Slides from the first Google Analytics Workshop

1. Google Analytics Workshop – April 16th

2. Who am I?
14 Years Web Analytics experience
6 Years Google Analytics experience
Google Individual Qualification holder
Worked with a wide range of sites
In-house and agency side
Also work with UX/usability design and testing
Currently working as the Data Insight Analyst for No Pork Pies
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3. ? ?
Who are you?
What you do?
How you currently use Google Analytics?
What you want to get from today?
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4. Setting up Google Analytics
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5. Setting up Google Analytics
A quick demo
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6. Accounts and Profiles
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7. Accounts and Profiles
Account – you should only have one account for all your different websites
Domains – these are the different websites that you are generating data for
Properties – you normally only have one property per domain but you might
have more, for example if you have sub-domains that you wish to treat
separately to your main site or if you have a mobile site that you want to
separate.
Profiles – you may have multiple profiles per property. You should always
have one ‘raw’ unfiltered profile but you may want to set up others that
exclude visits from your IP address (and that of your client). You can also set
up profiles based on geographical data, e.g. to only show data from the UK.
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8. Profiles Vs Segments
More on advanced segments later but…
Profiles – Can’t be changed retrospectively, i.e. If you set up a profile to
exclude visits from outside the UK GA won’t keep any data from these
visitors.
Segments – Segments can be applied to data to filter them at any time. You
can look at your raw profile and exclude visits from the UK.
In short… Filtered profiles mean that data is not collected at all. Using
advanced segments on unfiltered profiles will temporally exclude data, but
nothing is lost.
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9. Accounts and Profiles
• Always keep a ‘raw’ unfiltered profile for all your domains
• You only need one GA account
• Keep things neat and manageable!
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10. The basics
A run down of what a default Google
Analytics setup will tell you about
your website
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11. Basic reports
A quick demo
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12. Annotations in GA
A quick demo
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13. Internal Site Search
How to set-up Google Analytics to
monitor internal website searches
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14. Internal Site Search
If your website has a site search functionality on it then you can use Google
Analytics to monitor what people are searching for.
Doing this will help give you an idea what users are having trouble finding on
your site, and also what kind of content they are looking for that might not
already be on there – i.e. things you want to consider including in future.
Site search can be set up when you first set up your Profile. To add site
search to an existing profile you need to go to:
Admin > Account > Property > Profile > Profile Settings
From here select ‘Do track Site Search’ and enter your query parameter.
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15. Setting Goals
How to set-up Google Analytics to
monitor your website goals
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16. What is a goal?
A goal is a significant action taken by someone on your website, e.g.
• Requesting a demo
• Submitting a contact form
• Watching a video
• Looking at more than X number of pages
• Staying on the site for more than X minutes
• Downloading a PDF
• Viewing a specific page
• Requesting a brochure
• Voting in a poll
• Making a phone call (requires call tracking)
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17. Events
Four types of Goals:
1) Based on a URL visited (e.g. thanks.html after submitting a form)
2) Duration – time spent on site
3) Pages/visit– number of webpages viewed in the session
4) Events - Events are a way of recording actions not based on page
views or time on site.
Events are set by adding some Google Analytics code to your webpage
to monitor actions that would not normally be tracked by GA.
These include views of videos, PDFs or flash files.
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18. Events
GA does not track views to PDFs so you’ll need to set up tracking on the link that
points to the PDF.
The tracking has three main options:
Category – can be something like ‘video’ or in this case ‘PDF’
Action – e.g. ‘download’ or ‘play’
Label – This gives more detail on the file/action in question like the name of the
PDF or video
EXAMPLE CODE: <a href=“/file.pdf"
onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Category', 'Action', 'Extra Label if you
like!']);">download PDF</a>
<a href=“/file.pdf”>download PDF</a>
Becomes
<a href=“/file.pdf"
onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', ‘PDFs', ‘Download', ’Lukes_PDF']);">download
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PDF</a>

