Google Analytics IQ Lesson 3: Fundamentals

Google Analytics IQ Lessons

3. Fundamentals

1Based on Google’s Conversion University

http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=indexSplash&rd=1



http://www.hablardigital.com/

3.1. Profiles in GA• If you manage analytics for diferent

organizations, you’ll want an account for each.

• You can create up to 25 analytics accounts per Google username. However, you can be added as an administrator to an unlimited number.

• To give others access to your GA, you use the User Manager (from the Analytics Settings).

• Inside it you can view the users who currently have access






3.1. Profiles in GA

• There are two types of GA users: • “Administrators” full access and can modify settings. • “Users” only have read access to reports.

• If you manage the analytics services for several websites which belong to diferent organizations, the best practice is to create a separate Analytics account for each• If not any Administrators you created on the account

would have access to all the reports for all the websites.






3.1. Profiles in GA

• On your Analytics Settings page, you can see a list of the profiles that belong to the account.

• Profiles are very flexible -- they are basically just a set of rules that define what data is to be included in the reports:• You’ll have a separate profile for every domain or

subdomain.• A profile that tracks only a certain part of a site or that

only tracks a certain kind of traffic.• Profiles with diferent set of reports. You could give some

users access to one and other users to another. • Each user would only see reports that apply to them.






3.1. Profiles in GA• A profile consists of settings that define the reports

that you see. These include user access, goals, and filter settings (up to 50 profiles /account - you’ll need to be an Administrator to add a new profile.)

• You can see the diferent domain tracking in the tracking code number for each profile:

• The longer number (Xs), is the GA• Then, “dash 1” and “dash 2” are the property number

• Profiles 1 and 2 are tracking the same domain = “duplicate profiles” for containing diferent subsets of data

• Profile 3 is tracking another domain (diferent property #) 5Based on Google’s Conversion University





3.2. Campaign Tracking & Adwords• GA allows you to track and analyze all of your

marketing campaigns. There are two ways to track ad campaigns:

• For AdWords campaigns, you should enable keyword autotagging. This allows to automatically populate your reports with detailed AdWords information. (You’ll need to link your AdWords and GA.)

• Manually tag links with campaign-identifying information. You may also choose to manually tag AdWords links. (The tags are campaign variables that you append to the end of your URLs.)






3.2. Campaign Tracking & Adwords• By linking GA to AdWords account, you get advanced reporting

that measures performance and ROI for your AdWords campaigns.

• Within AdWords, select GA under the Reporting tab to link your accounts (you’ll need administrator privileges in Analytics to link them). If you don’t have a GA account, you’ll be able to create one.

• When you link them, you should enable "Destination URL Autotagging” to diferentiate paid ads from SEO and referrals and to see more info in the AdWords section of your Traffic Sources reports.

• Your cost data will be applied once you link your accounts. If you don't want cost data imported into a particular profile, you can edit the profile settings.






3.2. Campaign Tracking & Adwords

• Be aware that you can only link one Analytics account to one AdWords account.

• For administration purposes, you will want to create a new Analytics account for each AdWords account.

• Note that once you have linked them, the time zone in GA will automatically take that of the AdWords Account (if they are diferent).






3.2. Campaign Tracking & Adwords• Autotagging works by adding a unique id, or g-c-l-i-d, to the end of your

destination URLs, which allows Analytics to track and display click details in your reports.

• 3rd party redirects and encoded URLs can prevent autotagging from working properly.

• Notice that the first query parameter is always preceded with a question mark. Subsequent values are separated using ampersands.

• To enable autotagging, select “My Account” > “Account Preferences” > Make sure that the Tracking option reads “yes”. If it says “no”, click the edit link, check the box for “Destination URL Autotagging” > “Save Changes”.

• When linking for the first time your AdWords account to Analytics, you’ll be prompted to automatically select “Destination URL Autotagging” and “Cost Data Import”.






3.2. Campaign Tracking & Adwords• All AdWords cost data from an account will be imported into any

profile in which the Apply Cost Data checkbox is selected.

• If you don't want cost data imported into a particular profile, you can edit the profile settings. Within the "Edit Profile Information" screen, find the "Apply Cost Data" checkbox.

• Make sure both your AdWords and Analytics accounts are set to the same currency so that ROI data is accurately calculated.

• And finally, note that Google Analytics is only able to import cost data from AdWords, and not from other ad networks.






3.2. Campaign Tracking & Adwords• You may notice diferences between the data in GA and AdWords:

• AdWords tracks clicks, while Analytics tracks visits. • Some visitors who click may have JavaScript, cookies, or images

turned of, so Analytics won't report these visits, but AdWords will report the click.

