that you can get a clear picture of what is happening from the data that you have collected. Without goals, you won’t be able to set up funnel visualizations or goal flow reports that help visualize data in an amazing way. Goals are unique to the view that they are in and a good way to think about different goals is by the acronym ACE Goals which stands for Awareness Goals, Complete Goals, and Engagement Goals.

Destination goals are triggered based on a specific page URL. These goals are great to see the journey someone takes throughout your site and what leads them to purchase.

Duration goals are based on time elements and they help to show how long users are on specific pages. 

Event Goals are triggered by specific events that you made in Google Analytics that are pertinent to your particular business. This could be purchased but it could also be watching a video, signing up for something, clicking a link, etc.

Analyzing Reports

When analyzing your reports, keep in mind the Q.I.A. framework. This stands for Question, Information, Action. 

The question gets the process started. What are you looking to answer? Then what information is needed to answer that question? Lastly, and most importantly, what action will be taken after you get the answers? This helps to frame what exactly you are looking for and getting the results that are needed. 

There is so much information on Google analytics that I could write 1000 pages on it but the problem is that information without action isn’t going to help better you. Google provides a free demo account where you can play around with all their data and reports that I highly recommend checking out. Just google “Google Analytics demo account”. 

As I said, this was just the absolute tip of the iceberg when it comes to Google Analytics and if you’re interested in getting an in-depth understanding of the massive topic you should check out CXLs beginner and intermediate Google Analytics courses