Why is Google Analytics Important?

You can use Google Analytics (often referred to as GA or analytics for short) to transform the raw data about your visitors and their movements on the site into easy to read, valuable information.

Using Google Analytics can help you understand what your users are interested in and where your site might need improvement, as well as spark ideas for new content or methods of engagement.

What You’ll Walk Away With

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

• Understand what Google Analytics is
• Navigate through the Google Analytics interface effectively

We’ll cover how to read the reports, how to track additional website elements, and other topics in future lessons. For now, you just need to know your way around the reporting suite.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is an online platform that allows site owners to track traffic to their site and visitors’ actions on the site. It can provide an overview of how your site is being used or be used to dig deeper for more detailed analysis.

Setting Up Google Analytics

Outfitting your website with Google Analytics tracking code is typically quite simple.

What you’ll need:

• The Google Account you want to use to manage the reporting
• Access to the backend of the website you want to track (i.e. where you can add content and alter code)

All set? The steps for setting up an Analytics account are as follows:

1. Visit the Google Analytics home page and and sign-up or log into your existing account.
2. Find your tracking code. If you’re setting up a new account it will be presented to you; if you have an existing account, it’s located in Admin –> Tracking Info –> Tracking Code.
3. Your tracking code must then be placed on every page of the website you want to track, directly before the closing head tag (</head>).
   • It’s a good idea to place the code within the site header so it will automatically be added to every page.
   • Do not alter the code in any way, as this could break it and prevent it from reporting.

Once the tracking code has successfully been placed on the site, the Tracking Code page will show if the code is working properly.

Analytics is then ready to go! If you run into issues installing your code on your site, try using Google’s Tag Assistant extension. It will tell you what issues it’s encountering and link you to relevant articles to the fix the root cause.

Using Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager allows you to easily make changes to your website’s tracking code. Your web tracking codes are stored in containers, which can be easily installed sitewide and then be remotely modified.

Google Tag Manager containers also allow for easy bulk changes and implementations. If, for example, you wanted to add a specific tracking code on a number of pages, rather than manually adding it to each page, you can simply write a rule that only places the code on pages matching the rule’s criteria.

We’ll talk more about using Google Tag Manager in future lessons. For now, just know that it’s an alternative way to add tracking code to your website and can drastically reduce the amount of technical implementation time needed for adding or modifying web tracking codes.

The Interface

Your Analytics home screen lists the properties for which you have installed Analytics.

Each property can house multiple websites. For instance, if our greeting card company, Things by Bean, had a main website and a secondary website used at conventions and other events, both would be housed under a single Google Analytics property.

By default, Analytics opens to the Overview section of the Audience category. It shows basic information, including a graph of the sessions on your site over time and the number of users.

Date Ranges

The default time range in Analytics is the previous month. You can set the date range by clicking on the dates shown in the upper right hand corner of the screen. You can also compare two separate time frames. To do so, check the Compare option and enter your second date range in the provided fields.

Analytics should stay on that date range throughout your session. However, it’s a good idea to double check that your date ranges are consistent as you navigate through Analytics, as different date ranges will deliver different data sets.

Dimensions and Metrics

Dimensions and metrics will be covered more extensively in another lesson, but it’s valuable to know about these elements as you make your way through Analytics.

A dimension is a category such as browser type or page title. A metric, on the other hand, is how those dimensions are measured. For example, if we wanted to see how many visitors came to our site using Firefox, the dimension would be browser type, and the metric would be the number of visitors.

You can use dimensions to filter your data in any section of Analytics. This option can be found below the graph of the information and above the data table.

The Four Major Sidebar Sections

The left side of the page contains several sections and most of your navigation will be done here. The first four options are Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, and Real Time.

We’ll discuss how to use these sections in our more advanced Google Analytics lessons.

For now, we’ll be talking about the next four sections found on the sidebar and the types of data they contain in Analytics.

The four major sections of Google Analytics navigation are:

• Audience
• Acquisition
• Behavior
• Conversions

Audience

You can find information about who your visitors are in the Audience tab in the sidebar.

We’ll only be discussing a few of the subsections in the Audience reports for this lesson. If you’d like more information about one of these sections, you can click on it in the table to learn more from Google’s help articles, linked below.

Audience Overview

The Audience Overview section provides general data about the users on your site, such as how many users have visited the site, the language they speak, and how many of them are first time versus returning visitors.

Geo

The Geo category includes information on the language spoken by site visitors and their geographic location. Clicking on either sub option will bring you to a more detailed page.

Behavior

Here’s what you’ll find in each sub tab of the Behavior section of the Audience category:

Technology

The Technology section of the Audience tab includes data on two topics:

• Browser & OS: See which Internet browsers visitors are using to access your site and their operating system (ie. if they have a Mac or a PC)
• Network: See which Internet provider your users have

Mobile

Under the Mobile sub tab of the Audience section are Overview and Devices options.

• Overview: Presents the breakdown of users who accessed the site via a desktop/laptop, mobile phone, or tablet.
• Devices: Provides more detailed information about the machines visitors used when they accessed the site, such as if they were using an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy.

Users Flow

This tab displays a flowchart that illustrates users’ movements throughout the site. This can provide insight into their thought processes and reveal behavior patterns.

Acquisition

The Acquisition section focuses on how users came to your site. For example, you can see if they found you on Google or through another site.

