Day 14 - Google Analytics

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

by Tuhin Ghosh

MBA (XLRI), Guest Faculty (IIM-L), Digital Marketing
Strategist and Consultant

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

INTRODUCTION

Google Analytics

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > INTRODUCTION

John Wanamaker (1838-1922), department-store magnate, once said, “Half the money I spend
on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half".
That was almost a century back.
But now it is possible to know this. Lets see how Google Analytics helps in measurement,
analysis and improvement of all your digital marketing efforts.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

OBJECTIVES

Display Advertising – Day 8

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > OBJECTIVES

At the end of this module, you will be able to:

o Understand importance of digital analytics and how Google

Analytics helps the cause

o Set goals as per business objective and track them
o Read, interpret and customise reports and dashboards
o Link Analytics to AdWords and optimise
o Understand the importance of ‘test and learn’ approach of digital

marketing, create experiments and choose the right attribution
model

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

BUILDING A CASE FOR DIGITAL
ANALYTICS

Why is this an Important Aspect

of Digital Marketing

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > DEFINITION

“Digital analytics is the analysis of
qualitative and quantitative data from
your business and
the competition
to drive a continual improvement of the online

experience that

your customers and
potential customers have which
translates to your desired outcomes (both online

and offline).”

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT?

Measure- what is working and what is not

Set Priorities- where to focus
Segmentation- what works for a particular segment
Optimisation- Insights to drive the optimum effort
Develop niche – beyond your imagination!

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

UNDERSTANDING GOOGLE
ANALYTICS

How does Google Analytics Work

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > PREFFERED PLATFORM

Widely used
Free (it has premium version too)
Supported by the most popular search engine
Constantly evolving

Source : mobilemarketing.com

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > WHAT GOOGLE ANALYTICS CAN DO?

What is the visitor doing in your site?
From where are they coming?
When are they coming?
How are they buying?
Reports and Dashboards
Experiment and Learn

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > SETTING GOALS AS PER YOUR BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

Types of Goal Objectives
Ecommerce To sell products and services
Lead generation
Content publishing To collect user information and test various strategies
Online information
To encourage repeat visits and engagement
Branding
Looking for information when they need it

Awareness and loyalty of the users to a particular
website. The extent of reach of the website especially in
social media.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > COMMON TERMINOLOGIES

Dimension: Attribute of a visitor

Metric: Number to measure dimension

Visitor: The user who visits the website by clicking on the
URL.
Visits: The amount of times the Website is accessed by
different users
Session: is defined as the duration of time a visitor spends
on a website
Unique Visitor: “The number of individual (non-duplicate)
visitors to a site over the course of a specific time period”

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > COMMON TERMINOLOGIES

Pages/Session: gives information and displays the number
of pages that were accessed per session.
Average Session: duration is defined as the “total duration
of all sessions (in seconds) / number of sessions”.
Unique Page View: the number of sessions during which
that page was viewed one or more times
Conversion: when the goal is completed by a user

Bounce Rate: Percentage of visits in which the visitor only
views one page of your Website and leaves

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > FOUR COMPONENTS OF GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Data Collection
Data Processing
Data Configuration
Reporting

Source: https://brookchalmers.wordpress.com/2014/12/18/how-google-analytics-works/

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > ACCOUNT STRUCTURE OF GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Account
Property
View
Users
Permission (the ‘lock’)

Source: Google Analytics Guide

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

SETTING UP GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Getting Started

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > SETTING UP THE ACCOUNT

Sign up/in at https://analytics.google.com/
Enter details

Account Name
Website
Industry
Data Sharing
Get Tracking ID for the property
Add tracking code to your web/app
Java script for Website
SDK for Apps

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > SETTING UP THE ACCOUNT

Accounts- Apply users, configuration et al.
Property- Connect to website, app, social etc.
Profile

Master View
Test View

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

REPORTS AND DASHBOARDS

How to Read and Customise

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > DASHBOARD

View the main metrics in each property
Default is provided
Customise as:

Blank Dashboard
Starter Dashboard (preferred)
Items in dashboard includes page views, unique page

views, average time on the page, bounce rate, landing
page, sessions, new sessions, goals, goals conversion,
exits and page views exits.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > CREATE REPORT
Use this feature to create custom reports with your own dimensions and metrics

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > SET GOALS

Measure some set criteria depending on the visitor’s

action

Three options:
Use Goal Template: already some templates

available

Create Custom Goals: specific to your business
Create Smart Goals

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > CREATE NEW GOALS

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > CREATE NEW GOALS

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > IMPORT GOALS

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > 4 TYPES OF GOAL TRACKING Source :
Leadpages
Destination Goal- Page on the website which visitors see after
they complete an action. Source :
gaiax.com
• Example: Thank you page
Event Goal- Triggered by an event like the visitor downloading
your white paper.
Pages per visit Goal- Specify a minimum threshold of pages
visited by the users
Duration goal- Triggered when a user’s visit duration exceeds
or falls below a set duration.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > EMAIL REPORTS

Do not have time to check Analytics regularly- you can
automate it
You can email it to your colleagues as well
You can select the frequency
Reports are in form of Pdf, txt, CSV, TSV

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > CUSTOM TRACKING

Track any of your online marketing effort
Use Google UTM tracking to override any default

tracking.

