1. “Google Analytics” Naomh McElhatton December 2013

2. Today: Intro to Analytics Analytics Features Understanding Metrics
Setting up Goals
Overview

3. In a Nutshell...
Google Analytics provides you with insight into your website activity, providing you with information to allow you to make informed decisions on your website performance, design & conversion.
It allows you to answer questions such as:
Is my site content working/ Interesting?
Are customers dropping out from my checkout?
If so where are they going?
Is my online marketing working?
Do PPC (Pay per Click) visits convert more than visits?

4. Benefits of Analytics:
Target your online audience
Measure results of your online marketing activity
Customise your website for greater exposure
Evaluate traffic flow to your website
Improve your web page quality

5. Intro to Analytics:
Some of the basic features included in Google analytics include:
Map Overlay - helps you understand how to best target campaigns by geographic region.
AdWords Integration - which makes it easy to track Pay per click AdWords campaigns. 
Internal Site Search - allows you to track how people use the search box on your site. This can information can be used to feedback product requests to the Buying Team.
Funnel Visualization - so that you can optimise your checkout and conversion click- paths (ie make your checkout easier to use to stop you losing sales).

6. It is a good idea to use the Dashboard to give you a quick overview of the important stats or website KPIs that you need to know/ keep up to date with on a regular basis.

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8. Analytics Dashboard: Help Centre:
Google Analytics has over 80 reports to help you gauge your site's performance -- whether by usage metrics, return visit numbers, or time on page. Analytics is continually releasing new features and reports, this list changes and grows and these reports may now be available via a slightly different looking navigation menu.
2. Admin:
Use the Analytics Admin page to manage your accounts, properties, views, and users.
Date Range:
Graph your report by day, week, month or housr (where available).

9. Analytics Dashboard: Customise Dashboard:
Dashboards give you an overview of how your properties are performing by displaying summaries of different reports as widgets on a single page. With a dashboard, you can monitor many metrics at once, so you can quickly check the health of your accounts or see correlations between different reports.
5. Visits (important for visitor segmentation):
The concept of a visit in Google Analytics is important to understand since many features, reports, and other metrics depend on how Analytics calculates this metric.
See below

10. Visits:

11. Analytics Dashboard:
6. My Account: The 'My Account' link takes you to a page listing all your Google Accounts if there is more than one. 7. Audience: This section provides information on visitor interaction with your site, the type of visitors, and information about how they are viewing your site. 8. Acquisition: Find out how different offline or online sources sent traffic to your site. View which sources are driving the most traffic to your site and spot trends from the provided graphs and charts.

12. Analytics Dashboard:
9. Behaviour: These reports are all about the pages in your site and how visitors interacted with each one. Use the data here to find time on page, landing and exit page information, and a navigation summary for pages. 10. Conversion: If you've set goals for your Analytics account, then you should see data in these reports. Or if you are an ecommerce website and have ecommerce tracking enabled you will see the data in these reports. (we will come to this later).

13. Understanding Metrics:
Page Views:
Are recorded every time a web page loads up correctly.
In addition if a user refreshes or re-loads as page, this will be counted as an additional page view.
Page views are a very different metrics to a visit, since one visit can result in multiple page views.

14. Understanding Metrics:
Visit: (also known as a Session)
Is the period of interaction between your website and the users’  browser.
In  the  case  of  Google  analytics, if a user closes their browser or window, or doesn’t  actively  use  their  browser  for  a  period  of  30  minutes  or  more  (let’s  say  they  go  on   lunch without closing their Internet Explorer), then this will end the visit or session.
What is important to note however, is that if that person returns from lunch after the 30 minutes, and continues on where they left off- i.e. clicking about on your website in the browser window they have open, then this will start a new session or visit- and the person will have this registered as their second visit.

15. Understanding Metrics:
Visitor:
Is a uniquely identified user of your website. When a visitor comes to your site their browser is issued with a cookie.
The visitor cookie records a random, unique visitor ID and also records a time stamp of the users first visit.
The random visitor ID and the time stamp are combined to create a unique ID for that visitor.

16. Understanding Metrics:
Unique Page View:
Represents the number of visits during which that page was viewed - whether one or more times.
In other words, if a visitor views page A three times during one visit, Google Analytics will count this as three page views and one unique page view.

17. Understanding Metrics:
Unique Visitor:
Is a visitor who has visited your website only once during the defined time period you are looking at.
If you want to identify the number  of  unique  visitors  or  users  on  your  website  over  a  period,  the  “Absolute  Unique   Visitors”  report, thereby allowing you to ascertain the number of absolute unique users of your website.

18. Understanding Metrics:
New v’s Returning:
Report classifies  each  visit  as  coming  from  either  a  new visitor or a returning visitor.
So when someone visits your site for the first time, the visit is categorized as  “Visit  from  a  new  visitor.”  
If  the  person  has  browsed  your  website  before,  the  visit  is   categorized  as  “Visit  from  a  returning  visitor.”  
If your website has more new visitors then your website is successful at driving traffic.
However if you have a higher level of returning visitors, then your site is engaging enough to ensure that visitors return to the site on a regular basis.

