Google Analytics 101

Google Analytics 101
Francesca Lorenzoni
September 16, 2014
Start-up Chile Academy, CMI, Santiago

Google Analytics 101
• Why Analytics
• Google Analytics Step by Step
• Who are the people who visit my website?
• What brought visitors to your site?
• What they do once they got on the website?
• Did they do what you wanted them to do?
• Going Deeper
• To Learn More

Web Analytics: Definition
(1) the analysis of qualitative and
quantitative data from your website and the
competition,
(2) to drive a continual improvement of the
online experience that your customers, and
potential customers have,
(3) which translates into your desired
outcomes (online and offline).
*by Avinash Kaushik

quantitative data from DATA
your website and the
competition,
online experience that your customers, and

competition,
online experience ACTION
that your customers, and

competition,
online experience ACTION
that your customers, and
outcomes (onlineR aEnSd UofLfliTneS) .

Why you NEED Analytics?
Web Analytics is the
foundation for running
a successful website.
Without it, you are flying blind.
Brian Clifton

Who Can Use Analytics?
Executives can learn:
• Which marketing initiatives are most effective
• Which customer and customer segments are most valuable
Marketers can learn:
• Where users come from and what do they do on the site
• How can the website convert more users into customers
• Which keywords resonate with prospects and lead to conversions
• Which online ad or creative is the most effective
Content Creators can learn:
• Where people leave the site
• Which pages retain users the longest

Most Important Step: Identifying Goals
A goal is the reason why
you put up a website in the first place.
Think of a goal as specific and measurable
actions that you want your visitors to complete
before they leave your website.

Examples
• Visitors downloading a document
• Visitors completing a contact form
• Visitors completing a purchase
• Visitors who spend more than 5 min on
the website (engagement)
• “Negative goals”: #of zero search results
• ….

Why Google Analytics
• Free
• Easy to integrate in your website
• Easy to read reports
• Real-time reports
• Custom reports

Limits of Google Analytics
GA is not perfect: there are some errors.
But while the numbers aren’t exact,
the data is still very useful.
Analytics is about identifying trends,
not about getting hung up on precise numbers.

Standard Report
A session is a group of interactions that take place on
your website within a given time frame.
There are two methods by which a session ends:
Time-based expiry (including end of day): after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight
Campaign change: if a user arrives via one campaign, leaves, and then comes back via a
different campaign.

Standard Report
How many users viewed or interacted with your
content within a specific date range.

Standard Report
A pageview is an instance of a page being loaded
by a browser.
The Pageviews metric is the total number of pages viewed.
Repeated views of a single page are also counted.

Standard Report
The Pages/Session metric displays the average
number of pages viewed per session.
Repeated views of a single page are counted in this calculation.

Standard Report
Average session duration is:
total duration of all sessions (in seconds)
number of sessions.

Standard Report
Bounce rate is the percentage of visits in which users
view only a single page of your site.

Standard Report
% New Session is the percent of total users who
came your site for the first time

Your favourites, all in one page.
Quick links.
Out of the ordinary events
Use intelligence to identify important changes and
predict the future based on that information.
What’s happening right NOW?
Use real time reporting when you launch, announce
something, to see if it’s working, and to test new
campaigns, to ensure that tracking is ok.

Who are the people who visit my website?
What brought visitors to your site?
What they do once they got on the website?
Did they do what you wanted them to do?

Who are the people who visit
my website?
Audience

Demographics: age and gender
DATA
• Which age groups and
gender visit your website.
• Which age groups and
gender are mostly likely to
convert.
ACTION
• Target the most converting
groups to increase the
likelihood of making a
conversion.

Interests
DATA ACTION
• Affinity Category: potential
customers, higher in the purchase
funnel or near the beginning of
the process.
• In-Market Segment: users
likely to be ready to purchase in
the specified category, near the
end of the purchase funnel.
• Other Category: users who
are not in those other categories.
• Target ads based on the
interest group that is mostly
likely to convert.
• Target your content toward
the main interests of
audiences that already come
to your website.

Geo: Language and Location
DATA ACTION
• Check and improve the
effectiveness of existing
geotargeted campaigns.
• Target the locations and
languages of visitors most
likely to convert.
• Market Discovery.
• Which language and
location groups visit your
website.
• Which language and
location groups are mostly
likely to convert.

