ANALYTICS 101Down the rabbit hole we go

Presented By Garret Archer

ABOUT ME

● I’ve been in the industry for about 3 years

● I have the coolest dog

● I somehow became a Minnesota Vikings fan being born and raised

here in Oregon and with Packer fans as family

● I love spicy food

● No one can beat me at UNO, Foosball, and other useless games.

● I played soccer for 16 years

● I’m a huge nerd when it comes to fantasy fiction. And Fantasy

football.

● When I play “Two truths and a lie” I lie three times because

sometimes I enjoy disappointing others

Just Doing Dog Yoga

● We’ve been in business for over 7 years

● Collectively, our management has over 20 years experience in

digital marketing

● We provide service to a broad spectrum of clients spanning

small/enterprise level, medium sized and global corporations

● We’re one of the top Digital Marketing agencies in the country

● We provide a myriad array of digital services to clients to help

them grow their business

● NONE of those services is more important than properly setting

up and maintaining Analytics data

ABOUT US

GETTING STARTED

● Set up an account with Google. ● Get your Tracking Code and install it

● Set up Goals

● Give access to whoever needs it● Sit back and watch the data come in

ANALYTICS BASICS

● Sessions are visits to any page on your website. One user can have multiple sessions in any given time frame

● Users are the number of people coming to your site

● Pageviews let us know how many pages on your site were viewed during any given time frame

● Pages/Session gives us the average number of pages viewed each time someone comes to our site

● Avg. Session Duration provides us with the length of time people are staying on the site per visit

● Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who leave without going to a second page

● % New Sessions tells us how many sessions are new visits as opposed to recurring ones

GRANDMA’S ANALYTICS

Sometimes we need more than Grandma’s Analytics.

Analytics can be as robust or as simple as you’d like it to be.

DEEPER DIVE

● Demographics○ Age, Gender, etc

● Interests○ Affinity, In-Market Segments, etc

● Geo○ Where are people coming from

● Behavior○ How are people interacting with

my site

● Technology○ How is my site being seen by users

● Mobile○ What devices are people using

● Custom○ Allows you to customize variables

● Benchmarking○ Comparative analysis

AUDIENCE

Now that we know who is visiting you, we need to know how we are getting them to visit your site

All Traffic● Segment out the number of visits for each

channel

Top referring URLs● Who is sending me traffic?

Connect to AdWords● If you’re using AdWords it’s vital to link together

with Analytics

Campaigns● Separate and track the ways you are actively

trying to drive visits to the site

ACQUISITION

It’s incredibly important to understand what people are doing on your site when they get there. Your homepage isn’t important -- there are many ways to enter your site.

● Websites don’t read like books

● On average, about half or less of a website’s traffic even sees the home page

● Furthermore, the path with the highest frequency is usually followed up by a path with ~5% of visitors. Making decisions from such a small sample size is challenging, if not outright dangerous.

● We can look at the content of the site and see what performs best

● We can look at Events we’ve set up, like downloads of PDFs/Video Plays

● We can look at In-Page Analytics data to help us understand how users view the site while interacting with it.

● Essentially, we’re trying to infer intent

So what CAN we do,

then?

BEHAVIOR

If you’re not tracking what is and isn’t working, don’t bother with anything else from this presentation. If you can’t measure outcomes, don’t measure behavior.

Conversions tell us when consumers have done what we want them to do on our site.

● We set up Goals to track actions we deem valuable to the business

● We assign values to those Goals to measure ROI

● If you’re an eCommerce site, measuring revenue performance is essential

When you’re tracking conversions properly, you can really put Google

Analytics to good use.

It allows you to ask the “What’s next?” question.

CONVERSIONS

Now that you have all this data and understand what it means, what do you do next?

Compare your data historically to measure improvement

● Month over Month is the most common

● Year over Year lets you see historical progress

● If you have specific campaigns like email blasts that you are comparing with one another, sometimes week over week makes sense

WHAT NOW?

You can spend years working within analytics and probably still find something new to explore. Here are a few things that can help you stay efficient:

● Alerts● Filters● User Management● Custom Dashboards/Reports● Helpful Tools

SOME HELPFUL EXTRAS

Sometimes you can’t be in front of your computer at all times. Alerts can help you stay informed about what’s going on with your site without requiring constant monitoring.

ALERTS

If you don’t properly filter your traffic, you will end up with unreliable data. Trying to make informed decisions on unreliable data won’t work well.

Some Common Filters Include

● Personal Usage Filters○ Visiting your site often can cause

data to be skewed● Company Wide Filters

● Specific IP Filters● Spam Filters

FILTERS

Sometimes it’s helpful to have a third party set up and help maintain analytics for you. Sometimes you just need to add someone else at your

company so that they can view the data as well.

There are two types of “Analytics Pro’s”

● Implementers ○ These are more technical people○ They can do some coding work and

understand how Google Analytics works

● Analyzers○ These people are more data-oriented○ They can help you view the data that’s

important to you

USER MANAGEMENT

Keep track of the data that matters the most to you. Dashboards put that data squarely in front of you so that you don’t have to go hunting for it.

● Engagement metrics● User Behavior● Conversion data● Campaign performance

Sometimes, it’s not enough to just have the data. If you find yourself pressed for time or foregoing your analytics data, setting up reports and dashboards will help you stay efficient

CUSTOM REPORTING/DASHBOARDS

SOME HELPFUL TOOLS

https://www.iteratemarketing.com/blog/c-level-guide-google-analytics-dashboards

https://www.iteratemarketing.com/blog/how-to-tie-the-knot-between-analytics-and-adwords

https://www.iteratemarketing.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-diagnosing-traffic-drops-in-google-analytics

SHAMELESS PLUGS