Most of the commonly used subsections for this category are listed below. We won’t be talking about every subsection in this lesson, so as before, you can read more on Google’s Analytics support site, linked below.

Acquisition Overview

The Acquisition Overview provides a visual snapshot of how users have reached your site. Graphs show the number of sessions over time as well as the distribution of the channels used to find the site.

All Traffic Channels

Channels are the different avenues through which a user can access a site. For example, if you click on a link to a site in Facebook, you would have taken a social channel to get to the site. This tab breaks down how many visitors utilized each channel. Channels include:

• Direct: A user types the exact URL into the address bar
• Organic Search: A user conducts a search on a search engine like Google and they clicked on the result that represented your site
• Referral: A user clicks on a link to your site from another website
• Paid Search: A user clicks on a pay per click advertisement that leads to your site
• Social: A user clicks on a link to your site that was on social media

All Referrals

This section provides detailed information on the traffic to your site that came from referrals. You can see which site individuals came from, and how many people came from that site.

AdWords Campaigns

This section allows you to link to your AdWords account to get more detailed information on visits that were a result of clicking on a PPC ad.

Queries

This tab shows you which queries, i.e. keywords, visitors typed into a search engine that have brought up your site as a result. Hopefully you find that the user clicked through to your site, believing it was a good result that was relevant to their query.

Social Overview

The Social section shows how social media sources have contributed to your site’s traffic. It includes the following:

• Overview: A brief overview of how social networks impact site traffic
• Network Referrals: A breakdown of which social media networks have led to visits to your site, how many visitors, and how engaged those users were
• Landing Pages: Information about user engagement and the number of sessions on the pages visitors landed on when coming from a social media network
• Conversions: Displays the number of conversions from visitors coming to your site from social media
• Plugins: Provides a summary of which content is being “Liked” or “+1” etc.
• Users Flow: A flowchart illustrating the movements of users from social media

Behavior

The Behavior section of Analytics provides insight into what your visitors are doing while they are on your site. It includes the following subcategories:

Behavior Overview

The Behavior Overview gives a quick glimpse of how many page views your site is getting, the average amount of time spent on a page, and the bounce and exit rates, etc.

Behavior Flow

Much like the User Flow section in the Audience tab, the Behavior Flow illustrates how users are navigating through the site.

Site Content

The Site Content tab provides the opportunity to dig into the specific data for each page of your site. There are four subsections, including:

• All Pages: Shows pageviews, average amount of time spent, entrances, bounce rates, and exit percentages for each web page. You can toggle between the page URL and the Page Title in the bar above the data table to make the data easier to organize.

• Content Drilldown: Differs from the All Pages tab in that it allows you to compare sections of a website rather than just the individual pages.
Content Drilldown Example
With our greeting card company, let’s say we had a birthday section and a graduation section, each with their own subpages. In the Content Drilldown, we would be able to compare how birthday section as a whole is doing compared to the entire graduation section. You can read this blog post for more details.

• Landing Pages: Provides information on the pages where visitors enter your site. You can find session and engagement information for your landing pages here, as well as goal conversions and completions.
• Exit Pages: Shows the pages from which your visitors leave your site. This data can reveal which pages might need to be revamped to keep users on your website.

Site Speed

This section shows how fast your web pages are loading in comparison to your site’s average, and also provides suggestions to improve load times.

Site Search

The Site Search tab summarizes what users have typed into your website’s search bar, which requires some set-up to track. It has three reporting subsections.

• Usage: Compares the number of visits that did and did not include a search.
• Search Terms: Shows exactly what visitors typed into your site search bar. This information can point to potential improvements for a better user experience.
Search Terms Example
For instance, if many users on our greeting card company’s site searched for Doctor Who themed birthday cards, we could give this product its own page or add it to the navigation menu so it would be easier to find.

• Pages: Shows on which pages searches are conducted. Seeing from which pages users are conducting searches can guide your content creation and ensure that all desired information is found on the appropriate page.

Events

Events are specific actions your users complete while they are on your site. You can configure an event to “fire” when a visitor clicks a particular button, submits a form, etc. This section shows you where events are being completed, which occur the most often, and the path users took before they triggered an event.

Conversions

This tab includes four subsections. In these reports, you’ll find out which website objectives your visitors are completing and how they’re being completed.

Goals

The Goals tab has five subsections. We’ll briefly describe the most valuable.

• Goals: Displays the URL for the pages you have identified as a signal to Analytics that a goal has been completed. Note that you have to set up goals for Analytics to track them. We’ll show you how to do this in a future lesson.
Goal Example
With our company Things by Bean, we might make our “Thank You for Contacting Us” webpage a goal completion location because when someone reaches that page, it implies that they sent in their information and a goal was accomplished.

• Reverse Goal Path: Shows which pages visitors went to before they completed a goal, giving you an idea of what might have spurred them to complete a goal.
• Funnel Visualization: Highlights the number of users in each step of the funnel.  You must have created a funnel to see data. A funnel is a sequence of pages that lead your visitor to complete a goal. To learn more about Funnel Visualization, you can visit this page by LunaMetrics.
• Goal Flow:  Similar to Funnel Visualization, but the steps of a Goal Flow are not defined as they are in a funnel. To see the major differences between the two, check out this table from Google.

