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Analytics 201

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Andrew Mallis
Andrew Mallis

I was a self-taught Google Analytics user. I thought I was getting by OK. But, since working with professional analysts, I’ve seen how my data wasn’t as complete or accurate as I thought I was. And with bad data, it’s easy to tell the wrong story. Now, I’m here to level you up, and share best practices for setting up your Google Analytics accounts. In this talk, we will: - provide recommendations on best practices for setting up your views, filters, and goals - explain the connection between users, sessions and pageviews - look at the power of Search Console for unlocking SEO insights - outline strategies for UTM link generation and recording - demystify (and devalue) bounce rates - show how to improve the accuracy of your referral traffic - point to how GTM can be used to unleash features like video tracking, heatmapping, and more - Demonstrate how you can debug GA tracking in real-time and more! Attendees will walk away with a handy and concise 3-page guide to take them from basecamp to summit. VIDEO: https://youtu.be/zklhTO0tLWs

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Analytics 201 Drupal North 2019 Andrew Mallis CEO mallis@kalamuna.com | @andrew_mallis
20% of the queries on Google are voice searches
22% of voice queries are for local content
52% of all internet traffic comes from bots, while only 48% comes from humans
About Kalamuna
We make your mission our mission
Analytics 201
Analytics 201
Based in Oakland
and Toronto
We share our knowledge freely and actively in our community of practice
Analytics 201
We build community as event organizers
Analytics 201
We foster community interactions founded in meaning and service #drupal4good
Analytics 201
Analytics 201
Why invest in analytics?
Understand how and what to measure to deliver better outcomes
Empower stakeholders to control their destiny with data-driven decisions
Satisfy a desire to make measurable improvements to how much good are we doing
Logging to GA does not make me an analyst
Vadim Tchernine Senior Analyst
Examples
Click, move, scroll Heat Maps
Session recording
Page Analytics (plugin)
Geocoded density map
User Surveys How often do you visit the website?
Live Data Dashboards
Analytics help you understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can adjust your approach to your audience and have a greater impact.
101
Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data.
Digital analytics encompasses the collection, measurement, analysis, visualisation and interpretation of digital data illustrating user behaviour on websites, mobile sites and mobile applications.
Why do you have a website?
102
Users, Sessions, Pageviews
https://databox.com/basic-google-analytics-concepts-explained-visiting-shopping-mall
Analytics 201
Understanding time on your site ■ The quality of your content can be measured using several metrics. One of them is time spent on site. ■ The longer you’re in the mall, the more likely you are to buy more stuff
201
Session ■ Begins when user visits a page with the tracking code ■ Each session is unique to a browser on a device ■ Typically ENDS after 30 minutes of inactivity ■ If visiting the site once an hour, a new session starts each time. ■ Google Analytics has no way to measure duration for the last page visited within the session
Session Duration Looks at the total time spent across the entire session. It includes exits on the last page, so it is considered a less reliable metric since the last page will always have a value of 0.
Sessions only demonstrate traffic to your site, but not user intent once they’ve reached it. Goals in GA help measure campaign success. You can either create them yourself or import them from the Solutions Gallery.
Goals
Goals
Funnel Visualization
Enhanced eCommerce Reports
Segment Customizable subsets of visitors based on user, session, or page info. ■ Mobile Traffic ■ Single Session Users ■ Female users 35-44 in California ■ Users that performed a certain activity ■ Can be added to any report and work retroactively
Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate ■ A Bounce = a single page session ■ Bounce Rate is the the % of sessions that only saw 1 page ■ There is NO relationship to time spent ■ Sometimes visitors find what they want and Bounce. Success. ■ Most time-based metrics within GA, such as Average Session Duration, only include users who DID NOT bounce. If your Bounce Rate is 70%, that number is calculated using only 30% your overall traffic.
Data Collection
Views ■ Only Data from point of creation forward ■ The default View is called “All Website Data.” ORGANIZATION
Create a Minimum of 3 Views for Every Property The Master View is your working view. It’s where you apply many different filters and modifications to get the most accurate and actionable data. The Test View is where you test all of your filters first. Also where traffic from staging, localhost and other non production environment can go. The Raw Data View is untouched by filters that alter the data collection process for safekeeping in case something goes wrong in your working view(s).
Filters ■ Use them to exclude your organization from your traffic, to ensure you are only seeing data on your real customers ■ Remove query parameters that are polluting your reporting ■ Once data is filtered out, you can’t get it back
Site Search Ensure that you have enabled site search in each of your views. This the most specific information about user intent you are likely to get. Look for the parameter after the question mark. https://www.yoursite.edu/en/search?query=best+program
Sending out emails and being active on social media, but your main source of traffic is Direct? UTM parameters in your links help Google Analytics understand where traffic is coming from and what campaign it belongs to.
UTM Parameters in URLs
UTM Hierarchy & Strategy
UTM Parameters There are five primary dimensions under your control that can be used for slicing up the traffic data. Three are required, while the other two are optional. 1. Campaign The name of the campaign. Your campaign typically spans across multiple platforms, including offline. 2. Medium The marketing medium, e.g., cpc, organic, email. 3. Source The referrer of the visits, e.g., google, facebook, bing, nytimes. 4. Content - Optional Allows us to add granularity to the audience or content, e.g., email #4, blue banner, male segment. 5. Term - Optional Used for paid traffic only. Keyword when used for search ads. For other ad platforms, it is typically used for identifying the audience or the level below the campaign. For example, the ad set in Facebook.
UTM Best Practices ■ Use a generator service or Google Sheet to standardize UTMs ■ All characters should be lowercase ■ No spaces between words – use dashes if necessary. ■ Do not use special characters, such as &. ■ Do not create manual Google Ad UTMs ■ For social channels, its best for medium to be the broad category and say “social”, with source being the specific network. Email already follows this convention. ■ Keep naming convention and parameters used need to be consistent, even across different traffic sources
Search Console ■ Connect Search Console (Webmaster Tools) to Google Analytics to understand Organic Search performance, improve SEO, and identify broken links ■ Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months. As a result, SEO reports in Analytics also include a maximum of 16 months of data. ■ Search Console data is always 48 hours behind
“Other” Channel Group Traffic shows up as “Other” when Google Analytics sees a UTM parameter but it has not been setup as part of the Default Channel Group. If there is no UTM at all, traffic goes to Direct.
GTM
Google Tag Manager ■ Connect 3rd party tags (adwords, facebook, crazyegg, etc) ■ Enable/disable without code pushes (go, Marketers!) ■ Tags with GTM load asynchronously ■ UI to create Tags, Triggers, and Variables ■ Track types of clicks like email, outbound links, pdfs, etc ■ Add a dataLayer to customize data captured
Tags ■
GTM
Analytics 201
analytics meets powerpoint
Live Data Dashboards
Connector Gall
3rd party Connectors
Google Data Studio alternatives
Google Analytics alternatives
Learning More
Google Analytics Demo Account analytics.google.com/ analytics/web/demoAccount
E-Commerce Demo - dataLayer Examples enhancedecommerce.appspot.com
Free tips and tricks (with links) bit.ly/ga-tips-9
Thank You!
Andrew Mallis, CEO Twitter @andrew_mallis LinkedIn /andrewmallis Email mallis@kalamuna.com

