Google Analytics: Beginners Notes
In marketing we have concept of purchase funnel.
Funnel has different stages namely Acquisition, Behaviour and
Conversion.
Acquisition involves building awareness and acquiring user interest.
Behaviour is when users engage with your business
Conversion is when a user becomes a customer and transacts with
your business.
GA collect data and compile it into a report.
You create a GA account first, then you add some java script to your
website.
It can gather information like language, type of browser, device,
traffic and operating system.
A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.
You setup configuration and once set, it send it to the data base
where it can’t be modified.
All accounts are managed under one Organisation and under account
you create a Property and under each Property you create Views.
Each GA has at least one property and can collect data independently
of each other using a unique tracking id appearing in tracking code.
View let you set goals.
Views does not include past data.
Only admins can recover a view within limited time.
Clicking admin will let you set user permissions.
Summary in report shows every right hand navigation.
Site Usage shows behaviour.
Goals show what you have set.
And ecommerce shows the conversions.
Campaign tags are of 5 types: Medium, source, campaign, content
and term.
“Medium” communicates the mechanism, or how you sent your
message to the user. You could include “email” for an email
campaign, “cpc” for paid search ads, or “social” for a social network.
“Source” communicates where the user came from. This could be a
specific web page or a link in an email. Source could also differentiate
the type of medium. So if the medium was “cpc” (or “cost per click”
paid traffic), the source might be “google,” “bing,” or “yahoo.” If the
medium was “email,” the source might be “newsletter”.
“Campaign” can communicate the name of your marketing campaign
such as “2015-Back-To-School” or “2015-Holiday-Sale”.
“Content” can be used to differentiate versions of a promotion. This
is useful when you want to test which version of an ad or promotion
is more effective. If you’re running a test between two different
versions of a newsletter, you might want to label these tags “v1-
10dollars-off” and “v2-nopromo” to help differentiate which
newsletter the data is associated with in Google Analytics.
“Term” is used to identify the keyword for paid search campaigns.
You would only use this field if you are manually tagging a paid
search campaign like Bing or Yahoo!. We’ll talk about the best way to
track Google Ads in a later lesson.
Google Analytics: Advance Notes
If we break down the URL string, you can see that it’s passing some
useful information to Analytics about the user that triggered the hit.
For example, we can see things like:
the language the user’s browser is set to
the name of the page they’re viewing
the screen resolution of the user’s device
the Analytics ID that associates that hit to the correct Analytics
account.
Three common hits are page view hit, event hit and transaction hit.
A “pageview” hit is triggered when a user loads a webpage with the
tracking code. This is the most common type of hit sent to Analytics.
Every time a user opens a page with the tracking code, a new
pageview hit will be sent.
An “event” hit lets you track every time a user interacts with a
particular element on your website. For example, you can track
whether users click a video Play button, a particular URL, or a
product carousel. Event hits pass four parameters of data in the URL:
event action, category, label, and value. You can use these to
categorize interactions in reports that are specific to your website.
We’ll go into more detail on event tracking a little later.
A “transaction” hit (also called an “ecommerce” hit) can pass data to
Analytics about ecommerce purchases such as products purchased,
transaction IDs, and “stock keeping units” (or SKUs).
GA first analyse the user as new or returning. Every time a user
appears, it creates a unique cid, through which it identifies the type
of the user. The only limitation is that these IDs are stored on the
basis of cookies. If user clears the browser cookies, the id is lost and
GA will identify it as a NEW user.
Sessions timeout after 30 minutes of inactivity. If a person visits the
opage after 30 minutes then 2 hits would be counted.
Configuration rules include data filters, goals, data grouping,custom
dimensions and custom metrics.
Segmentation helps to view subsets of data in report.
You can create user or session segments.
User segments can span multiple session upto 90 days.
You can create seperate user segment for age, gender, date etc or a
combination.
Session segments create single session like Goals completed,
revenue generate etc.
You can apply upto 4 segments.
Cohort Analysis Report groups an audience based on acquisition date
and compares behavior metrics over several weeks.
Active User report shows users who initiated sessions over 1-day, 7-
day, 14-day, and 30-day periods.
Flat Table is a Custom Report shows a static, sortable table with rows
of data.
Remarketing is a powerful tool that lets you target ad content to
users who have already visited your website.
Dynamic remarketing let you target users more precisely.
Advertising report features and google ads and video 360 account
linking must be enable to enable remarketing.
540 days is the maximum days a user can be included in remarketing.
1000 user cookies does an audience list require to be eligible for
Google Ads Search Ad remarketing.