Multi-Channel Funnels

This section shows how users might see a combination of website referrals, social media mentions, and email campaigns before converting. Since we can’t tell which channel led to the conversion, we can attribute this conversion to the combination of all three. Google’s instructional video provides insight into using the Multi-Channel Funnel functionality.

The Four Tabs at the Top of the Page

Let’s move away from the left sidebar to the tabs at the top of the page. The four tabs are:

• Home
• Reporting
• Customization
• Admin

The Reporting tab is where you’ll spend most of your time, but it’s good to know what you’ll find in the other tabs as well.

Home

The Home tab is where you’ll find your list of properties and the websites associated with them.

Reporting

Here is where you interact with and view the data associated with the property you selected in the Home tab. The left sidebar contains all of the reporting sections that we just covered in this lesson.

Customization

In the Customization tab you can make your own custom reports. We’ll teach you how to build custom reports in an upcoming lesson.

Admin

The final tab at the top of the page is the Admin tab. Here you can change user settings, set up filters, find your tracking code, and more.

Accounts, Properties, and Views

The Admin tab is divided into three sections which define the account structure in Analytics.

• Account: The highest level in Analytics and what lets you access the tool. An account can have multiple properties.
• Property: Essentially, your website. A property can have multiple views.
• View: Different perspectives on or collections of data.

Confused? We’ll use our go-to example to help clear things up.

Our Account would be our company, Online Academy. Properties would include any websites we have, such as thingsbybean.com, and if we have other sites like info.thingsbybean.com. Then, within each property we could have multiple views, such as a view that filters out visits to our site from within our store and one that does not.

So our example could look like this:

Things by Bean (Account) → thingsbybean.com (Property) → All Website Data (View)

Google has an extensive explanation of this account structure here.

Goals

We’ve discussed that goals are actions we want visitors to take while they are on our site (and we’ll discuss Goals & Events again in greater depth in upcoming lessons). You can set up goals in the Admin tab, under the View section.

Here’s what you have to do to make a goal:

• Click the red “+New Goal” button on the left side of the page.
• Name and design your goal. The name should be descriptive so you can easily remember what that goal is.
• Select the type of goal you want to make.
• Fill in the required information.

There are several types of goals that align with different actions users can take on a site.

• Destination Goals: Refer to when a user visits a particular page.
• Duration Goals: Refer to when a user has spent a specific amount of time on a page or site.
• Pages/Screens per Session Goals: Refer to when a user has viewed a certain number of pages on the site.
• Event Goals: Refer to when a user has taken a specific action, such as clicking a “Contact Us” button. An event must be setup before you can make an event goal.

Note that you can only have 20 goals per view and goals cannot be deleted. If you need more goals, you’ll need to create another view or edit an existing goal.

Filters

Filters allow you to place limitations on the data you’ll see in Analytics. This means you can ignore actions you don’t want to include in your data, or focus only on the ones you do want.

For example, if we didn’t want to include our own visits to our company site from our physical store, we could filter out our store’s IP address. With this filter, any of the actions we take on our site at our own store won’t be included in our data, so we won’t skew our own results.

Try These Tracking Exercises

Complete the exercises below before moving on. You’ll gain critical hands-on experience that will help you become the marketer you were meant to be. Plus, it makes completing the quiz at the end of the lesson even easier.

Exercise A: Reading Google Analytics

Effectively reading Google Analytics’ reports comes down to asking yourself a few questions:

• Where did the traffic come from (e.g. search, social, etc.)?
• Where did the traffic go (e.g. homepage, service page, blog post, etc.)?
• What did the traffic do (e.g. purchased, bounced, viewed more pages, etc.)?

So by looking at your sources for the traffic and analyzing their behavior, you can start pinpointing the exact marketing effort that made the impact.

Exercise B: Troubleshooting GA Installation

Google Analytics installation process is fairly easy — you add one small snippet of code in a site-wide element and it begins collecting data.

However, technical peculiarities about your website and other innocent errors can create problems during installation. But thanks to Google’s Tag Assistant, identifying those issues is easier than ever.

Why Understanding Metrics, Dimensions, & Other Analytics Terms Is Important

Google Analytics gathers and organizes tons of information from your website and other sources. But to find meaningful trends in that data, you need to understand how that data is organized. And that starts with metrics, dimensions, and other basic components in a Google Analytics profile.

What You’ll Walk Away With

By the end of this lesson you should:

• Have a strong grasp of what metrics and dimensions are and how they are used to represent data in Analytics
• Understand what filters are and how to set them up
• Know how Analytics defines users and sessions

Metrics

As you move through Analytics, you’ll see that most pages in the “Reporting” tab contain data tables. These data tables contain Metrics and Dimensions that summarize the information about your site.

What are Metrics?

A metric is a quantified value. These numbers represent the data itself and are often sums or ratios.

For example, with our greeting card business, Things by Bean, we will probably want to know how much time individuals spend on our site. This numerical value representing the amount of time is a metric.

One of Google’s examples is that for a city, a metric could be the population, or number of people living there.

Default Metrics in the Analytics Interface

Some metrics are automatically included in the data tables in Analytics. These typically include:

• Sessions
• % New Sessions
• Avg. Session Duration
• Bounce Rate
• Pages/Session, etc.

Some standard reports will use difference metrics. But for the most part, these are the ones on display by default in each standard report in Google Analytics.