Behaviour: Frequency & Recency
Count of sessions

Behaviour: Frequency & Recency
Days since last session

Behaviour: New vs Returning
DATA ACTION
• If returning visitors are more
likely to convert, get first-time
visitors back onto the website
by having them subscribe or
remarketing them.
• If new visitors are more likely
to convert, aim for conversion
optimization strategies that
grab people on their first visit.
• Which between new and
returning visitors are mostly
likely to convert.
• How and when people return
to the website.
• Engagement with the website.

Technology
DATA ACTION
• Fix any problem that some
browsers could have.
• Check constantly if the
website is working well in
the top three browsers the
visitors use.
• What are the browsers
with problems.
• What are the most used
browsers.

Mobile Report
DATA ACTION
• Focus your effort on target
the devices converting
more.
• Is it time to create an app?
• The percentage of visits
from mobile, tablet and
desktop.
• Whick between mobile,
table and desktop is more
likely to convert.

Users Flow
DATA ACTION
• Identify and improve the
pages on your website
leading visitors to view even
more pages.
• Traffic patterns and flow
(note: you can also highlight
segments!) from the starting
page through as many
interactions users make or
pages they view.

What brought visitors
to your site?
Aquisition

Channels
ORGANIC SEARCH PAID SEARCH DIRECT
Visitors from search
engines.
Visitors from paid
search ads
(AdWords…).
Visitors without a
traceable referral source
(URL into the browser
or bookmarks).
REFERRAL SOCIAL OTHER
Visitors from other
websites.
Visitors from social
networks.
Visitors from links with
UTM parameters for
custom campaign
tracking.

Url Builder
www.analytics101.com/?
utm_source=newsletter-06-2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=analytics&ut
m_content=version1&utm_campaign=startupchile

Channels
DATA ACTION
• Invest more on the traffic
sources that are bringing
you more conversion.
• Adjust the investments in
the sources that are not
bringing enough
conversions.
• Which are your top traffic
sources.
• Which traffic source
convert more and which are
not working good.

All Traffic
DATA ACTION
• Where most of your traffic
comes from.
• What is the engagement rate for
each source.
• What sources are bringing you
converting visitors.
• Changes in time (sudden drop or
rise in traffic).
• Improve your advertising
efforts investing more in the
converting sources.

All Referrals
DATA ACTION
• Identify your strongest and
most influential brand
advocates on Twitter /
Pinterest /Blogs and build a
relationship with them so
that they continue to do so
• Details about traffic from
other websites.
• Which tweets* / pins /
Google images are driving
the most traffic to your
website.
* Use this plugin:
www.campalyst.com/plugin

Campaigns
DATA ACTION
• Fix campaings with more
spending than revenue.
• Fix the landing pages
associated with campaings
bringing in lots of users, but
not converting
• How your paid campaigns
are working.
• Campaigns that are bringing
in lots of users, but not
converting.

Keywords: Paid/Organic
DATA ACTION
• Chech if you rank for
keywords related to your
products or services and, if
not, fix that.
• Make sure that the
keywords that appear in this
report are the ones you
want to be associated with
you and your content.
• Which keywords are
bringing you traffic.
• Comparison between
branded and not branded
keywords

Social
DATA ACTION
• Focus on social networks
bringing the most to ROI.
• Make better, more efficient
data-driven decisions in
your social media marketing
programs, focusing on the
most converting content.
• Value of traffic coming from
social sites.
• Which social networks
visitors are using to engage
with your content.
• How people interact with
your website, based on
where they came from.

Search Engine Optimization
DATA ACTION
• Impressions (times any URL
of your site appeared in
Google) and average
position of the words and
phrases that your visitors
have used to find your
website.
• Keyword discovery for paid
campaigns (but be careful to
not cannibalize your own free
traffic).
• Increase the number of clicks
improving your copy and
shoot for a click-through rate
of at least 20% on keywords
that are getting the biggest
number of impressions.

What they do once they got on
the website?
Behaviour

Site Content: Content Drilldown

Site Content
DATA ACTION
• How your single pages are
performing.
• How different types of
content are performing.
• Identify and improve the
copy and the design of the
low-performing pages.
• Grow the traffic to high
converting landing pages.

