Welcome to Google Analytics for Beginners

Introduction

Hi, I’m Justin Cutroni. And I’m Krista Seiden. We’re Analytics Advocates at Google. Welcome
to Google Analytics for Beginners. In this course we’ll take you through a basic understanding of
Google Analytics.

We’ll show you how to create and implement an account, set up views and filters, read basic
reports, set up dashboards, perform basic analysis, and set up goals and campaign tracking.

Defining Digital Analytics

To begin, let’s start by defining “digital analytics” and why it’s important. So Krista, what’s the
deal with digital analytics?

Well Justin, people usually purchase goods in stages.

In marketing, we have the concept of a purchase funnel. There are different stages within the
funnel that describe customer interactions. A basic purchase funnel includes the following steps:

 Acquisition involves building awareness and acquiring user interest

 Behavior is when users engage with your business
 Conversion is when a user becomes a customer and transacts with your business

In the offline world, this process can be hard to measure. But in the online world, we can
measure many different aspects of the funnel using digital analytics. We can track what online
behavior led to purchases and use that data to make informed decisions about how to reach new
and existing customers.
Digital Analytics in Practice

Think about an online store, such as the Google Merchandise Store. It might have a goal to sell
more t-shirts. Using digital analytics, the store could collect and analyze data from their online
advertising campaigns to see which are most effective and expand those marketing efforts.

For example, the store could analyze geographical sales data to understand if people in certain
places buy a lot of shirts and then run additional advertising campaigns in those areas. They
could also use analytics to understand how users progress through their online shopping cart. If
they notice that users have trouble with a particular step on their website, they can make changes
to the site to resolve the problem.

Different kinds of businesses can benefit from digital analytics:

 Publishers can use it to create a loyal, highly-engaged audience and to better align on-site
advertising with user interests.
 Ecommerce businesses can use digital analytics to understand customers’ online
purchasing behavior and better market their products and services.
 Lead generation sites can collect user information for sales teams to connect with
potential leads.

While we’ve primarily talked about collecting data from a website, Google Analytics can also
collect behavioral data from a variety of systems such as mobile applications, online point-of-
sales systems, video game consoles, customer relationship management systems, or other
internet-connected platforms.

That’s right. This data is compiled into Analytics reports, which you can use to perform in-depth
analysis to better understand your customers and their purchase journey. Then you can test out
new solutions to improve your business.

The process of collecting Analytics data

Google Analytics is a platform that collects data and compiles it into useful reports.

Tracking a Website

To track a website, you first have to create a Google Analytics account. Then you need to add a small piece of
Javascript tracking code to each page on your site. Every time a user visits a webpage, the tracking code will
collect anonymous information about how that user interacted with the page.

For the Google Store, the tracking code could show how many users visited a page that sells drinkware versus
a page that sells houseware. Or it could tell us how many users bought an item like an Android doll by tracking
whether they made it to the purchase confirmation page.
But the tracking code will also collect information from the browser like the language the browser is set to, the
type of browser (such as Chrome or Safari), and the device and operating system used to access the Google
Store. It can even collect the “traffic source,” which is what brought users to the site in the first place. This
might be a search engine, an advertisement they clicked on, or an email marketing campaign.

Keep in mind that every time a page loads, the tracking code will collect and send updated information about
the user’s activity. Google Analytics groups this activity into a period of time called a “session.” A session
begins when a user navigates to a page that includes the Google Analytics tracking code. A session ends after
30 minutes of inactivity. If the user returns to a page after a session ends, a new session will begin.

Processing and Reporting

When the tracking code collects data, it packages that information up and sends it to Google Analytics to be
processed into reports. When Analytics processes data, it aggregates and organizes the data based on particular
criteria like whether a user’s device is mobile or desktop, or which browser they’re using.

But there are also configuration settings that allow you to customize how that data is processed. For example,
you might want to apply a filter to make sure your data doesn’t include any internal company traffic, or only
includes data from a particular country or region that’s important to your business.
And Justin, one very important thing to remember.

What’s that?

*Once Analytics processes the data, it’s stored in a database where it can’t be changed*

Great point, Krista! So remember, when you set up your configuration, don’t exclude any data you think you
might want to analyze later. Once the data has been processed and stored in the database, it will appear in
Google Analytics as reports. We’ll show you what these reports look like a little later.

The Analytics account structure

Now that you know how data gets collected, let’s look at how Google Analytics accounts are organized.

All of your Google Analytics accounts can be grouped under an “Organization,” which is optional. This allows
you to manage multiple Google Analytics accounts under one grouping.
Large businesses or agencies could have multiple accounts, while, medium to small-sized businesses generally
(only) use one account. When you create an account, you also automatically create a property and, within that
property, a view for that account. But each Analytics account can have multiple properties and each property
can have multiple views. This lets you organize your Analytics data collection in a way that best reflects your
business.

The Google Analytics Account determines how data is collected from your websites and manages who can
access that data. Typically, you would create separate Analytics accounts for distinct businesses or business
units.

Each Google Analytics account has at least one “property.” Each property can collect data independently of
each other using a unique tracking ID that appears in your tracking code.

You may assign multiple properties to each account, so you can collect data from different websites, mobile
applications, or other digital assets associated with your business. For example, you may want to have separate
properties for different sales regions or different brands. This allows you to easily view the data for an
individual part of your business, but keep in mind this won’t allow you to see data from separate properties in
aggregate.