Dimensions

Dimensions are an aspect of the data table that’s shown on most pages in Analytics. Dimensions and Metrics work together to communicate your site’s data. You can read Google’s explanation of how Dimensions and Metrics are related by reading this page of the Analytics help section.

What are Dimensions?

Dimensions can be thought of as attributes that categorize data. For example, if we want to see how long people are on our Things by Bean website, our dimension would be Session Duration, and the metric to measure it would be the number representing the amount of time.

Dimensions in the Analytics Interface

Each of the information tabs in Analytics has specific Dimensions that are used to best express that category of data. While many of the Dimensions shown on each page are the same, they can differ based on the data being described. You can also specify dimensions in custom reports, which we’ll discuss in an upcoming lesson.

Filters

Sometimes there are sources of data that you specifically want excluded or isolated in your Analytics reports.

Filters allow you to do just that — select which particular traffic sources are reported on in Analytics.

Why Use Filters?

It’s essential that Analytics report only on relevant data so you get the most accurate picture of your online performance. If you do not exclude traffic sources that are biased, you can skew your data.

For instance, if we did not exclude web traffic from our Things by Bean store in Analytics, the number of visits and interactions etc. would be inflated and we wouldn’t have a realistic picture of our site.

How to Setup a Filter

To setup a filter, you’ll need Edit permission at the account level:

1. Navigate to the Admin tab, and click All Filters, which is under the Account column.
2. Then click + New Filter and Create New Filter. You’ll be prompted to create a name for your filter. Make sure you choose a descriptive name so you understand exactly which sources of traffic are being limited.
3. Next, select either a Predefined Filter or a Custom Filter. You can learn more about the different types of filters and their purposes here. Use the dropdown menus to select if you want to include or exclude the traffic source or destination, which type of traffic you want to limit, and finally the expression that will specify the exact source/destination.
4. Make sure you apply the filter to the appropriate view(s), click save, and you’re done!

An Example of Setting Up a Filter

Let’s say Things by Bean wants to make sure that no traffic in Analytics is from sessions on the business’s IP address (since it’s likely an employee, not a prospective buyer). Once we’ve navigated to our Create a Filter page, here’s what we do:

1. Create a name. We’re going to name our filter “Removing Store Traffic.”
2. We’re going to select our options for a predefined filter.
• For Filter Type, we’re going to select Exclude.
• For Source or Destination we’re going to select Traffic from the IP addresses. Using an IP address is an easy way for us to identify where traffic is coming from and ensure that no traffic from our store comes through to Analytics. If you don’t know how to find your IP address, go to Google and search “What is my IP?” It should come right up!
• Our expression will be That are Equal to because we know exactly which IP address we want removed, and we don’t want to exclude any other traffic with this filter.
• We then need to enter the IP address we want to block from Analytics.
3. Pick which views will have this filter. We’re going to select All Web Site Data because we want to be sure that every view in Analytics has our store’s traffic excluded.
4. Click save, and that’s it! The end result should look like this:

Sessions & Users

Sessions and Users refer to the way you categorize website hits. Simply put, a User can visit your site multiple times, creating multiple Sessions.

What are sessions?

Sessions are the actual visits to your website. A user can take multiple actions on your site within one session. For instance, a customer could browse birthday cards, our brand new cards, and make a purchase during the same session.

What are users?

A user is an individual who visits your site. Note that just as an individual can visitor your site multiple times, a single user can have multiple sessions on your site.

Try These Tracking Exercises

Complete the exercises below before moving on. You’ll gain critical hands-on experience that will help you become the marketer you were meant to be. Plus, it makes completing the quiz at the end of the lesson even easier.

Exercise: New Analytics View

A good rule of thumb for Google Analytics is to always have at least 3 different views:

1. Master View (i.e. where you’re most often reporting from)
2. Test View (i.e. where you test your filters, etc.)
3. Raw Data View (i.e. an untouched, filterless view for comparison)

Exercise: IP Filter

Your Google Analytics account will register any interaction with your website — including interactions from you and your team members. So, to avoid skewing your audience interaction data, it’s often best to exclude any interactions originating from your organization. And the simplest way to do this is by filtering out activity from your IP address.

Why Goals and Events Are Important

Goal and Event tracking are fundamental parts of a Google Analytics installation. Together, Goals and Events map the most important moments on your buyers’ journey.

This is important because knowing where your audience started and stopped during their buying journey is critical for understanding why they started or stopped along their journey.

Armed with this knowledge, you can easily clear any obstacle standing between your audience and your objective.

What You’ll Walk Away With

At the end of this lesson, you’ll know:

• How to nominate Goals and Events in Google Analytics
• How to set up Goals and Events in Google Analytics
• How to troubleshoot Goals and Events in Google Analytics

Defining Goals and Events

Every website has an objective—getting somebody to buy something, fill out a contact form, sign-up for a newsletter, etc. Goals and Events are how you track those objectives.

Goals are used to measure how effective your site is at getting users to complete your target objectives. So each time a user completes your objective (e.g. submits a form), a Goal will fire, logging a conversion in your Google Analytics account.

Events are recorded interactions leading up to a Goal—think of them as milestones. They’re tracked independently from web page level data (e.g. # of clicks a button receives). Events can be used for tracking unrelated to Goals, but those uses are infrequent and often require advanced implementation.

How To Use Goals And Events

Plot important points along the buyer’s journey.