19. Understanding Metrics:
Bounce Rate: Bounce rate is the % of visits that go only one page before exiting a site. What is BOUNCE Rate?

20. Understanding Metrics:
Direct Traffic: occurs when a user accesses your site by typing the URL or web address directly into their browser. This also includes those people who have Bookmarked your web address. Search Engine Traffic: indicates any visitors who have clicked on search results on any search engine results page (Google/ Bing/ Yahoo). Search Engine traffic includes both paid and organic search. Referring Sites are any sites that send traffic to your site. These could be banner ads or links featured on blogs, affiliates, or any site that links to your site.

21. Understanding Metrics:
You can sometime see referrals from Google. This is usually referrals from Google groups posts/ Google Images/ static pages on other Google sites.
The All Traffic Sources report is particularly helpful because you can identify your top performing sources, regardless of whether they are search engines or sites.
However, just looking at traffic levels alone will not provide you with a great deal of information, as a source which drives a large amount of traffic may indeed result in poor conversion.

22. Understanding Metrics:
Content Reports:
There are three main content reports, each of which organises the data slightly differently. However all of the content reports are useful at helping us understand how the majority of users browse your site, what paths they take, what they look at etc.
The Top Content report lists the web pages that received traffic in order of the highest amount of page views, and is useful in helping us to identify the most popular pages on the site- or the pages which most people visiting the site look at during their visit. The pages are indicated by their actual URLs in this report, with the / meaning your Home Page.
The Content by Title report lists the web pages that received traffic in order of the highest number of page views- however in this report the page TITLES are visible- so that you know the actual page name that was viewed rather than just the URL, therefore it can be a little easier to interpret.

23. Understanding Metrics
The Top Landing Pages report lists all of the pages through which people entered your site. You can use this report to monitor the number of bounces and the bounce rate for each landing page, a good indicator of page relevance and effectiveness. The more relevant the page, the less likely a visitor will be to bounce.

24. Understanding Metrics:
Linking Ad Words & Analytics
Keyword Report: The keywords that people are using to find your site can offer a wealth of information on the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Keywords which result in high bounce rates can be seen as ineffective and an indicator that the keyword used is not reflective of your product/ the landing page is not relevant enough in meeting user expectations.

25. Setting up Goals:
Goals allow you to track how many of your sites visitors perform a particular action, such as submitting an enquiry form or purchasing a product online.
NOTE: In order to set up goals you will need Admin level Google Analytics access.

26. Define YOUR Goal: You need to define what your goal is:
If you are running a lead generation site, a goal will be a successful enquiry submission.
If you are trying to build up a mailing list your goal will be a successful submission.
If you are running an ecommerce website, you get special Google Analytics treatment, with all data being tracked – find out more information here:

27. Step by Step: Login to your Analytics account
Select “Admin” then “Goals”

28. Step by Step:
3. Create a Goal

29. Types of Goals:
Google Analytics can track four different types of goals:
Destination: triggered when a set URL is navigated to, e.g. a thank you page (this is the most important goal to measure for maximising ROI)
Duration: based on the amount of time spent on a site. These goals are useful for websites such as blogs or new sites where the aim is to increase the amount of time a user engages with the content.

30. Types of Goals:
Pages/Screens Per Visit: similar to duration, these goals are important for content based websites
Event: a very versatile format that allows you to track events such as as video plays and downloads. This can be useful if you feel it’s important for visitors to watch a certain video or download a PDF.

31. Step by Step:
As an example we will be tracking a confirmed mailing list signup using a ‘Destination’ based goal.
Give your goal a memorable name. If you plan on having multiple goals it’s important to give a clearly identifiable name.
Select “Destination” under goal type
Click Next Step

32. Step by Step:
There are three URL options to select under “Destination”:
Equals to: matches your URL exactly as you list it
Head match: matches the first part of the URL and allows for a dynamically generated suffix e.g. /thanks.cgi?default=3874id=123 (the URL in red would be the goal used)
Regular expression: control tracking based on a URL meeting specifically set conditions

33. Step by Step:
Navigate to your thank you page which is shown after you complete a successful signup.
If you do not have a thank you page it’s essential you create one as this will ensure tracking for all analytics programs is easy to setup.
If your URL doesn’t have extra characters/numbers you are fine to use “Equals to”.

34. Step by Step:
Add the part of your destination URL after your root domain. E.g. if your full URL is you will only need to add “/thank-you”
IMPORTANT: you must ensure each forward slash (/) is added correctly when using ‘equals to’ as a goal type. Such as /thank-you/ vs /thank-you ...
otherwise the goal will not track.

35. Step by Step:
Create Goal!!

36. Funnels:
Google Analytics has the ability to track goal paths using Funnels.
This is particularly useful for ecommerce sites whereby you can monitor each stage of the checkout process to see where customers are dropping off.
E.g. If a large proportion of customers leave after adding products to the cart you could consider providing a voucher in exchange for an address.
You can then use for an abandonment marketing campaign.

37. Overview: Understand what users are doing and NOT doing.
Allows you to make informed decisions about your website.
Understand if customers are finding you for your businesses keywords.
Your website can be amended to meet the needs of your customers.

38. Thank you ! M: