Guide to analytics

Making Sense of Google Analytics
Enterprise Online Marketing Solutions < SEO > < PPC > < Social Media >

What is Analytics?
If you have a website and don’t measure how well it’s performing you will not be able to
understand whether it’s working for, or against, your business.
You’d not employ a new salesperson, kit them out with laptop, mobile phone, a tablet,
briefcase full of literature put them in a smart company car, send them out on the road
and not talk to them for a year - and yet thousands of companies do this every day of
every month of every year to their websites.
Analytics is simply a tool that you can use to measure the performance of your website
and Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools used by small businesses.
It enables you to understand who well your website is performing and is free to use -
for most businesses.

Why use Analytics?
The goal of any analytics application is to help you, the website owner understand a whole
range of information that’s important.
It’s not just about the number of visits that your site attracts but also about understanding
where they go, what they do, how they found your site, the impact of changes that you make,
how well your marketing is working for you - and much more.

Getting started with Analytics
The goal of any analytics application is to help you, the website owner, understand a wide range
of information that will help you to understand how your website is performing in the real
world.
It’s not just about the number of visits that your site attracts but also about understanding
where visitors go, what they do whilst they are on your site, how they found your site, the
impact of changes that you make, how well your marketing is working for you - and much more.
As previously mentioned, Google Analytics is one of the best tools that a website owner can
use. It’s easy to install and the data is presented in a very accessible way, making it easy to
navigate and a breeze to understand - once you know where everything is and understand the
terminology.
If you don’t have Google Analytics yet then the next few slides will show you how to get started

Setting up Analytics
The fist step is to go to www.google.com/analytics and if you already use other Google tools,
such as Gmail, then “Sign In” but if you are a first time Google Account holder then click
“Create an Account”

After you have signed up or signed in click on the “Admin” tab and in the “Property” column
click on the “Tracking info” option and then “Tracking Code”

A new screen will open containing the code that you need to paste into every page of your
website that you want to measure. There’s also guidance as to where it should go.
There’s also an easy option to email the code to your webmaster if you are not responsible for
the management of your website.

If you are adding the code yourself, it needs to be added in the section right at the top of each
page, between the <head> and </head>

If you use a Content Management System, (CMS) such as WordPress, adding the code is even
easier. You simply paste your Google Account number into the appropriate box and your CMS
does the rest, automatically - even when you create new pages.

Now that Google Analytics has been installed, it’ll start collecting data
about the people visiting your website and the next time that you log
in, you’ll be taken directly to Analytics home page displaying data
about the visitors to your site.

In the top-right corner of your screen you’ll see a start date and end date. The default value is
the previous 30 days and the next page shows how you can change this.
Using Analytics - setting the time frame

You can also
compare to previous
dates
Understanding Analytics
You can use the drop-down menu to choose from a number of pre-set options, such as “today”,
“yesterday”, “last week” etc .
You can also choose “custom” which enables you to choose a start and finish time of your
choosing and even compare periods of time.

Understanding Analytics – Core Stats

Sessions
Total number of visits to your website
Page Views
Total number of pages viewed for the selected time
frame
Avg. Session Duration
Average amount of time that a visitor speds on your
website
% New Sessions
Percentage of new Vs returning users

Users
Total number of unique visitors
Pages/Session
Average pages viewed per visit
Bounce Rate
Percentage of people who never visit
more than the page they landed on

Although it’s good to see a large number of visitors, it’s not so good if those visits are of poor
quality, i.e each visitor only spends a short amount of time on the site and only looks at a few
pages.
There are no absolutes to compare against because each site is different, if you only have a
Home & Contacts page, for example, your Average Pages per Visit can never be more than two
and the Average Time on Site will be short, if you have a lot of pages, however, you’d hope that
these numbers are quite a bit higher.
To get the best from these metrics you’ll have to understand what the goal of your website is
and what visitors have to do to meet those goals. Now, you can start to look at the figures in a
meaningful way.

The Bounce Rate measures the visitors who reach your site and leave from the same page that
they landed on without clicking on anything or visiting other pages.
Anything below 20% is very good, anything above 45% should be investigated and anything
between those two figures is where the majority of websites sit.
Typical reasons for high Bounce Rates include setting an expectation that the site fails to
deliver, pages that are slow to load (anything that takes more than 3 seconds to load is
considered slow), poor design, unsuitable content, pages not optimised for the smartphone
user or visitors arriving from countries that your business doesn’t serve

Understanding Analytics – Visitor Demographics

Understanding Analytics – Visitor Demographics
Visitor Demographics provides a little insight in to the people who have visited your site. As a
note of caution, it’s not 100% accurate because the data comes from the third-party services
such as DoubleClick cookies (for web traffic) and from anonymous identifiers for mobile apps
(i.e., Advertising ID for Android and IDFA for iOS).
Google Analytics does not collect Demographic Information about website visitors.
For some businesses it’s a valuable tool - if you have gender or age specific offers, for
example, it can help indicate that you are attracting visits from your target groups.

Understanding Analytics – Visitor Location
Scroll down this page to see the data in list form
Understanding where your
visitors come from can help
you understand how well your
marketing is working for you
in the countries that you are
targeting.

Understanding Analytics – Visitor Location

Understanding Analytics - Technology
These screens
show which web
browsers people
who visit your
website are
using.
You can also
check which
Operating
Systems they are
using

This tab shows
you which
Internet Service
Provider the
visitors to your
website are
using.
In most cases this information is of limited value. However, there may be times when
individual companies can be identified - providing an opportunity for some follow up
activity, although you'll still not be able to identify individuals.

