What is Google Analytics?

Since 2005, Google Analytics has been the preferred choice for tracking activity on your website. Replacing slightly clunky web analyser software which used to translate server logs into useful graphs, GA as it’s widely known, is now the most widely used analytics package in use today*. *Wikipedia At a basic level, GA works by fetching a piece of code from it’s servers every time someone loads one of your pages. Whether this is a website or landing page, if the code is called, then a ‘visit’ is recorded. Over the years, Google has expanded on the base functionality by including more and more tools that can track clicks from external sources like banner ads or social posts, follow users on a journey through your site or report on ecommerce activity. One of the most interesting features is the Real Time view, where you can see activity on your site live. Fascinating to watch during launches, social posts or emarketing. The two main benefits of GA are: • It’s comprehensive • It’s free Google also offers Google Analytics 360 which provides extra support and features for $USD 150,000 a year. For most businesses, the free version is good enough.

Using Google Analytics

GA will provide you with a piece of tracking code once you set-up your account. Your developer can add this to your sites templates (so that is loaded on every page) and once pushed live, data will begin showing in your account immediately on the Real Time view. It does take some time for this Real Time data to begin showing in the main Reporting area. It depends on your traffic, but can take up to 24 hours for busy sites. The Reporting area is where you can view all your site’s activity. You will see that there are lots of standard views and these are broken down as below: Audience: who is visiting? Acquisition: where did they come from? Behaviour: what did they do? Conversions: what did they do? Plus! Conversions looks at specific actions that Visitors took and includes e-commerce activity and other events such as filling in forms or other pre-defined goals.

Top Tips for Data Wrangling

Filter your company from results : You and your staff will visit the website often either through checking information or publishing/checking new content. All these visits can skew data and make it appear as though the site is performing better than it is. You can add filters for any IP address that regularly visits whether your office or your network of offices to eliminate these from data collected. For long running accounts, this will more than likely have a detrimental impact on your data, but you’ve taken a step closer to understanding your site’s actual performance.

Enter the second dimension : Nearly all reports within GA offer the option to add a secondary dimension to the report you are looking at. This allows you to cross reference the current report with other data collected to give illuminating breakdowns of the main reports. So if you wanted to see how much of your social traffic is on a mobile, you could view the ‘Channel’ report and add ‘Device’ as a secondary dimension. GA helpfully offers popular combinations near the top of the dropdown, but this simple and underused feature can open up new insights which are specifically relevant to what you’re trying to achieve.

Use UTM’s Codes for EVERYTHING : These are absolutely essential for monitoring performance and can be used to monitor both the performance of campaigns and the success of your sites KPIs. UTM codes are the pieces of seemingly random information which you may have seen loaded into your address bar if you’ve clicked on a banner ad or social post. It will have looked like this: https://example.com?utm_source=news&utm_ medium=email&utm_campaign=springsummer Everything after the ‘?’ in the above URL is the UTM code and will not affect the destination of the URL which appears BEFORE the ‘?’

If you look at the above URL carefully you can see that the information contained within it is:

utm_source = news

utm_medium = email

utm_campaign = spring-summer

So from this, we can deduce that this link came from an email newsletter that formed part of the Spring/Summer campaign. GA will let us see how many times this link was clicked and combine it with all the other data that GA usually provides such as location, user, device etc. 

By using tracking information that is unique or combined we can review the success of the Spring/Summer campaign or how much traffic we get from emails or whether news or promotional emails are more popular. GA places information from UTM codes into the Acquisition > Campaigns report though it can be viewed in other reports using the Secondary Dimension feature. We can’t state the importance of these links more highly when sending traffic to your site from social posts, eMarketing, email footers, QR codes and any other incoming link. Where space ro convenience is required, consider a URL shortener like Bitly. Simply paste the whole URL into Bitly. You can use this tool from Google to build your own UTM codes: https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaignurl-builder/ Click here for more information about using UTM codes with Bitly https://bitly.com/blog/ google-campaign-url-builder-and-bitly-twomust-have-tools-for-campaign-tracking/

Events Events are like flags which you place on important actions on your site or landing page. By adding these flags to a submit button or a link to a telephone number, the event is captured in GA and can then be reported on. Let’s say your site has the same ‘Enquire Now’ call to action featured twice on every page; one at the top and one at the bottom. You would add a flag (or event) to each button to say the button has been clicked, but you can also add another marker that will tell GA whether it was top button or the bottom button that was clicked. In the Behaviour > Events reports you will see how many Enquiry buttons were clicked and also break it down further to see whether the top button performs better than that at the bottom of the page. You can of course combine this with other data to see whether mobile users prefer the top or the bottom button for example. This intelligence can directly inform future page design and boost website leads.

Dashboards in Data Studio Google Analytics can be confusing for those that just want to see an overview of what’s going on without having to click through reports and set up filters and dimensions. Therefore Google introduced Data Studio as means to surface relevant data on to single, automatically updated pages. As every business is different, Data Studio allows completely custom reports to be defined that can combine complex data views into easy to view and print off pages. The key to using Data Studio is in the definition of what you want to see and what is useful. You don’t need to limit yourself to the standard GA reports. Defining the data needs of the business and providing a weekly report for management that automatically updates will save literally hours of combining data in Excel.

Benchmarks A relatively new feature found under the Audience reports, Benchmarking allows you to compare the performance of your site anonymously with other GA users. It is important to specify the subject of your site and it’s location so that you are comparing like-for-like. The report will tell you how many properties it is comparing your site to and how your site compares in terms of where traffic is coming from and how that traffic behaves once it is on your site. This report also provides some insights into how much your competition in your sector is relying on paid advertising for its’ traffic.

How Crowd Use Google Analytics

As alluded to above, the best way to approach analytics is to try and ignore the standard GA reports and concentrate on exactly what the business needs to know and then work backwards to provide that data. We use the full range of tools available from UTM codes to events to dashboards in varying combinations to provide our clients with the exact data they need to run their business. At Crowd we see this as an essential part of any marketing project and we bake in that trackable user journey from our earliest conversations. Crowd are committed to using tools like GA everyday for all our clients and several members of the team are certified by Google as experts in Google Analytics and its use as a business tool. Being able to prove that marketing expenditure is benefiting the business directly is one of the key features of digital marketing over traditional offline techniques and being able to prove to management that your campaigns are working and providing results will make next years marketing budget easier to secure.