• Maybe the GA Tracking Code on your landing page doesn’t execute. • Google AdWords automatically filters invalid clicks from your reports,

Google Analytics will still report the visits.• AdWords data is uploaded once a day to Analytics so the results for

each may be temporarily out of sync.• Campaign data can be lost if your site uses redirects. As a result,

Analytics won’t show the visits as coming from AdWords, but your AdWords report will still report the clicks.






3.2. Campaign Tracking & Adwords• GA automatically tracks all of referrals and

searches that send you traffic. • However, if you are running ad campaigns, you

should add tags to the destination URLs of your ads.

• If you manually tag your AdWords ads, the reports will only show you information by Campaign and Keyword.

• If you enable auto-tagging, you’ll see much more detail. The AdWords reports will show you results by ad group, matched search query, placement domain and many other AdWords attributes.






3.2. Campaign Tracking & Adwords• To tag a URL, you add ‘?’ to the end, followed by your tag. The variables

and values are listed as pairs separated by ‘=’ and each pair is separated by ‘&’. There are five variables you can use when tagging URLs:






3.2. Campaign Tracking & Adwords• Let’s look at where information from each of the tags shows up in your

reports:

• Source: All Traffic Sources report. This report will include not only all the sources you tagged, but also sources like “direct” and website names.

• Medium: You can see also see traffic by medium in the All Traffic Sources report. In addition to all the mediums you tagged, you’ll also see mediums such as “referral” and “organic”.

• Campaign: will appear in the Campaigns report.

• Term: Keywords report.

• Content: Ad Versions report.

• You can also segment on any of these variables.






3.2. Campaign Tracking & Adwords• You can use the URL Builder in the Google Analytics Help

Center to construct your URLs:• You enter in the destination URL and the values for each campaign variable. • The URL builder can only construct one URL at a time.

• If you have many URLs to tag, you can use spreadsheets to automate the process:• Generate a sample URL in the URL Builder and create a simple spreadsheet

formula.






3.3. Analysis focus - Adwords• The Adwords Report gives you post click performance for

your traffic from Adwords so you can see what happened afer visitors clicked on your ad. You can review usage metrics, goal conversions, e-commerce activity, ROI… Others:• Impressions: number of times your ad was displayed• CTR: clicks/impressions• Revenue per click, ROI and margin help you assess keyword keyword

profitability. • If RPC are 0 and ROI -100% it is because you have 0 revenue, make sure you’ve set

goal values and enabled e-commerce tracking. • Before you delete negative ROI consider if you have enough data (too short time

ranges?)






3.3. Analysis focus - Adwords• The Adwords Report organises data according to campaign, ad

group and keyword. Click on any of them to see the drilldown – all metrics are available at each level.

• You can also organise according to a variety of Adwords dimensions (match type, etc) – only available with autotagging.

• Use Day Parts Report to find out which times of day your campaign is most efective.

• Destination URLs Report which URLs received traffic from Adwords, so you can see which one performed better.

• Overview gives you shortcut links to common used analysis. • To find our which placements work best, look on overview and

navigate to the Placement Report. • Keyword Position reports tells you how ad position afected your

keywords performance. • Use the TV Campaigns Report to track your TV campaign with time,

type of audience and program you targeted. 17

Based on Google’s Conversion University





3.4. Goals and Funnels• Defining site goals and tracking goal conversions assesses how well your site meets its

business objectives.

• A goal represents an activity or a level of interaction with your website that’s important to the success of your business.

• There are three types of goals in GA:• A URL Destination goal is a page that visitors see once they have completed an activity• A Time on Site goal is a time threshold that you define. When a visitor spends more or less time on your site than the

threshold you specify, a conversion is triggered.• A Pages per Visit goal allows you to define a pages viewed threshold. When a visitor views more pages --or fewer

pages --than the threshold you've set, a conversion is triggered.

• For each URL Destination goal you can also define a funnel = the set of steps, or pages, that you expect visitors to visit on their way to complete the conversion.

• Defining a funnel is valuable because it allows you to see where visitors enter and exit the conversion process.






3.4. Goals and Funnels• To set up a goal: Settings page and edit the the profile for which you want to configure it. Then

look for the “Goals” section.

• You can create up to 4 sets of 5 goals each.

• To define a URL Destination Goal: • You don’t have to enter the entire URL, simply enter the request URI (what comes afer the domain or hostname). • You can also enter a name for the Goal (it will appear in your conversion reports).

• Defining a funnel is optional: add the URLs (or URIs) of the pages leading up to the goal URL and provide a name for each step in the funnel

• The match type defines how Google Analytics identifies a goal or funnel step. Three types:

• “Head Match” is the default. The URL of the page visited must match what you enter for the Goal URL, but if there is any additional data at the end of their URL then the goal will still be counted. For example, some websites append a product ID or a visitor ID or some other parameter to the end of the URL. Head Match will ignore these.

• “Exact Match” means that the URL of the page visited must exactly match what you enter for the Goal URL. Exact Match can only be used to match one single page.