Recall our first lesson, Understanding Intent and the Buyer’s Journey. In that lesson, we talked about the different stages of a buyer’s journey—awareness, consideration, decision, and experience.

Ideally, your website should have one or more objectives for each stage and for your different target audiences.

For example, the ultimate objective during the decision stage for consumers browsing Things by Bean would be completing a purchase. For retailers on Things by Bean, the ultimate objective would be a form submission requesting a wholesale purchase.

After identifying your objectives for each stage of the buying process and audience type, you can create Goals based on the actions that complete the objectives. Then, each time an objective is completed, a Goal (AKA conversion, goal completion, etc.) fires in Google Analytics. In the cases discussed above, we could create Goals for successful purchase completions and form submissions.

Events should be assigned similarly to Goals. Events should reflect the interactions leading up to the completion of an objective. For example, expanding an image for a card may trigger an Event. While this doesn’t equate to a sale, it’s an important interaction along the way to a sale.

Also, two things to note. First, there is a variety of advanced tracking that can be done with Google Analytics Ecommerce tracking. We’ll discuss that in a future lesson. Second, Events can be used for a variety of other purposes (e.g. troubleshooting); goal tracking is simply the most basic use.

Set Up and Test Your Goals

After mapping your Goals to your website’s objectives, it’s time to set up your Goals.

Setting Up Your Goals
To set up Goals, you need to navigate to the “Goal” section in Google Analytics. It’s found in the “Admin” section of the site, under the “View” column. Once in the “Goal” section, click “+New Goal”.

There are several Goal tracking options here. The only option we’re going to discuss is the first one—the Destination Goal.

A Destination Goal is triggered when a user reaches a certain page. Most commonly, it’s the page that shows after somebody completed an objective, so it should be an accurate measurement when you’re trying to determine the effectiveness of your website.

For example, if somebody makes a purchase on Things by Bean, it redirects the buyer to an Order Summary page. We would use the URL for the Order Summary page as the Goal’s destination URL. This way, we’d know precisely how many people successfully submitted an order by looking at the number of Goal completions.

You can also assign a value to a Goal, allowing you to easily view and report on transactions from your marketing campaigns.

If you’re able to calculate the estimated value for that Goal (e.g. ~$110  for wholesale card order requests) then you should do that.

Testing Your Goals
Once you’re satisfied the Goal is properly configured, click “Verify this Goal” option at the bottom of the page. This will use data in your Analytics account to determine if the Goal would have fired in the past 7 days.

If you do not have data in your account that would register as a Goal Completion (e.g. nobody has fulfilled Goal criteria since being set up) then clicking on “Verify this Goal” will not work.

Another way to test Goals would be to complete the triggering action (e.g. making a purchase) and wait 24 hours to see if it’s recorded in Google Analytics. It’s important to keep the time lag in mind when QAing and troubleshooting Google Analytics goals.

Set Up and Test Your Events

Events allow you to establish milestones your visitors will pass through on their way to a completing a goal. Measuring those milestones can help you identify where users are struggling to convert.

Setting Up Your Events
Events are set up by adding a small snippet of code to the website element you want to track, such as a button, a link, etc.

This is what the code looks like:

    ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘category’, ‘action’, ‘label’, value);

Note: This method is used in Google Universal Analytics. If you’re using an older version, you’ll have to look here for instructions (although they operate very similarly).

When using the code on your site, you’d replace category, action, label, and value with something descriptive.

For example, if Things by Bean wanted to track how many people were clicking on the “Sale” link in their navigation, this is what the code would look like:

    ga(‘send’, ‘event’, ‘button’, ‘click’, ‘nav buttons’, 2);

This syntax classifies the event as being in the “button” category, notes that it involved a click, and includes where the action occurred—in the universal navigation.

We won’t go into detail about how to actually paste the code into your website. Installing the code is CMS dependent so there are too many variables to describe here. If you’re struggling with this, we advise working with a developer. You can also refer to Google’s guide to event tracking for developers.

Testing your Events.
You can find existing Events by looking at the “Events” reports found under “Behavior” in Google Analytics reporting.

If there are no Events showing up in your Google Analytics reports, then that could mean:

• You don’t have any Events set up on your website
• The Events are set up but they’re not firing
• Nobody has triggered an Event yet

The best way to test Events is to use the following process:

• Right-click on the page and select “Inspect.”
• Navigate to the “Network” tab and check the “Preserve Log” box.

• Complete the action you are trying to track, such as submitting a form or clicking a button.
• In the “Inspect” window type in “collect,” “pageview,” or “event.” You’ll then see several items under the “Name” section.

Click to enlarge

• Hover over the items in the “Name” section and search for your event category, action, and label. They should be preceded by “ec” for event category, “ea” for event action, and “el” for event label.

It’s important to note that it’s worthwhile to check your events on a regular basis to ensure that they are tracking correctly. If an event isn’t firing properly, it’s best to contact a developer for support.

Try This Tracking Exercise

Complete the exercises below before moving on. You’ll gain critical hands-on experience that will help you become the marketer you were meant to be. Plus, it makes completing the quiz at the end of the lesson even easier.

Exercise: Mapping A Website’s Goals & Events

Setting up goals and events in Google Analytics is critical for understanding the impact of your marketing efforts. By clearly recording when a visitor completes a desirable action, you can better understand which parts of your campaign are contributing the most to your bottom line results.