View Settings

Just as each account can have multiple “properties,” each property can have multiple “views.” You can use a
feature called Filters in your configuration settings to determine what data you want to include in the reports
for each view.
For example, The Google Store sells merchandise from their website across different geographical regions.
They could create one view that includes all of their global website data. But if they wanted to see data for
individual regions, they could create separate views for North America, Europe, and Asia. If the Google Store
wanted to only see data for external traffic (that didn’t include their own store employees), they could set up a
view that filtered out internal traffic based on IP address.

The view level also lets you set Google Analytics “Goals”. Goals are a valuable way to track conversions, or
business objectives, from your website. A goal could be how many users signed up for an email newsletter, or
how many users purchased a product. We’ll discuss Goals and Conversions in a later lesson. Be thoughtful
when setting up your accounts, properties, and views, because you can’t change data once it’s been collected
and processed. by Google Analytics.

Before we move on to user access permissions, there are a couple important things to note about views:
 1. New views only include data from the date the view was created and onwards. When you create a new
view, it will not include past data.
2. If you delete a view, only administrators can recover that view within a limited amount of time.
Otherwise, the view will be permanently deleted.

User Permissions

You can assign permissions to other users at the account, property, or view level. Each level inherits
permissions from the level above it.

For example, if you have access to an account, then you have the same access permissions to the properties and
views underneath that account. But if you only have access permissions for a view, then you won’t have
permission to modify the property or account associated with that view.

By clicking “Admin”, Google Analytics lets you set user permissions for: “Manage Users,” “Edit,”
“Collaborate,” or “Read and Analyze.”

 “Manage Users” lets users add or remove user access to the account, property, or view.
 “Edit” lets users make changes to the configuration settings.
 “Collaborate” allows users to share things like dashboards or certain measurement settings.
 And finally, “Read and Analyze” lets users view data, analyze reports, and create dashboards, but
restricts them from making changes to the settings or adding new users.
How you configure your organizations, accounts, properties, and views can affect how your data gets
collected. Be thoughtful when setting up your Google Analytics implementation, and make sure you align your
properties and views of the data you collect with your overall business structure.

Navigating full reports: Part 1

Introduction

Previously, we showed you a high-level version of the “Audience Overview” report. At the
bottom of that report, there’s a link to “view full report,” where you can see expanded versions
of each Audience report in the left-hand navigation.

Now, let’s check out a full report.

When you open up the full report, you’ll see links underneath the segment picker that control the
different types of data in the report. The “Summary” view is a summary of the dimension
categorized by Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion metrics. This makes it easier to interpret
these metrics in the context of the marketing funnel we discussed in Unit 1.
“Site Usage” shows behavior metrics like users, sessions per user, new users, sessions, pages per
session, and average session duration. “Goals” will show metrics based on the number of goals
you’ve configured and will only show up if you’ve set up goals in Google Analytics, which we’ll
discuss later. And “Ecommerce” will show you transaction metrics if you’ve set up ecommerce
tracking in Analytics. Now let’s switch back to the Summary view.

Below the graph is the main data table. You can see that the first column shows the current
dimension “Country,” which was the last demographic category we selected in the Overview
report. You can switch between other dimensions like city, continent, and subcontinent by
clicking the links above the data table. It’s important to know you can also add another
dimension to the table for even more specific analysis. We call this a secondary dimension,
which is a common technique when analyzing data. For example, you could add a secondary
dimension of “device category” to the Location report to see what kinds of devices were used by
people in different countries while visiting your website.
Here you can see that each row of the table represents a different segment of traffic in the
“Country” dimension. Note that Analytics is only showing you the first 10 rows of data and only
as many columns as will fit on the screen. To view additional rows, use the “Show rows”
pulldown menu on the bottom-right side of the table to select how many rows you want to see, or
use the left and right arrows to scroll through 10 rows at a time. If you wish to view all of the
columns, you may need to use the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the report.

You can analyze the data table in different ways. Clicking on each column in the table toggles
the data sort between ascending and descending. The arrow in the column header shows which
column you’re currently sorting by. Note that by default, Analytics sorts this report by users.

It can also be useful to filter the data table to focus only on the segments of traffic that are
significant. Use the filter field at the top of the table to include only rows where the primary
dimension contains your filter term. For example, you may want to look at data for a specific
country like India, so rather than scroll through the table, you could simply type “India” into the
filter field and Analytics will show you only data for segments that include the term “India.”
“Advanced,” next to the search box, lets you apply even more sophisticated rules for filtering.
We’ll cover techniques for advanced filtering in an advanced course.

Report Visualization

 Next to the “advanced” link, there are several different visualization options:
 The “data table” view is the default visualization for most reports. This organizes your
data in a table broken out by acquisition, behavior, and conversion metrics for the
audience and acquisition reports.
 The “pie chart” icon creates a pie chart based on your data. This helps you compare the
percentages of a whole such as how many users are on desktops, tablets, and mobile
phones. You can choose which metric from your report should display in the pie chart
using the pulldown menu.
 The “performance” view shows a bar graph of your data. This helps you compare
individual segments side by side like which countries bring in the highest traffic. You can
also use the pull-down menu to select various metrics to be represented as bars.
 The “comparison view” shows you a bar graph to quickly see whether each entry in the
table is performing above or below the site average for the selected metric. If the value
for a given row is better than average, it appears green. If it’s below average, it appears
red. Again, you can use the drop-down menu to select which metric should be displayed.
 Finally, the “Pivot” view creates a pivot table in which both rows and columns can show
different dimension values for comparison. For example, a pivot table could show The
Google Store the bounce rate and number of sessions for each landing page and device
type.