Getting Started with Google Analytics

During my internship at Relationship One, I had the chance to dive into Google Analytics (GA). Our Google Analytics account had been set up, but only to the extent that webpages were tagged and there was a basic dashboard that didn’t provide much actionable insight. There was much more to be unlocked and discovered! Enter me: intern with zero Google Analytics experience, but eager and willing to learn!

Using Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik and his blog, Occam’s Razor, as a guide I took the team on a journey to maximizing the website data and insight available in GA. During the project I documented lessons and ‘ah-ha moments’ that really made a difference in how Relationship One’s marketing team used the tool. Here are some of the things I learned that may also be helpful to those just getting started with GA.

1. Know the Purpose and Goals of Your Website.

If your organization has an e-commerce site, you know the main purpose is to sell your product or service, but don’t forget about its other important purposes.

If don’t have an e-commerce site, figure out your website’s purpose and use that as a guideline for knowing what type of information you need in order to see actionable insights. Define what conversion is for your site – whether it be form submissions, downloads, or blog subscriptions – and use it as an outcome in the reports you create.

2. Tag Everything.

Tag pages, campaigns, and events so that Google Analytics can properly track what is happening on your website and provide accurate reports. Without tagging, you cannot attribute where visitors come from and differentiate which marketing efforts are working and which are not.

You may already know that you need to tag your website’s pages and campaigns. But did you know that you can tag events? An event can be a click, form submission, blog subscription, download, etc. If the visitor can interact with it, you can tag it as an event. Make sure to set up events for all meaningful page interactions that align with your strategic goals for the website. If a visitor arrives on your blog page from Facebook, subscribes to your blog, returns and converts, you want to know that! Gathering this data over time gives you strategy over guessing.

Tagging doesn’t necessarily require special coding skills. Google Tag Manager makes it easy to do.

3. Create Goals and Assign Values to Them.

Without goals, how will you know if certain sources, landing pages, or campaigns are successful? Set goals based on the averages you see over time. There’s no right or wrong answer and you can always change them if you see a new and sustaining trend.

4. Filter Out Unwanted Data.

Use the Filter option under the Admin tab in Google Analytics to exclude employee activity and all of the devices they access your website on. You can find individual internal IP addresses by typing in “What is my IP?” in Google.

5. Turn on Demographics and Interests.

These two Audience reporting options are not automatically enabled, but can offer information on visitor age, gender, and interests based on whether they are higher or lower in the purchasing funnel. These reports can be used to segment your data. Be sure to read Enable Demographics and Interests reports and Adhere to the Analytics Advertising Features Policy on the Google Support website first.

6. Turn on the Search Console.

Enabling the Search Console in Google Analytics will allow you to view the Acquisition reporting options under Search Engine Optimization. These reports will help you understand your presence in search engine results and whether your visitors are being led to the most effective landing pages based on their keywords. Search Console is separate from Google Analytics, but they should be used together to make decisions on SEO. Google Ad Planner is another supplementary tool for segmenting and analyzing search keywords.

7. Upgrade Your Reports.

You don’t need to stick to the default reports in Google Analytics and navigate through all of the menus each time. Use the ‘+Add Segment’, ‘Secondary Dimension’, and filtering options or make custom reports (under the Customization tab or ‘Customize’ button in any report) that help you make decisions for your business. Some examples from Avinash may get the ball rolling. Use the Shortcuts feature as a quick way to view your key standard or custom reports, but know that these reports are only active on your own account. You can add any standard or custom report to the Shortcuts by clicking the ‘Shortcut’ button in the report.

Hopefully these recommendations will help you make better use of Google Analytics. There’s so much valuable insight available! The best thing you can do now is to just get started. The data might be messy and you might not understand everything – that’s okay. Just keep exploring and researching. You’ll learn a lot along the way, just like I did!