GOOGLE ANALYTICS

What is Google Analytics and why does every marketer need to know about it?

Google Analytics is a suite of tools which helps you in analysing your web / app traffic and make sense of it.

Google Analytics does a decent job at collecting and at reporting data but an incredible job at storing data. One can use it to store data and use Tag Manager to collect the information and Data Studio to build reports,’cause those tools are actually better at that than Google Analytics is.

One other thing to highlight is when not to use Google Analytics, is that there isn’t that nice visual component to Google Analytics. So sometimes when you want a heatmap or a scroll map, other tools are available for that, like Hotjar,TruConversion. It is part of Google’s Marketing Platform And there are two versions of Google Analytics.They’ve got the free version and then Analytics 360 for Enterprise level.

The Google Analytics course in the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree course talks about installing Google Analytics in three different ways:

• Built-in integrations by copying and pasting the tracking ID into the system you’re working with.
• Copy and paste the script in the standard implementation way or using Tag Manager.
• Google Analytics demo account which makes is a lot easier for you to learn Google Analytics

Google Analytics reports data using Dimensions and Metrics. Dimensions are how things are sorted by e.g. the source of the traffic and what pages are viewed etc. whereas metrics are the numbers or values which those dimensions represent. Most Google Analytics reports are of 3 types.

• Overview Reports
• Table Reports
• Flow Reports

In Google Analytics you can connect and monitor multiple domains and websites using properties. Views are different ways to look at your properties sliced by different filters, goals, dimensions, etc. Three types of views are Production View, Test View and Backup Views. Production View is the live view used to make most of your marketing decisions. Test view is used to conduct tests on your website changes. The Backup Data view is all types of data that is coming to your website without any filters and it is only used in times of emergency.

The Google Analytics Reports

Reports help us in viewing our traffic data in different formats. There are 5 types of reports:

• Real Time Reports: It gives you an overview of what’s happening in real time and to see if everything is working. Real time reports also allows you to segment users by location, device, traffic source, etc. Your destination goals and event goals also show up here.
• Audience Reports: Audience reports answer the question who are my users by tracking their client ID which is essentially a cookie set by GA for a particular device the user is coming from. It tells you information about demographics, interests and the type of technology they are using.
• Acquisition reports: Acquisition reports answer the question- Where are my users coming from, by tracking the source or medium / campaign the users came from.
• Behaviour reports: This report answers the question — What actions are my users taking on my website. They also report events that occurred if your users took a particular action you’re interested in.
• Conversion Reports: This report tracks the results and goals you have set for your user that you want to achieve by driving traffic.

Getting deeper into Google Analytics

In today’s world we are no short of data, collection and storing and even analysing it through tools like GA. But the real challenge is crafting a story around that data and taking business actions. In this regard, having clean data makes it easier to tell that story and draw valuable business insights.

Google Analytics provides us with a number of ways to achieve that:

• Spam Filtering: This helps in avoiding bot views, filtering out spam sites and restricting certain host names.
• Internal Hits Filtering: This is used to prevent our in-house team from triggering goals and events while testing which can lead to false metrics. Installing the Google Analytics chrome extension is the easiest way to achieve that but we can also create a filter for that based on geography etc.
• Cross Domain Tracking: A customer journey can go through multiple domains and hence Google Analytics can confuse customer journeys from different sources. So it is important to link domains using a linker, so that the users are not attributed wrongly.

You can also link other products like Google Ads for running ads on your domain, Google tag manager for collecting information you want from particular event which fire on your website, Google Search Console, etc

Google Tag Manager is a Tag Management System developed to solve the challenge of a customer’s journey on a website not having a greater visibility through GA. So not only will it help you to get greater visibility into what exactly is going on in terms of the Welcome page, but what button they’re clicking on, how much time they’re spending on there.It will help you to get greater visibility to the actual specific behaviors that are happening on a particular page and then, that information can be sent on to platforms like Google Analytics. In GTM,

Tags provide the what, Triggers provide the when, and Variables provide the information.