More Related Content

Analytics 201

  • 1. Analytics 201 Drupal North 2019 Andrew Mallis CEO mallis@kalamuna.com | @andrew_mallis
  • 2. 20% of the queries on Google are voice searches
  • 3. 22% of voice queries are for local content
  • 4. 52% of all internet traffic comes from bots, while only 48% comes from humans
  • 11. We share our knowledge freely and actively in our community of practice
  • 13. We build community as event organizers
  • 15. We foster community interactions founded in meaning and service #drupal4good
  • 18. Why invest in analytics?
  • 19. Understand how and what to measure to deliver better outcomes
  • 20. Empower stakeholders to control their destiny with data-driven decisions
  • 21. Satisfy a desire to make measurable improvements to how much good are we doing
  • 22. Logging to GA does not make me an analyst
  • 25. Click, move, scroll Heat Maps
  • 29. User Surveys How often do you visit the website?
  • 31. Analytics help you understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can adjust your approach to your audience and have a greater impact.
  • 32. 101
  • 33. Analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of meaningful patterns in data.
  • 34. Digital analytics encompasses the collection, measurement, analysis, visualisation and interpretation of digital data illustrating user behaviour on websites, mobile sites and mobile applications.
  • 35. Why do you have a website?
  • 36. 102
  • 40. Understanding time on your site ■ The quality of your content can be measured using several metrics. One of them is time spent on site. ■ The longer you’re in the mall, the more likely you are to buy more stuff
  • 41. 201
  • 42. Session ■ Begins when user visits a page with the tracking code ■ Each session is unique to a browser on a device ■ Typically ENDS after 30 minutes of inactivity ■ If visiting the site once an hour, a new session starts each time. ■ Google Analytics has no way to measure duration for the last page visited within the session
  • 43. Session Duration Looks at the total time spent across the entire session. It includes exits on the last page, so it is considered a less reliable metric since the last page will always have a value of 0.
  • 44. Sessions only demonstrate traffic to your site, but not user intent once they’ve reached it. Goals in GA help measure campaign success. You can either create them yourself or import them from the Solutions Gallery.
  • 45. Goals
  • 46. Goals
  • 49. Segment Customizable subsets of visitors based on user, session, or page info. ■ Mobile Traffic ■ Single Session Users ■ Female users 35-44 in California ■ Users that performed a certain activity ■ Can be added to any report and work retroactively
  • 51. Bounce Rate ■ A Bounce = a single page session ■ Bounce Rate is the the % of sessions that only saw 1 page ■ There is NO relationship to time spent ■ Sometimes visitors find what they want and Bounce. Success. ■ Most time-based metrics within GA, such as Average Session Duration, only include users who DID NOT bounce. If your Bounce Rate is 70%, that number is calculated using only 30% your overall traffic.
  • 53. Views ■ Only Data from point of creation forward ■ The default View is called “All Website Data.” ORGANIZATION
  • 54. Create a Minimum of 3 Views for Every Property The Master View is your working view. It’s where you apply many different filters and modifications to get the most accurate and actionable data. The Test View is where you test all of your filters first. Also where traffic from staging, localhost and other non production environment can go. The Raw Data View is untouched by filters that alter the data collection process for safekeeping in case something goes wrong in your working view(s).
  • 55. Filters ■ Use them to exclude your organization from your traffic, to ensure you are only seeing data on your real customers ■ Remove query parameters that are polluting your reporting ■ Once data is filtered out, you can’t get it back
  • 56. Site Search Ensure that you have enabled site search in each of your views. This the most specific information about user intent you are likely to get. Look for the parameter after the question mark. https://www.yoursite.edu/en/search?query=best+program
  • 57. Sending out emails and being active on social media, but your main source of traffic is Direct? UTM parameters in your links help Google Analytics understand where traffic is coming from and what campaign it belongs to.
  • 59. UTM Hierarchy & Strategy
  • 60. UTM Parameters There are five primary dimensions under your control that can be used for slicing up the traffic data. Three are required, while the other two are optional. 1. Campaign The name of the campaign. Your campaign typically spans across multiple platforms, including offline. 2. Medium The marketing medium, e.g., cpc, organic, email. 3. Source The referrer of the visits, e.g., google, facebook, bing, nytimes. 4. Content - Optional Allows us to add granularity to the audience or content, e.g., email #4, blue banner, male segment. 5. Term - Optional Used for paid traffic only. Keyword when used for search ads. For other ad platforms, it is typically used for identifying the audience or the level below the campaign. For example, the ad set in Facebook.
  • 61. UTM Best Practices ■ Use a generator service or Google Sheet to standardize UTMs ■ All characters should be lowercase ■ No spaces between words – use dashes if necessary. ■ Do not use special characters, such as &. ■ Do not create manual Google Ad UTMs ■ For social channels, its best for medium to be the broad category and say “social”, with source being the specific network. Email already follows this convention. ■ Keep naming convention and parameters used need to be consistent, even across different traffic sources
  • 62. Search Console ■ Connect Search Console (Webmaster Tools) to Google Analytics to understand Organic Search performance, improve SEO, and identify broken links ■ Search Console keeps data for the last 16 months. As a result, SEO reports in Analytics also include a maximum of 16 months of data. ■ Search Console data is always 48 hours behind
  • 63. “Other” Channel Group Traffic shows up as “Other” when Google Analytics sees a UTM parameter but it has not been setup as part of the Default Channel Group. If there is no UTM at all, traffic goes to Direct.
  • 64. GTM
  • 65. Google Tag Manager ■ Connect 3rd party tags (adwords, facebook, crazyegg, etc) ■ Enable/disable without code pushes (go, Marketers!) ■ Tags with GTM load asynchronously ■ UI to create Tags, Triggers, and Variables ■ Track types of clicks like email, outbound links, pdfs, etc ■ Add a dataLayer to customize data captured
  • 67. GTM
  • 73. Google Data Studio alternatives
  • 76. Google Analytics Demo Account analytics.google.com/ analytics/web/demoAccount
  • 77. E-Commerce Demo - dataLayer Examples enhancedecommerce.appspot.com
  • 78. Free tips and tricks (with links) bit.ly/ga-tips-9
  • 80. Andrew Mallis, CEO Twitter @andrew_mallis LinkedIn /andrewmallis Email mallis@kalamuna.com