Site Speed
DATA ACTION
• How fast are the pages in
your website.
• Increase the speed of very
slow pages.
Remember: tolerance for waiting on the Internet is super low:
it’s too easy to go somewhere else.
Your speed is closely correlated with your revenue.

Site Search
DATA ACTION
• What people are looking
for in your website.
• Make sure that people find
what they are looking for,
and easliy.
Remember: Every time a visitor enter a keyword,
he’s telling you exactly what he wants
to find on your website.

In-Page Analytics
DATA ACTION
• If users are not clicking
where you want, test
different design and copy of
your pages.
?
• How visitors navigate on a
given website page (where
they click)?

Did they do what you wanted
them to do?
Conversions

Goals
DATA ACTION
• Number of completions for
each goal you set up.
• What is the path to the
conversion.
• How much traffic is
dropping off at each funnel
step.
• Identify unexpected exits
from a step in the middle of
the funnel.
• Minimize the number of exit
points in your funnel.
• Focus on the most
converting segments of
traffic.

Ecommerce Report
PRODUCTS TRANSACTIONS TIME TO PURCHASE
The number of days
and number of
sessions it takes to
purchase, starting
from the most
recent campaign
through the
completed
transaction.
Which products
users buy, in what
quantity, and the
revenue generated
by those products.
The revenue, tax,
shipping, and
quantity
information for
each transaction
(purchased order).

Ecommerce Report
DATA ACTION
• Top performing products
• Top performing sources.
• How long it takes
customers to make the
decision to purchase, and
how many sessions to your
site it takes to induce them
to purchase.
• Trace transactions back to a
specific campaign and adjust
your budget, investing more
in the most converting
sources and investing less in
the less converting ones.
• Plan marketing activities
based on the time to
conversion.

Multi-Channel: Top Conversion Paths

Multi-Channel: Assisted Conversions

Multi-Channel: Assisted Conversions
Assisted / Last Click or Direct Conversions
=0 this channel functioned primarly as final conversion.
=1 equally assist and final.
>1 The greater the value, the greater the assist role.

Multi-Channel
DATA ACTION
• Number of conversions
involving more than one
touch point.
• Which referrals contributed
to the final conversion.
• Full-referral path and what
impact each referral has on
the final conversion.
• Differentiate your marketing
strategy for the channels
that assist and the channels
that tend to lead to
immediate conversion.

Attribution
DATA ACTION
• How many conversions are
attributed to each channel.
• Valuate if all your marketing
channels worth the effort.
Problem: How much credit for conversions
should be attributed to various touch points in conversion paths?

KEEP CALM
CAUSE
IT’S JUST
THE BEGINNING

Be careful with averages
The interesting thing about
averages is that they hide
the truth very effectively.
Avinash Kaushik

Compare days of the week
0 = Sunday 1 = Monday

Compare Metrics to Site Average

Compare Conversion Rate to Geo
If you have set up goal tracking, you can look at
conversion rates by geographic location. This
will tell you if there are particular countries or
cities where interest in your products or
services are greater than others. If your
business has local branches or retail outlets,
this information can help you forecast demand
and identify promising new locations.
Sessions

Compare Conversion Rate to Geo
Conversions

Compare Email to Demographic
Demographic
Email

Remember: include change in your strategy!
Knowledge withouth action
is meaningless.
The real power of analytics
Lies in what you do with the data.
Brian Clifton

Free Online Learning
support.GA Help google.com/analytics/?hl=en#topic=3544906
www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/learn/
www.youtube.com/user/googleanalytics
GA Training
analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com/explorer/
GA Academy
GA Conversion University
GA Youtube Channel
www.youtube.com/user/ConversionUniversity

Blogs
Official Google Analytics Blog
http://analytics.blogspot.com/
Occam’s Razor, Avinash Kaushik
www.kaushik.net/avinash/
Measuring Success, Brian Clifton
www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/

Book #1 (technical)
Advanced Web Metrics
with Google Analytics
Brian Clifton

Book #2 (less technical)
Web Analytics 2.0
Avinash Kaushik

Tools
Google Tag Assistant
Page Analytics

Doubts?
Contact me!
lorenzonif@gmail.com
@FrancescaLor

Google Analytics 101

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