Google Analytics for Beginners | Review 4

This is the 4th review of the CXL Institute Minidegree for Conversion Rate Optimization. This is the 4th week of my CXL Institute Scholarship and this week I completed Google Analytics for beginners.

As an SEO specialist, I assist the company I work for in increasing online traffic and bringing quality traffic to our website. Google Analytics plays an important role in my line of work. I make use of Google Analytics daily for insights for different campaigns we run. 

 Today I'll be writing about my experience and learnings with the Google Analytics course with Chris Mercer who presented the GA course. The course length was 9 hours and 17 minutes which I had to complete a final exam with a pass rate of 90% or higher to earn a certificate.

The Introduction to Google Analytics:

The course is aimed at understanding analytics reports, event tracking and behavioural data analysis. The course also assists with improving a product, marketing and strategy decisions.

The first few sections are focused on getting started with the following:

• Reports
• Admin Settings
• Realtime Reports
• Audience Reports
• Acquisition Reports
• Behaviour Reports
• Conversion Reports

The first few chapters focus on the various types of reports which are available in GA and explain the use of each one, when to use them and what questions they answer.

Chris Mercer makes use of Google Merchandise Demo Google Analytics account data to show how GA works and all users can access this account to have a look around. 

What is the difference between Metrics and Dimensions:

To understand Google Analytics and the story it's telling you, you need to understand the reporting terms they use to understand the data and answer any questions you might want to solve.

• Metrics are numbers displayed in GA
• Dimensions are anything that describes the numbers for example like source or page title.

Understanding the different types of reports:

1. Real-Time Reports:

The real-time reports allow you to see activity that is currently happening on your website. An example of this is how many users are currently on your website, which page they are on and what city they are based in.

Real-Time reports can be used to see if your GA tag is firing on all pages correctly, check goals are firing that you implemented and check different traffic sources.

2.Audience Reports:

The Audience report gives you a vast array of data that you can extract about your users. 

The report can give you the following information about your users:

• Active Users
• Lifetime Value
• Cohort Analysis
• Audiences
• User Explorer
• Demographics
• Interests
• GEO
• Behaviour
• Technology 
• Mobile

3.Acquisition Reports:

The acquisition reports give you information about the traffic sources and which source sends you the highest amount of traffic. Your conversions are displayed per source and this gives you valuable insight into what marketing channels are performing and where you need to improve your efforts. 

4.Behaviour Reports:

If you are wondering what actions your visitors are taking on your websites and what pages they are viewing then you can view this in the behavioural report. If you enable site search in the admin section and your website has a search function, then you can track what keywords visitors are using to search for products or information on your website.

5.Conversion Reports:

The conversion reports will show you the exact metrics for each event you set up such as sign-ups or clicks. 

2.Setting up Google Analytics:

Before you can look at data in Google Analytics, you need to install GA properly on your website and how to set up the accounts in GA.

Google analytics has 3 structures that you need to understand if you want to set up your account properly.

The four structures (Hierarchy):

• Organization - The organization means the business or company. So a company can have many accounts for different products.
• Account - Users settings
• Property - Where properties can be created and google products can be linked.
• View - The section where you can create different views.

Installing Google Analytics:

Before installing Google Analytics, you need to create an account. 

1. Go to google analytics.
2. Create an account.
3. Setup your property in your account.
4. Create your reporting view.
5. Install the tracking code on your website.

Once you have successfully installed the tracking code on your website, your next step is to check that you installed it correctly and that it works. Head on over to your real-time reports and check to see if you can see yourself as a visitor on the website. To ensure that it is you, you can create a UTM and check that way or you can check under the locations sections to see if the visitor is you indeed and check that your city pops up. 

Once you can confirm that this is you, then it's time to move on to the next step.

It's time to create different views so that you can customize your views accordingly.

You can set up 3 views: 

1. Backup View: This is what you go to if you mess up anywhere along the line and need to retrieve data. The backup account will have no filters or anything, this just collects data.
2. Test View: This is where you will set up filters, Goals, Events and anything you would like to do such as renaming traffic sources. This account is used to test first and verify that everything is working before implementing it in your production view.
3. Production View: This will be your main view where you are going to answer your questions you have to solve any issues.

The different types of goals you can setup:

1. Destination Goals: A thank you page
2. Duration Goal: When somebody spends 5 minutes or more on a page
3. Pages/Screens per session: Viewed 3 pages 
4. Event: Played a video

You are allowed to set up 20 goals per view and the most important thing to remember about goals is that you cannot delete them. You are only allowed to turn them off. So before you start creating them, think carefully about your website and the goals in mind. You are allowed to create 20 goals for each view in GA.

Once you have completed the course, you will be armed with the necessary knowledge you need to set up your account.