Why Custom Reporting Is Important

Showing the impact of your efforts in an easy-to-understand report is essential for client communications. Unfortunately, the pre-configured reports in Google Analytics don’t always provide a clear view of the impact of your efforts.

Custom reports allow you to create a more precise view of website activity arising from your efforts. They give you more flexibility in terms of choosing your dimensions and metrics as well as more flexibility in terms of reporting navigation and complexity.

What You’ll Walk Away With

By the end of this lesson, you’ll know:

• How to create and edit custom reports in Google Analytics
• How to share custom reports in Google Analytics

Defining Custom Reporting

A custom report is a user-created report featuring any combination of dimensions and metrics. The custom reports in Google Analytics draw their data from a website’s online (or offline) data sets.

How To Create Custom Reports

Custom reports are found in the “Customization” tab found in every Google Analytics account. From this screen, you can manage existing custom reports and create new ones.

Creating A New Custom Report

You can create new custom reports by clicking “New Custom Report” while on the customization tab. Pretty intuitive so far, right? Next, you get to build the report. And there are tons of options to choose from. We’ll briefly cover the different options available, but we’ll primarily point you towards the most frequently used building blocks for custom reports.

Choosing Report Type

Explorer: You’ll be using this type of custom report 90% of the time. It creates a data table that allows you to include a bunch of metrics and dimensions in the report. Plus, it includes a nice big line graph. The main advantage of the explorer report type is the ability to explore or drill down into your data (e.g. click on a single page URL and view additional information confined to that URL, like the browser types used when accessing the page).

Flat Table: This report type provides you with a data table that uses a single primary dimension and a single group of metrics. This is useful for simple reports.

Map Overlay: This report type visualizes your data as a color-coordinated map. While often impressive looking at first glance, it’s not as efficient in communicating information as the previous two reports. But if you’re reporting to somebody who doesn’t like reading reports, this one will make them smile. 

Selecting Metrics

Recalling one of our earlier lessons, metrics are the numbers you want to report on: pageviews, avg. time on page, goal completions, etc. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of metrics to choose from, so we’ll confine our discussion to those most frequently used.

Important Metrics

• Sessions
• Pageviews
• Goal completions (sitewide and for specific Goals)
• Goal conversion rate (sitewide and for specific Goals)
• Avg. time on page
• Bounce rate
• Exit rate

Selecting Dimensions

Going back again to our earlier lesson, recall that dimensions are how you categorize the numbers you want to report on— URLs, page titles, browser types,  etc. Yet again, there are dozens more dimensions than you’ll need; we’ll stick with the most important ones for this lesson.

Important Dimensions

• Source
• Medium
• Traffic type
• Page
• Landing page
• City
• Event category
• Browser version

Adding Filters

As you should recall from a previous lesson, filters prevent specified types of web data from showing up in your reports.

You can use filters to zero in on a certain type of data in an individual report (e.g. only include traffic type exactly matches organic). You can also use filters to remove a certain type of data (e.g. exclude city exactly matching your hometown).

For example, if you wanted to know how Things by Bean was performing without search engine traffic, you could exclude traffic type exactly matching “organic” and then run your report.

Tabbing Reports

You can expand the range of data to include by adding tabs to the report. Doing this allows you to:

• Use multiple report types
• Keep metric groups more easily organized
• Reorganize dimension drilldowns

To add a tab to a report, click on “+add report tab” found at the top of the page when you’re creating or editing a custom report. From there, it’s the same process as building out a new report.

Basic Building Blocks for a Custom Report

Listed below are the building blocks for a basic custom report.

• Type: Explorer
• Metrics: Sessions, goal conversion rate, pageviews, avg. time on page, bounce rate
• Dimensions: Page, source/medium, city, hour
• Filters: Include traffic type exactly matching organic

Use these settings to create your own report. You can also use this pre-built custom report into your own Analytics profile and edit it to your heart’s content. Note: to use the pre-built report, you need to access the hyperlink while logged into the account you use to view your Analytics profile.

Organizing Your Custom Reports

If your account has a lot of custom reports (or you plan on creating a lot) you can organize them with categories. Essentially folders, you can name your categories whatever you want and file your reports accordingly. You can create categories by clicking the “+ New Category” button while on the “Customization” screen.

How To Share Your Custom Reports

Sharing the reports you create is simple. If the party you’re sharing the report with has access to the Analytics view, they’ll be able to see your report from the moment you publish it. Additionally, you can apply the report to all of your Analytics profiles.

To do this, simply create a new report or edit an existing one. At the bottom of the Create/Edit page, there’s a list of Analytics profiles capable of viewing it; select the profiles you want to include.

If you’re sharing the reports with somebody who cannot access the reports in Google Analytics, then you’ll need to export the report as a PDF. The “Export” option is found at the top of the page when viewing the report.

Try This Tracking Exercise

Complete the exercises below before moving on. You’ll gain critical hands-on experience that will help you become the marketer you were meant to be. Plus, it makes completing the quiz at the end of the lesson even easier.