Use Google URL Builder
Basic tags used

utm_campaign
utm_source
utm_medium
On a large scale use Google Tag manager to manage

custom tracking

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > SEGMENTATION

Isolate and analyse subset of your data
Creates a relevant context
Build online strategy accordingly
Segmentation examples:

Date and Time
Device
Marketing Channel
Geography
Customer characteristics

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > AUDIENCE REPORT

WHO-HOW-WHERE-WHEN
Demography
Geography
Behaviour
Technology
Mobile
Benchmarking

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > ACTIVE USER
What is the long term engagement with your audience.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > DEMOGRAPHIC
Understand the age and gender composition of your audience and tailor the content.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > INTEREST REPORT

Affinity: What are the topics they are interested in?
In-Market: What are they actively researching and comparing in GDN and YouTube?

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > BEHAVIOR REPORT

How many visitors are coming back?
How frequently and how often?
What is the engagement level?

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > GEOGRAPHIC REPORT
Where are they coming from?

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > TECHNOLOGY REPORT

What browsers are they using?
What Network are they using?

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > MOBILE REPORT
What devices and screen sizes are they coming from?

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > BENCHMARKING REPORT

Source: Kaushik.net

Provides valuable contexts and helps to set meaningful targets and gain insights into trends
that occurring across the industry

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > ACQUISITION REPORT

What are the different channels you acquire from?

AdWords- Tracks your AdWords campaign
Search Console- Monitors your SEO
performance
Social – Monitors your social media traffic
Campaigns- Tracks different online campaigns
you conduct

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > BEHAVIOUR REPORT

How visitors engage with your site content
Points out where site speed may be a problem
Tracks what have people searched for when they visited your site
through ‘site search’
Tracks events (this has to be set example video play time)
Tracks your AdSense and other publisher
Helps you to track experiments you set up for testing what works
and what does not
Show click distribution in your page

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > CONVERSION REPORT

Help you in understanding how a conversion has happened.

Before this you need to set up conversion tracking

Three main areas:
• Top conversion path: all top unique path leading to

conversion
• Time lag: number of days since the 1st interaction
• Path length: how many touch points before conversion has

happened

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

ADWORDS AND ANALYTICS

Linking and Optimising

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > LINKING AND OPTIMISING

You can link both ways
Once Linked you can use the reports for

optimisation(refer our AdWords module)

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

A/B TESTING WITH EXPERIMENTS

Using ‘Test and Learn’ Approach

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > WHY TEST AND LEARN Source: Teanler.com

You are never sure what will work and what won’t.
That’s why you make some assumption through a combination of
past data, intuition and feedback.
This assumptions form a hypothesis.
You test the hypothesis and make changes.
Two main types of tests are used:
• A/B testing: testing two parameters at a time
• Multivariate testing: testing multiple parameters at a time

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > DEPLOYING ‘CONTENT EXPERIMENT’

Choose an Experiment (A/B testing)
Name your experiment
Define the Objective
Determine traffic distribution (we suggest equal distribution)
Set the period
Add the code to the relevant pages
Review and start

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

ATTRIBUTION MODELLING

Who Gets the Credit

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > WHY ATTRIBUTION MODELLING

You need to know which channel is most effective for

your goals

But one visitor may come from different channels at

different points of time

So how do you solve this- use Attribution Modelling
“An attribution model is the rule, or set of rules, that

determines how credit for sales and conversions is
assigned to touch points in conversion path”

GOOGLE ANALYTICS > DIFFERENT ATTRIBUTION MODELS

MODEL WHEN IS IT USED

Last Interaction model attributes 100% of It is useful when we want to know the
the conversion value to the last channel with transactional details for a current moment.
which the customer interacted before buying
or converting This is the default model used by google
analytics.
The Last Non-Direct Click- This model
ignores direct traffic and attributes 100% of If you want to identify and credit the
the conversion value to the last channel that AdWords ads that closed the most
the customer clicked through from before conversions, use the Last AdWords Click
buying or converting. model.

The Last AdWords Click model- This mode
attributes 100% of the conversion value to
the most recent AdWords ad that the
customer clicked before buying or converting