• “Regular Expression Match” gives you the most fexibility. For example, if you want to count any sign-up page as a goal, and sign-up pages can occur in various subdirectories, you can create a regular expression that will match any sign-up page in any subdirectory.

• Check “Case Sensitive” if you want the URLs you entered into your goal and funnel to exactly match the capitalization of visited URLs.






3.4. Goals and Funnels• Threshold goals (Time on Site and Pages per Visit) are useful for

measuring site engagement, whereas URL Destination goals are best for measuring how frequently a specific activity has been completed.

• “Goal Value” allows you to specify a monetary value for goal. You should only do this for non-ecommerce goals.• GA will be able to calculate metrics like average per-visit-value and ROI. These metrics

will help you measure the monetary value of a non-ecommerce site.

• There is an important diference between goal conversions and e-commerce transactions: a goal conversion happens once during a visit, but an e-commerce transaction can occur multiple times during a visit.

• If you are using a filter that manipulates the Request URI, make sure that your URL Destination goal is defined so that it refects the changed Request URI field.






3.4. Goals and Funnels• If you define a funnel for a goal, you have the

Funnel Visualization report:• Lef: how visitors entered. Right: where they leave

and go.• The middle shows you how visitors progress, how

many of them continue on to each step.


• The Reverse Goal Path report (available with or without funnel) lists the navigation paths that visitors took to arrive at a goal page and shows you the number of conversions in each path.

• This is a great report for identifying funnels that you hadn’t considered before and it can give you great ideas for designing a more efective site.





3.5. Filters• Google Analytics filters provide you with an extremely fexible way of

defining what data is included in your reports.

• You can use the Filter manager to create new filters, to edit their settings, and to delete them. To apply filters to a profile, you edit the profile.

• Filters process your raw traffic data based on the filter specifications. The filtered data is then sent to the respective profile. Once data has been passed through a filter, Google cannot re-process the raw data.

• You can set up filters from the Analytics Settings page: • Begin by editing the profile. Then, under “Filters Applied to Profile”, click “Add Filter”.• Now you have two options: add a new filter or apply an existing filter.• To create a new filter you will need to complete several fields, including the filter name

and type. • If you elect to create a custom filter, you will need to complete several additional fields.






3.5. Filters• GA provides 3 predefined filters:

• “Exclude all traffic from a domain”: GA will apply a reverse lookup with each visitor’s IP address to determine if the visitor is coming in from a domain that should be filtered out. Domains usually represent the ISP of your visitor although larger companies generally have their IP addresses mapped to their domain name.

• “Exclude all traffic from an IP address”, removes traffic from addresses entered into the IP address field. This filter is generally used to exclude your internal company traffic.

• “Include only traffic to a subdirectory”, causes your profile to only report traffic to a specified directory on your site. This is typically used on a profile that is created to track one part of a website.






3.5. Filters• In addition you can also create custom filters. To create a

custom filter, select “Custom filter” from the “Filter Type” drop-down. Each custom filter has three main parts:

• “Filter Types”. There are six filter types available and each one serves a specific purpose.

• “Filter Field”. There are numerous fields you can use to create your filter (Eg.: Request URI, Visitor Country…). Complete list of fields can be in the Analytics Help Center.

• “Filter Pattern”. This is the text string that is used to attempt to match pageview data. The pattern that you provide is applied to the field and, if it matches any part of the field, it returns a positive result and causes an action to occur. You’ll need to use POSIX Regular Expressions to create the filter pattern.






3.5. Filters• Filter types:

• Exclude and Include filters are the most common. They allow you to segment your data in many diferent ways. They’re frequently used to filter out or filter in traffic from a particular state or country.

• Lowercase and Uppercase filters do not require a filter pattern, only a filter field. They are very useful for consolidating line items in a report when the only diference between the multiple entries is that sometimes the URL or keyword appears with a diferent combination of upper/lowercase letters.

• Search and Replace filters replace one piece of data with another. They are ofen used to replace long URL strings with a shorter string that is easier to read and identify.

• You can use Advanced filters to remove unnecessary data, replace one field with another, or combine elements from multiple filter fields.






3.5. Filters• You can track and segment multiple sites from the same Analytics

account, using the same JavaScript code. And once you’ve defined a filter, you can apply it to a single profile or across several profiles.

• By setting up multiple profiles and applying filters creatively to each of them, you have a great deal of reporting and analysis fexibility.

• Again, you use the Filter manager to create and manage filters. To apply filters to a profile, you edit the profile.

• You can also use profiles and filters together to create customized data views. Remember, you always want to maintain a profile that contains all of your data.






3.5. Filters• If your subdomains are totally separate businesses, and you don’t need

cumulative traffic, then you could simply create a unique profile for each.– To do this, you’d install the “dash 1” version of your tracking code on your Subdomain A

pages, and the “dash 2” version of your tracking code on your Subdomain B pages.

