Google Analytics Basic: SSM Thoughts Bridge Review

I have been writing about multiple topics for last few weeks. I have been exploring google analytics and got to do the basic courses from Google Analytics Academy by Google. It’s always fun to explore google analytics and play with the demo account if you are looking to learn. So I am going to write about some important and basic topics of Google Analytics.

Google Analytics for Beginners

This course is taught by Chris Mercer, Co-Founder of Measurement Marketing.io, definitely a highly skilled instructor. I am going to write and mention about the basic of Google Analytics. So here’s summary of what I learned from CXL.

Important Concepts

Google Analytics is a great tool for website analysis BUT, and this is a big but, it has a lot of concepts that could be misunderstood.

Dimensions: Are the element or things you can count on Google Analytics. I.e.: Users, Entrances, Exits, Conversions, etc.

Users: you can think a User is a person or a client that visits your website but you´re wrong. Google assigns a Client ID to every device that is used to visit your site so if a customer visits the website from different devices he/she is going to have several Client IDs. Being so, your number of real visitors is likely to be lesser than the Users Number.

Channel: This is the top level of the sources of traffic. Every channel comprises a certain quantity of platforms. I.e: Social (Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin).

Source/Medium: Source is the brand of the traffic source and Medium is the Type of traffic. I.e: Google/Organic, Bing/Organic, Yahoo/Organic.

Entrance: Is the total number of Users that visit your website through a particular page. This means they didn´t visit any page before this one. It could be a product page with your most important “keyword” or a landing page for a particular ad campaign.

Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate: The Bounce Rate represents the rate of users that left your site on a page regarding the total number of Entrances that has that particular page. On the other hand, The Exit Rate refers to the rate of users that left the page from the total views os that same page.

 

Styles of GA Reports

There are three styles of Reports on GA:

• Overview Reports: Are those you are going to find in first place on the platform. They try to show you a visual summary of the results.
• Table Reports: Are the most important reports because they allow you to answer different questions and you could go beyond and be more specific.
• Flow Reports: It shows you the flow of your users through your website, and it is more graphic.

 

Google Analytics Sections and what it can answer:

Real-time Reports: knowing how many people are visiting your website right now is not really useful for statistical purposes because you can´t establish conclusions over data taken in such a short period of time. This Report is helpful just to know if Google Analytics is working on your site.

Audience Reports: This type of report answers the question: Who are your visitors?

Here, you could find demographic information of your visitors such as Age, Gender, Location, or psychographic information as Interests. This is very useful when you want to know which websites you could show your ads in.

Acquisition Reports: In this case, we are going to answer the question: Where are my users coming from?

Which sources of traffic are bringing more visitors, how long have they been on the website, what is their bounce rate, which one of them is better for conversions…

This is helpful, for example, to realize where to invest your advertising budget or even which social source is better for conversions and then, create a specific strategy for it.

Behavior Reports: The question we are going to answer here is: What actions are my users taken on my website?

In this section, GA shows us which pages attract the most visitors, how long they stay on that particular page, you could see if that page is the first one they see or the last one, or even if these pages have high or low conversions. All these data will allow us to detect and optimize the pages with issues.

Conversion Reports: The final question that GA is going to answer here is: What are the results of all our actions?

There are 3 types of reports in this GA section:

1.    Goals Reports: In here you are going to see the complexion of the goals you set up on the platform. In this section, you could see the percentage of visitors that are going through the funnel or even a flow report, where you could visualize the customer journey through your website.

2.    Ecommerce Reports: This is very useful to see in detail what are your best seller products, how many transactions have been in one period of time, your e-commerce revenue. With this kind of report, you can know where to optimize your customer journey but even more specific than in the previous Goal Report. Here we could see for example, which source a buyer of a particular product comes from.

3.    Multi-Channel Funnel Report: Now that you know which sources convert more, this report is going to show you, how many other sources help in make those conversions. People don´t use to go to purchase directly, the journey outside your website could be much longer, there is where this report is useful. There could be channels that are bad for conversions but very good assisting conversions so you don´t want to come to a hasty conclusion and think these sources must disappear of your strategy.

I will be writing more about Google analytics and its advanced tools in another article till then here’s my take over on GA for this week.

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Sheikh Shafi Mahmud is an Economics Graduate of Notre Dame, Digital Full Stack Marketer. Author and Founder of SSM Thoughts Bridge. He is also the Co-Founder, Music Composer & Producer of Apeiruss. Can be reached at sheikhshafimahmud@gmail.com