19. Setting up Goals
A quick demo
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20. Goal Funnels
A quick demo
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21. Campaign Tracking
Links from emails, PDFs and other sources that are not “web pages” will be
marked as “direct” traffic unless you instruct GA otherwise.
Use the Google URL Builder Tool to build URLs for your campaigns.
Campaign Source: Something nice and clear like "magazine"
Campaign Medium: This should be set as "PDF"
Campaign Name: Used to identify the issue of a magazine, i.e. "Issue 1"
Campaign Content: This should be a brief description of the link
destination, e.g. "homepage"
http://tinyurl.com/LukesGAurl
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22. Campaign Tracking
Another example…
Use the Google URL Builder Tool to build URLs for your campaigns.
Campaign Source: Something nice and clear like “Newsletter"
Campaign Medium: This should be set as “Email"
Campaign Name: Used to identify the email subject, i.e. “June Newsletter"
Campaign Content: This should be a brief description of the link
destination, e.g. "homepage"
http://tinyurl.com/LukesGAurl
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23. Segmenting Data
Advanced segments and setting up
filtered profiles
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24. Segmenting data
To get a better idea of how people are using your site you’ll want to segment
your data. This simply means filtering your audience based on their attributes.
Example segments include:
Default segments Custom Segments
Traffic from Search Engines Users who purchased a particular product
Traffic from Mobile Phones ‘Brand’ traffic from Search Engines
Returning Visitors Visitors who used internal site search
Traffic from Tablets Visitors from France
Traffic from Referring sites Traffic from Social Media
Once a segment has been selected, all the data in the report will be based on
that segment (until it’s deselected or you end your GA session).
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25. Custom Segments
A quick demo
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26. Dashboards
What are dashboards, why you
should use them, and how to set
them up
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27. Dashboards
Dashboards are a way of seeing a lot of your data in one place. If set up correctly
they can give you a quick but detailed overview of how a website is performing.
You can set up your own dashboard from scratch or use a template as a starting
point.
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28. Dashboards
A quick demo
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29. Custom Reporting
How to customise specific reports for
your clients
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30. Custom Reports
Different websites will have different objectives so may need more than
the standard reports to give real insight into how people are using them.
Examples of custom reports include:
• Month by month reporting
• Popular blog posts
• Visits by time of day
• SEO keyword analysis
• Referring sites analysis
• Advanced audience demographics
A quick search for ‘Google Analytics custom reports’ will give you a load
of pre-built reports that might be useful for analysing your data. (e.g.
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2175001/7-Time-Saving-Google-
Analytics-Custom-Reports)
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31. Custom Reports
A quick demo
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32. Alerts and Intelligence Events
Setting up email alerts to give you
instant feedback on user behaviour
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33. Alerts and Intelligence Events
Google Analytics Intelligence Events give you insight into the major
events triggered by your website traffic.
For example, if a page of your site gets a 90% increase in bounce rates
this will be flagged here. Intelligence Events occur on a daily, weekly or
monthly basis and are given a level of importance to give you an idea of
whether they are the type of event that you should be concerned about.
You can set up alerts based on your website events. Examples of these
include:
• Traffic up/down by <10% on the previous week/month
• Revenue up/down by <10% on the previous week/month
• <X amount of Goals in one day/week
• <£xxx of revenue in a day/week
• Increase of <X% of visits to a certain page
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34. Alerts and Intelligence Events
A quick demo
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35. Other Analytics Tools
A look at some other analytics tools
that you might want to use along
with Google Analytics
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36. Other Analytics Tools
Some other tools you might want to use include:
• Crazyegg – heat mapping
• ClickTale – user recordings and form analytics
• SocialCrawlytics – social shares
• Brandwatch/Topsy – social mentions
• Crowdbooster – twitter ‘reach’
• Twitonomy – twitter stats
• Survey Monkey – surveys
• Google Trends – search trends over time
• Visual Website Optimiser – a/b testing
• Woopra – individual user analytics (stalking)
• Fivesecondtest – simple online user tests
…and many, many others!
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37. Round-up and Tips
A quick round-up of the session and
some of the main tips to help you get
the most from your data
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38. Round-up and Tips
Some tips to take away…
• Make sure your ‘Properties’ are set up correctly; all Profiles under
one account and all Properties should have a ‘raw’ Profile
• Set up dashboards for an ‘at a glance’ overview
• Use GA regularly to get comfortable with it
• Set up Custom Reports if the standard ones don’t give what you want
• Set up Goals for ALL websites
• Focus on Goals rather than Traffic!
• Set up Custom Alerts to stay on top of unexpected events
• Set up internal site search (if appropriate) to get more insight
• Segment your data to get an idea how different visitors use your site
• Use GA to get ideas for changes, and to justify those to your clients!
• Ask questions or look online, there’s lots of help available
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39. Questions??
http://www.noporkpies.com/blog/author/luke-hay/ - My posts on the No Pork
Pies blog, on analytics and user experience design.
http://www.koozai.com/blog/category/analytics/ - Some good analytics blog
posts and guides here.
http://www.google.co.uk/analytics/iq.html - Official GA ‘university’ training
videos.
http://www.advanced-web-metrics.com/blog/ - Blog for the best selling GA
book, book is good but probably a bit out of date now.
http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/tags/analytics - A good range of blog posts
about analytics on eConsultancy
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