Exercise: Creating a Custom Report

The best way to create a Custom Report is to have a vision for what the finished report will look like. To do this, you can ask yourself these questions:

• Who is reading the report? Does this individual need high-level information or are they interested in something specific?
• Who is the subject of the report? Are you reporting on all visitors? Is there a segment of your visitors you should draw attention to?
• What data do you want to show? Are there particular traffic sources you want emphasize or exclude?
• Where should the report focus on? Are there particular pages of the site you want to analyze or is it the website as a whole?
• How long of a time period do you want to capture and/or compare? Does the time period for your report contain enough information to accurately depict trends, rather than temporary fluctuations?

Why Are Segments Valuable?

Segmenting your visitors can help you identify how behavior patterns differ between groups. This makes it easier to understand how to appeal to different sets of visitors and how to tailor your digital campaigns to that segment of visitors particular needs.

For example, seeing what pages are visited by users who complete a goal vs. users who do not complete a goal can reveal a critical webpage in the buyer’s journey.

What You’ll Walk Away With

In this lesson, you’ll learn:

• What Google Analytics segments are
• Why they are valuable
• How to use them

What Is a Segment?

In analytics, a segment is a subset of your data that is grouped based on a shared characteristic.

There are two types of segments.

• Segments based on users. A user segment groups site visitors together based on a characteristic that can describe the users.For example, a user segment could include visitors who are located in the U.S. or those who used a Mac to access the site.

• Segments based on sessions. A session segment groups sessions together that have a common trait.For example, a session segment could include sessions that lasted more than 10 minutes or sessions in which more than 5 pages were viewed.

How to Create New Segments

The option to create a segment is located at the top of the page in Analytics and is labeled +Add Segment.

You’ll then be in the segment builder. Here you can choose to apply a preformulated segment or create your own. Let’s start with building our own. To build a segment, follow the steps listed below.

1. Click the red +New Segment button.
2. Now you can choose which characteristics will serve as the basis for the segment. There are many options, which are organized into the following categories.

Keep in mind that every option you select will build on the others. So if you select US users and users with Windows OS, your segment will only include visitors who are both in the U.S. AND use Windows.

Since the majority of these options are fairly intuitive, we’ll focus on the advanced methods of creating a segment which include using conditions and sequences. You can review what’s included in the other options by reading this help page.

3.  Once you’ve selected the traits you want your segment to have, click save. Your segment will now appear at the top of the page throughout Analytics so you can see the data that describes just that segment.

Advanced Segment Options

The Advanced Segment options “Conditions” and “Sequences” give you the opportunity to build a segment using any metric or dimension. Their features include:

• The ability to use the logic functions OR and AND
• The ability to include or exclude data
• The ability to create a combined user-based and session-based segment, which will show data that meets both requirements.

To see how Google describes these options, click here.

Conditions

You can set up a segment that meets specific requirements, called conditions or filters. You can set multiple conditions and, using logic operators, require that any or all of the conditions be met. This section also offers the ability to use regular expressions, or “Regex,” to build your segments. You can learn more about Regex here.

For example, we can set a user segment that includes returning visitors who visited our help page. This could tell us how many users can’t seem to find the information they want after multiple visits. To make this segment, we have to:

1. Navigate to the Conditions tab in the segment builder.
2. Set the filter to Users.
3. Select the dimension User Type in the first dropdown, then Exactly Matches in the second dropdown, and click Returning User in the field that follows. We then need to click AND to add another condition.
4. For the second condition, we need to set the first dropdown to the dimension Page, the second dropdown to Exactly Matches, and click or type the URL for our help page. Then click Save.

Sequences

Data can also be segmented using sequences. With sequences, you can:

• Choose to show only sessions or users who completed specific actions on your site, either in a particular order or any order.
• Set the sequence to start at the user’s first interaction with the site or any interaction they had with the site.

Here’s how we could make a sequence that would show the number of sessions in which the user came to the site either directly or from Google, and then either submitted a contact form or visited the contact us page.

1. Navigate to the Sequences tab in the segment builder.
2. Set the filter to Sessions.
3. Select the dimension Source for the first dropdown, then Exactly Matches for the second, and choose direct in the last field. Then click OR.
4. Select the same options for the first two dropdown menus, and then choose Google in the last field. Click Add Step to add the next step in the sequence.
5. For the first dropdown menu, choose Submit Form under the Goals dimension, and per session in the second. Then select the greater-than symbol and type 0 (zero) into the last field. Then click OR.
6. Select the dimension Page, then Exactly Matches, and then click on the “contact us” page. Then click Save.

How to Use Existing Segments

Using existing segments is much simpler than creating new ones. Once you’ve clicked Add Segment at the top of the page, just check the box for the segment you want to apply to the data and click Save.

Try This Tracking Exercise

Complete the exercises below before moving on. You’ll gain critical hands-on experience that will help you become the marketer you were meant to be. Plus, it makes completing the quiz at the end of the lesson even easier.

Exercise: Creating a Custom Segment

Segments allow you to quickly compare the website data of one group of website visitors with the website data of another group of website visitors. So, if you’re trying to understand what sets apart website visitors who complete goals vs. everyone else, a segment is an easy way to view that comparison.

Why Are Dashboards Important?

A dashboard provides you with a high-level view of a website’s performance. And rather than navigating between different reports, a dashboard allows you to consolidate your most important metrics all in one place.

What You’ll Walk Away With

By the end of this lesson, you should:

• Understand what Google Analytics dashboards are and why they are useful
• Know how to pick which elements should be included in your dashboard
• Be able to create and share an Analytics dashboard

What is a Dashboard?

