Google Analytics cheat sheets
Data-driven VS data-informed
Data-driven: Decisions made only based upon statistics, which can be misleading.
Data-informed: Decisions made by combining statistics with insight and our knowledge of human wants & needs.
We will be able to use data and human creativity to come up with innovative solutions.
When we click into Google Analytics, we can see a large amount of lines, full of data, strange names.
But don’t chill out, we can break things
In this blog, I will illustrate Analytics +Art = Creative Data Scientist
Agenda
- Installing And Customising Google Analytics
- Learning Dashboard
- Analysing Behaviours
- User Acquisition
- Generate And Share Reports
1. Installing And Customising Google Analytics
When we install the Google Analytics, there are several terms we should pay attention:
2. Learning Dashboards:
Admin page: account, property, view
Under the account, there are several properties.
Take one account as the example, there are many URLs associated with this account.
In other words, we have a site. Under this site, we have a whole bunch of other properties that we’ve associated here.
The tracking Id is the same, except for a number at the very end.
Google Ads and Google AdSense:
Ads are the words we buy from Google. They are links or text that appear on top of Google search pages. AdSense are the ads google sells that we can insert on our own site. We use AdSense if we are a publisher and we want to monetise our content.
Set the ‘Bot Filtering’ in the view setting under the view page of Admin.
It excludes all hits from known bots and spiders. Google, Yahoo and etc. They have programs to analyze and index the content. Bots is short for robots. Spiders are because these little programs crawl, web, spiders.
It is not a must way to have it turn on, but we have a big site, for a professional who wants to do the analytics, we should gain insights about what the humans (content is for humans) excluding the robots. If we are interested in what users are doing on our site, maybe we can do this easy way to turn it on.
Because the robots just crawl the data from our sites.
Sidebar
Then we can have a look at the sidebar.
- Customisation: Suggest to install a custom report to give it a try.
- Real-time: What users are doing the right very second.
- Audience: We will see who, what, when, where, from where. A big module.
- Acquisition: Where traffic comes from, how marketing efforts working. We can have a look at channel, we will see direct, paid search, organic search, (other), referral, email, social. And this tells us again, how people find me? How is my marketing working? Are we just wasting our money?
- Behaviour: This is kind of fascinating, think of this as being the security camera in the store. We are watching our uses picking up items or checking out or running out of the exits.
- Conversiond: It is the happy part. It is where we track and figure out how well our sites are turning our visitors into customers.
3. Analysing Audience Behaviour
(1) Conversion vs Engagement:
Conversion: A one-time interaction. Granted, this is a powerful interaction, but it is the end goal of a chain of events.
Engagement: Repeated use, that results in an emotional, psychological and sometimes near-physical tie that users have to products, e.g., apple fans.
There are a lot of opportunities to grow if we were to take this site to have it available in other languages.
(2) Active users
From the line in active users, we can see whether nothing is effective on the traffic. Or there is really no marketing being done.
(3) Cohort analysis
Cohort is a group of users that all share a common characteristic, in this case, the acquisition date is the day they came to your site which here is known as day 0. Metrics here are used to analyse the user behaviour.
We can see how is going on day 1?
We can see how many people came back the next day.
- Track individual users with user explorer
- How to use segmentation to refine demographics and interests
It helps us to know who our audience is and what type of contents we are trying to expose them->impact the design choices.
(4) Demographics
If it is young people who use smartphones mostly, we should simplify the navigation choices.
(5) Interests
Target-rich environment for the site can be a place which is the combination of top 3 interests
we can create a segment ‘tablet traffic ‘ to give it a try and we can find whether there are some differences between the all users.
Language & Location. We can set the segment like ‘ converters ‘ to compare with the ‘all users’ to find some differences.
(7) Behaviours:
We can set the ‘ mobile and tablet traffic ‘ as the segment to compare with ‘all users’. We find after how many seconds, people are paying more attention. The numbers are trending up. Whether we got their attention for a long span of time.
(8) Technology
Browser & OS: Flash version is if we want to do ads on the website, we need to make sure that they actually display.
Network: This can be a really big deal if we are working in users and areas where we know they have very slow connections. And do we need to simplify a new page for them? This is called adaptive design.
(9) Mobile
If something is strange but not significant, we can just move on.
4. User Acquisition
(1) Learning about channels, sources and mediums
There are many questions here:
Well, how do they get the site?
Sources, searched and referrals
SEO and what users are looking for
Social statistics and …
Channels: The general, top-level categories that our traffic is coming from, such as search, referral or social
Sources: A subcategory of a channel. For example, search is a channel. Inside that channel, Yahoo Search is a source.
Mediums: By which the traffic from a source is coming to our site. That is, if the traffic is coming from Google, is it organic search or paid search?
(2) Differentiating between channels-organic search and direct
(direct): direct traffic is where someone comes directly to our site, i.e., type the address into the browser bar or they click on the bookmark.
‘not provided’: the data comes through Google is now encrypted to keep governments or hackers or spies from getting value from it.
(3) Unlocking Mysterious Dark Social Traffic
There are 6 ways that the dark social traffic can come to the site.
- Email, messages. The traffic is from someone’s email program. This is not tracked by Google Analytics because GA lives in browsers.
- Links in docs: it is in an application that is not tracked by Google Analytics
- Bit.ly, Ow.ly, etc.
- Mobile social: twitter etc.
- From https to http
- Search errors
(4) Drilling down to track who goes where
From source/mediums: trigger email
(5) Spotting the ‘Ghost Spam’ in referrals Ghost spam:
It isn’t really hurting anything. In fact if we really are organized and we are the only one looking at the reports. We can leave them alone and nothing happens.
There are noxious visits to my site made with the nefarious intent of getting us to click on the links and visit the site of the spammer. They are not actual visits. These sessions and pageviews are from bots that either hit our site and execute the Google Analytics scripts or bypass the server and hit the Google Analytics directly.
Firstly, we need to find out the ghost referrals:
They came from host names that are not our site.
Check it through: Acquisition->All traffic->Referrals.
We can see there is some websites that have 100% bounce rate and 0s average session duration.
We can also see some things e.g., xxxxxx.com / referral in Acquisition->All traffic->Sources/Medium
How to remove the ghost spam and fake traffic from Google Analytics?
Next blog we will talk more about it.
If you are interested in or have any problems with Business Intelligence or Google Analytics, feel free to contact me.
Or you can connect with me through my LinkedIn.
Originally published at http://jacquiwu.com on April 13, 2020.