These screens show which devices are being used to access your
website - and how the users of each type of device are using your
website

This screen breaks down the mobile devices so that you can see which
specific devices are being used to access your website

Understanding Analytics – User Flow
User Flow helps you to understand how website visitors are moving
through your site (green) - and where they are leaving your site (red)
Use this
menu to
choose the
metric you
want to
monitor

Understanding Analytics – Acquisition
The Acquisition Tab shows you where the visitors to your website
came from.
Any search engine that has the tag
/organic means that the traffic has come
from the free results whilst google/cpc
highlights traffic that has come from a
Google Ads campaign.
A Source with a /referral means that the
visit came from a click on a link on the
website listed - you might be advertising
on a particular site, for example

Understanding Analytics – Acquisition
Clicking on the “Referrals” link filters
out all other sources of traffic and just
displays the results of clicks on links
published on other websites - if your
site relies on extensive advertising for
traffic then this will be particularly
useful because you can use the stats to
measure how successful the visits have
been.

Understanding Analytics – Content
The information held under the
“Site Content” menu will show you
how popular/unpopular all of the
pages on your website are, and
provide a valuable insight in to how
each page is being used.
A page with a lot of content that
has a short Average Time on Page
indicates that there’s a problem
with the page, for example

Understanding Analytics – Content
The Landing Pages and Exit Pages show you which page was the first one
that visitors arrived on (Landing) and the last page they were looking at
before they left your site (Exit)
Because of the way that the search engines work not all visits will start
from your home page and the Landing Pages info may give you a good
indication as to how your SEO is performing

Understanding Analytics – Site Speed
The average internet user has a short attention span and pages that take
longer than 3 seconds to open are unlikely to be successful and may lead to
people leaving your site.
Google, like web users, does not like slow pages and websites with pages
that take longer than 3 seconds to open are likely to be pushed down the
results, no matter how well optimised they are.

Moving on from the “Overview” you can check the performance of each
page of your website, and if you have poorly performing pages “Speed
Suggestions” will provide you and/or your web developers with ideas for
speeding things up

As you can see, none of the pages here have a speed issue - however, Google
has still found a number of things that could be implemented to make them
even faster.
Clicking on each of the suggestions will open a list of ideas for each page

Understanding Analytics – Events
Google Analytics is great for tracking visits to actual pages, but if your
pages have things that visitors can do, download files, subscribe to
newsletters, watch videos etc. then you need to understand “Events”.
You should make a list of every action that you want to measure and
then you, or your web developer, has to add a specific piece of code to
each action.
Once the code has been added, Google can track the events and the
data will be found in this section of Analytics.
There’s more information about the code required on the Google
Analytics Developers website

Understanding Analytics – Experiments
When developing a new website - or updating an existing one, it can be quite difficult to
settle on a design, different people have different ideas about images, colours, fonts,
layout etc. It’s almost impossible to reach an objective conclusion in such a subjective
arena.
Google Experiments allow you to create up to 6 variations of a page and allow website
visitors to use the pages, Google will serve the variations to your visitors and measure how
they are using the different pages and will show you which pages are the ones with the
best rate of success.
You can see a video that demonstrates Google Experiments on the next page

Understanding Analytics – In Page
Google’s In-Page Analytics
actually shows you where
visitors to your site are
clicking so that you can
determine the best places
to put links.
It also has a tool that will
enable you to view your
website through different
sized screens so that you
can ensure that visitors to
your site see what you
want them to see.

Understanding Analytics – Goals
Google Analytics allow you to create up to 20 goals. A Goal can be many things, it could
simply count the number of people who make it to your “contacts” page, it could track
newsletter subscriptions, online purchases, downloads etc.
When you have Goals set up, a column is added to the right of all Stats screens, enabling
you to measure and understand how your website is performing based on your aims for
your site,

Understanding Analytics – Conversions
To set Goals, go to the Admin tab at the
top of the page and click on
“Goals” in the RH (View) column and click on
the icon

Select the type of Goal that you want to set.
If none of the template options meet your
needs then you can use the “Custom” option
to build your own Goal.
The next page will show you where the
Goal results feature in your Analytics pages.

Understanding Analytics – Custom Reports
Google Analytics presents the user with a vast amount of data. However, a lot of it may not
be relevant to you and so you should consider setting up a Custom Report
Go to the “Customisation” tab at the top of your
screen and click on “New Custom Report”
Work through the screens to add the data that is
relevant to your business and click “Save”.
At the next screen you’ll have the option to have your
report automatically emailed to you (and others)
using the “Email” tab

Understanding Analytics – Custom Reports
Your email can be set up to send to as
many people as you like, at a
frequency of your choosing.
You can also choose how the data is
received, Excel Spreadsheet, CSV or
PDF for example.
Now, instead of having to remember to
login to Analytics, the data that’s
important to you is in your inbox at the
frequency of your choosing

Understanding Analytics – Have a go
I’ve covered the key metrics in this presentation, however Google Analytics provides much
more information - if there’s a metric that I’ve not explained, just
explore yourself to see what else is available.
A lot of screens have a “Help” option that’s accessed by clicking on
the mortar board in the RH corner and Analytics has its own,
dedicated “Help” channel that’s accessed through the Settings Cog in the top right of your
screen

Find me
www.enterprise-oms.co.uk
andy@enterprise-oms.co.uk
Follow me
Twitter @andypoulton
Linkedin AndyPoulton
Phone me
01793 23 80 20
07966 54 71 46

Guide to analytics

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