A dashboard is a page that contains summary information from different sections of Analytics that you have opted to view in one place. Dashboards serve as customized overviews that show the data you deem most important, presented in an easy-to-digest format.

How to Make a Dashboard

Dashboards are relatively simple to make, once you know which data you want to include.

What to Include in Your Dashboard

Your dashboard should include information that aligns with the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ve established for your site.

For example, for Things by Bean, our KPIs could be the average length of a session and the average number of pages viewed per session. These metrics reflect our visitors’ engagement with our site, which shows us how interested they are in what we have to offer.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when building your own dashboard.

Anatomy of a Dashboard

Dashboards are made of widgets. A widget is a module that displays specific data you have selected. A Dashboard can have up to 12 widgets. Below is Google’s list and descriptions of the types of widgets:

• Metric. Displays a simple numeric representation of a single selected metric.
• Timeline. Displays a graph of the selected metric over time. You can compare this to a secondary metric.
• Geomap. Displays a map of the selected region, with the specified metric plotted on the map. Hover over the map to see the actual metric values.
• Table. Displays up to 2 metrics describing the selected dimension, laid out in tabular format.
• Pie. Displays a pie chart of the selected metric grouped by a dimension. Mouse over a slice to see the specific metric values.
• Bar. Displays a bar chart of the selected metric grouped by up to 2 dimensions. Mouse over a slice to see the specific metric values.

You can change the layout of your Dashboard by clicking Customize Dashboard in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Widgets can be rearranged by dragging and dropping.

Building the Dashboard

Let’s walk through building a Dashboard using our example greeting card company. We’ll start with getting an overview of the direct traffic to our site including how many sessions resulted from direct traffic and the rate of goal conversions.

1. Click Dashboards in the left sidebar of Analytics, then +New Dashboard.
2. You can then choose to make a dashboard from a blank canvas or a preformulated set, and then name your Dashboard. We’re going to build one from a blank canvas.
3. Click +Add Widget in the upper left side of the screen.
4. Name the widget, select the widget type, and choose the appropriate dimensions and metrics.

We’ll name ours Direct Traffic and use a timeline because we want to see multiple metrics per our dimension, which is Traffic Type.

5. If applicable, we can also use one or more filters on our widget. Since we only want to include direct traffic, we can apply a filter. When finished, click “Save.”

For our example, we’ll select Only show in the first dropdown, then Traffic Type as our dimension, choose Containing in the second dropdown, and type Direct in the field.

6. The widget we just made will be added to our Dashboard. To make new widgets, we repeat steps 1-3, changing the widget titles and types as well as metrics and dimensions to reflect the data we want to see.
7. Let’s add another widget, just for practice. We want our next widget to show if the landing pages for our paid ads are experiencing goal completions and conversions.
   • Click +Add Widget.
   • If you don’t name a widget, a name will be generated based on your selections. We’ll let Analytics generate a name for us.
   • We’ll use a table widget.
   • Our dimension will be Landing Page, and our metrics will be Goal Completions and Goal Conversion Rate.
   • Since we only want to see traffic that came from our paid efforts, we’ll apply a filter like we did in the first example. In order, our selections will be Only Show, Traffic Type, Containing, Paid.
   • Once we click Save, our new widget is added to the dashboard. We can rearrange the widgets by dragging and dropping to get them in the order we want.

Our dashboard now looks like this:

We repeat the process until our dashboard includes widgets for each aspect of our site’s performance. There are dozens of custom widgets you can build. As we mentioned, it’s ideal to have widgets to assess the following:

• Direct traffic
• Organic traffic
• Paid traffic
• Social media traffic
• Email traffic
• Overall traffic
• Most popular pages
• Average page load time
• Mobile sessions

You can find an example dashboard with a widget for each of the above here.

Shared vs. Private Dashboards

A Dashboard will only be visible to you (i.e. private) until you share it with others. There are several methods for sharing a dashboard, but we’ll go over the ones you’re most likely to use:

• Share with those who have access to the current view in Analytics.
  • Click Share at the top of the page and click Share Object.
• Share with other views and accounts as a link to a template.
  • With this option, you only share the Dashboard settings, not the data itself.
  • Click Share at the top of the page, then click Share template.
  • Send the link to the person you want to have access to the dashboard. Note they must have an Analytics account.
• Send in an email.
  • Next to the Share option, click Email. You’ll be able to email the dashboard as a PDF attachment.
  • You can have your Dashboard be sent at regular intervals by selecting the appropriate frequency in the dropdown. You can set these emails to be sent at that frequency for up to 12 months by clicking Advanced Options.

• Save as a PDF.
  • Click Export, next to Email.

How to Use a Dashboard

Once you’ve created a dashboard that reflects your chosen KPIs, you should be able to click on it in the left sidebar, under Dashboards. You’ll then be able to get an overview of your site’s performance by just scanning the page. If you see something interesting or concerning, you can delve further by clicking into the appropriate section of Analytics.

Try This Tracking Exercise

Complete the exercises below before moving on. You’ll gain critical hands-on experience that will help you become the marketer you were meant to be. Plus, it makes completing the quiz at the end of the lesson even easier.

Exercise: Creating a Custom Dashboard

Reporting frequency is a big factor when considering what data to select for your custom Dashboard; will the reader easily be able to see problems or opportunities that arise between reports?