This document provides a summary of Grumpy Cat's guide to using Google Analytics to analyze website traffic and conversions. It outlines how to customize the homepage dashboard, analyze audience demographics and behavior, benchmark site performance against industry averages, track acquisition sources, set up report shortcuts and alerts, measure goals and conversions, attribute conversions to specific marketing campaigns, and use URL tracking tools. The key takeaways are to dig into acquisition sources driving traffic, monitor important site content and search terms, track conversions of goals, and leverage attribution and URL tracking to fully understand the impact of marketing campaigns.

1. 26-1-2015
Grumpy Cat’s Guide to Google Analytics
Paul Raybould http://planonsoftware.com

2. Agenda
• Customising your homepage
• Audience - Overview
• Benchmarking
• Acquisition - Overview
• Report shortcuts and
email alerts
• Behaviour - Goals
• Behaviour - Attribution
• URL tracking
• Key Takeaways
Images courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/TheOfficialGrumpyCat
Wake me up
when this is over

3. Customising your homepage
• Change the date range
• Switch mode
• ‘Favourite’ the sites of relevance to you to limit your view
• Please note: The monthly stats I circulate are specific to
countries NOT URL paths such as /nl, /uk etc
3

4. Customising your homepage
4
1. Change dates to view data
for a specific timeframe
2. ‘Favourite’ the sites of
interest by clicking the star icon
3. Limit your view to only sites of
interest by clicking the star icon

5. Audience - Overview
5
Should I be
impressed by
these?

6. Audience
• Geo - look at where your users are coming from by
city/state (can be useful after a big event to see if it’s
driven much interest online)
• Behaviour – look at new vs returning to measure how
initiatives like the nurture programme affect visits
• Benchmarking – Google reintroduced this feature in
September 2014, allowing us to compare our website
performance against other industry verticals
6

7. Benchmarking returned late 2014
7
We do better than
average in ‘Business &
Industrial’ sector for
driving traffic from email,
search and direct.
We score lower than
average for driving traffic
from social, display and
paid search – which
makes sense as we
haven’t yet launched
display or paid search.

8. Benchmarking returned late 2014
8
Our bounce rate is
28.97% against an
average of 55.65% in the
‘Business & Industrial’
vertical.
Having a low bounce rate
shows we’re driving the
right people to our site
and giving them the
content they want.
A low bounce rate also
helps with our organic
search engine rankings.

9. Acquisition - Overview
9

10. Acquisition - Overview
10

11. Acquisition - Overview
11
If we’re advertising here then
it appears to be working well
Links on Wikipedia are
driving traffic as well as
helping our search engine
rankings
We should take a look at this
forum to see if there is a
discussion about Planon that
we should be aware of or
possibly respond to

12. Report shortcuts and email alerts
Images courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/TheOfficialGrumpyCat
That’s just what I
need, more
emails
From the top navigation of any
report you can create an email alert
or shortcut so that you can be sure
you’re comparing ‘like for like’ over
time

13. Behaviour – Site Content
13
Particularly useful
to measure
performance of
landing pages for
any campaigns
you’re running

14. Behaviour – Site Search
14
Knowing what words people are searching for on our site can help decide which
content to advertise on the homepage or new content to create if necessary

15. Conversion - Goals
15
It’s not exactly
the World Cup
now is it

16. Conversion - Attribution
“Marketing attribution provides a level of
understanding of what combination of events
influence individuals to engage in a desired
behavior.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_%28marketing%29
Images courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/TheOfficialGrumpyCat

17. Conversion - Attribution
Images courtesy of https://www.facebook.com/TheOfficialGrumpyCat

18. Conversion - Attribution
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19. URL Tracking
• Use Google’s URL Tracking service as an easy way to
create tracked links
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en
• There’s a URL ‘tracking cheat sheet’ on the J drive
J:departmentsMarketingPolicies & Procedures
• Make sure ‘source’ and ‘medium’ are included if you
want to measure using the attribution models (list source
as ‘Display’ to be captured as advertising in the
attribution model)
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20. Key Takeaways
• Dig deeper in the ‘Acquisitions’ section to see which referral
sites are driving traffic, especially if you’re paying for ad space
• Set up email alerts or shortcuts of useful reports so you can
easily access them in future
• Look at the ‘Site Content’ report in the ‘Behaviour’ section to
see which campaign landing pages have high traffic
• Use the ‘Site Search’ report in the ‘Behaviour’ section to
inform your content plans
• Monitor ‘Downloaded Something (Goal 1)’ to see how well
traffic on your site is converting to leads
• Use attribution models to see the real impact of your
campaigns beyond just first or last click
• Use the online tool to create tracked URLs so you can really
measure the influence of your campaigns
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21. 21
Questions?