GA Basic (Part II): SSM Thoughts Bridge Review

Continuing my writings about GA. Here’s the second part. Digital analytics is one of the most relevant specializations in the data-driven marketing era and refers to the art and science of analyzing and understanding the data.

In its own words, CXL Institute describes the key objectives for students of this course as being to “Learn in-depth skills for the Google suite of analytics tools to become a data-driven specialist who can set up any needed tracking and turn data into insights and money.”

The main topics I will cover in the following weeks are Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, Google Tag Manager, and Analytics APIs.

To provide some structure, I will include the following information in my review of each course:

Introduction

In today’s article, I will describe the importance of cleaning data, how to use the Google Analytics API to export the data on Excel and I will write a small introduction about Measure Protocol.

These three topics are many times underestimated by companies but are very useful in improving the accuracy and the analysis of the data.

 

Clean Data

Google Analytics is one of the most important tools marketers could use to understand users' behavior and measure the performance of the site. But despite being such an essential part of the decision-making process for many businesses and blogs, some sites do little or no data filtering after installing the tracking code.

The first consequence of the above is that marketers will not realize that they waste their efforts on data analysis that doesn't represent the actual performance of their site.

To make sure companies are getting only the real ingredients and prevent fake data, companies need to use the tools that GA provides to eliminate all the artificial excess that inflates reports and corrupts data.

First of all, spam traffic will usually show as a Referral, but it can also appear in any part of the reports, even in unsuspected places like a language or page title. Sometimes marketers might be misled by spam URLs that are very similar to known websites, for this reason, companies need to pay attention when they search for spam traffic.

Independently of the type of spam, there are 3 things marketers need to do when they think they found one in their reports:

• Firstly, they should not visit the fake URL. Most of the times these sites are trying to sell a product or promote their service but could also have malicious scripts on their site.
• Secondly, they should not install scripts from unknown sites.
• At last, they should tick the “Box Filtering” (Admin -> View setting -> Box Filtering) and filter out traffic referred from selected domains in their Google Analytics account to keep the data clean. (Additional information about the use of filters can be found here: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034842?hl=en)

Once filters are in place, companies can be sure that their efforts are well spent on analysing deceptive Google Analytics data, and every decision is based on solid information. Moreover, if companies are using other tools that import data from GA, for example, WordPress plugins like GADWP, excel add-ins like AnalyticsEdge, or SEO suites like Moz Pro, the benefits will affect all of them as well.

 

APIs

Did you know it is possible to create a direct connection between Google Analytics and Excel and schedule a report to receive the data you need?

The Google Analytics spreadsheet add-on brings you the power of the Google Analytics API combined with the power of data manipulation in Google Spreadsheets. With this tool, everyone can:

• Query and report data from multiple views
• Compute and display custom calculations
• Create visualizations and embed those visualizations on third-party websites
• Schedule reports to run and update automatically
• Control who can see the data and visualizations by using Google Sheets' sharing and privacy features

To use the Google Analytics add-on, marketers need to add it to the spreadsheet. So, they create a new Google Spreadsheet (or open an existing one) -> from the menu bar choose: Add-ons and then Get Add-ons -> find and select the Google Analytics Add-on from the Add-ons gallery -> from the add-on description page, click the "+" to add this add-on to the spreadsheet.

The add-on is now installed and a "Google Analytics" submenu will now appear in the Add-ons menu.

Once it is installed, marketers can create reports of the view with customised metrics, dimensions, and segments.

The reason why it is very useful is that when the data is in a Google Spreadsheet, marketers can take advantage of all the visualization tools that Google gives. Also, Google Spreadsheet charts and graphs can be embedded into external sites. This means it is easy to create personalized dashboards with visualizations of the Google Analytics data which will automatically update as often as marketers run the reports.

 

Measurement Protocols

The measurement protocol is a set of rules which applications have to follow to send raw hit data directly to the Google Analytics server.

With this protocol, marketers are able to collect and send raw user interaction data directly to Google Analytics server from any device or system which can be connected to the internet. To do so, it is important to format the data according to the measurement protocol before sending it to the Google Analytics server.

It's particularly useful when marketers want to send data to Analytics from a point of sale system (POS), or anything that is not a website or mobile app (online). While the Analytics JavaScript and mobile SDKs automatically build hits to send data to Analytics from websites and mobile apps, marketers must manually build data collection hits for other kinds of devices. The Measurement Protocol defines how to construct the hits and how to send them to Analytics.

Here's so far my take over on GA basic part 2. This article is based on what I have learnt from CXL.

***

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