• If you want to analyze the traffic aggregated across both, you could set up at 3 duplicate profiles. Then, you’d apply an Include filter to two of them:

• In this scenario, you’d install identical tracking code on every page of the site regardless of subdomain.






3.5. Filters• You can apply multiple include and exclude filters to a single profile, but

keep in mind that when more than one filter is applied, the filters will be executed in the same order that they are listed in your Profile Settings.

• If you drive traffic from AdWords to multiple sites, each of which is tracked in a separate Analytics profile, you’ll need to apply a filter to each site’s profile. Because, when you apply cost data from an AdWords account, data from the entire account is applied to each profile - Google Analytics doesn’t automatically match campaigns to specific profiles.






3.6. Regex• A regular expression is a set of characters and metacharacters that are

used to match text in a specified pattern. You can use regular expressions to configure fexible goals and powerful filters.• For example, if you want to filter out a range of IP addresses.

• Metacharacters are characters that have special meanings in regex.


1.) DOT





3.6. Regex


2.) BACKSLASH





3.6. Regex


3.) RANGES AND CHARACTER SETS





3.6. Regex


4.) QUANTIFIERS AND REPETITION





3.6. Regex


5.) GROUPING





3.6. Regex


6.) ANCHORS





3.6. Regex


7.) SHORTHANDS AND CHARACTER CLASSES





3.6. Regex


There are several common uses for regex within GA:





3.7. Cookies


• Some web sites store information about you or your computer in a small file called a cookie, stored on your hard drive. There are 2 types: • First-party: set by the domain being visited. Only the web site

that created a first-party cookie can read it. This is the kind of cookie used for Google Analytics tracking.

• Third-party cookies are set by third party sites.

• Users can choose whether to allow some, none, or all types on their computers. If a user does not allow cookies at all, they may not be able to view some Web sites or take advantage of customization features.

• Sites that run GA issue first party cookies that allow the site to uniquely, but anonymously, identify individual visitors.





3.7. Cookies


• Cookies can be set with or without an expiration date:

• Persistent cookies have an expiration date, and remain on your computer even when you close your browser or shut down. On return visits, persistent cookies can be read by the web site that created them.

• Temporary cookies do not have an expiration date, as they are only stored for the duration of your current browser session.

• Many kinds of sites require that visitors have cookies enabled: • to login to many online shopping carts and to use web mail.

• First party cookies (GA’s) are allowed by a majority of visitors.

• Cookie tracking makes it possible to correlate shopping cart transactions with search campaign information, and perform other visitor analysis.

• Remember -- websites only have access to the information that you provide. Webs can’t access to any information on your computer unless you provide it. And since GA only uses first party cookies, GA cookies can only be read by the website that created them.





3.7. Cookies


• Google Analytics sets five first-party cookies:

• The __utmv cookie is optional, and will only be set if the _setVar() method is called (explained later)

• All are persistent except __utmc cookie. • All cookies are browser-specific.





3.7. Cookies


__utma – visitor identifier





3.7. Cookies


__utmb and __utmc – Session Identifiers

•The content of the __utmc cookie is simply the domain hash. The content of the __utmb cookie will also be the domain hash plus, if the site is using ga.js, some additional values.

•Key diference: __utmb is persistent, expiring 30 minutes afer it is created. __utmc is temporary.

• Each time the visitor navigates to a new page and the JavaScript in the GA Tracking Code is executed, the __utmb cookie is refreshed and set to expire in 30 minutes. As long as the visitor remains active on the site, the session remains active.

• If the visitor stays on a page for more than 30 minutes, the __utmb cookie will be destroyed. The next time the visitor loads a page, a new __utmb cookie is created and, so this is a new session.

• So, why is the __utmc cookie needed? If a visitor quits and starts the browser and comes back right away to the same site. Since the __utmc cookie was destroyed, Google Analytics will know that this is a new session.

Note that it is possible to adjust this behavior customizing the GA Tracking code, you can make the session timeout length anything you want.





3.7. Cookies


__utmz – Campaign Cookie

•It stores the campaign tracking values that are passed via tagged campaign URLs (utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign) and will show up in your All Traffic Sources report.

•Preceding the campaign tracking values, you will see four numbers: – domain hash– Timestamp– “session number”: increments for every session during which the campaign cookie gets overwritten.– “campaign number”: increments every time you arrive at the site via a diferent campaign or organic search, even if it

is within the same session.

•The __utmz cookie has a six month timeout, meaning that a visit will be attributed to a particular campaign for up to six months, or until the __utmz cookie is overwritten with another value.





3.7. Cookies


__utmz – Campaign Values





3.7. Cookies






3.8. E-Commerce


• If your site sells products or services online, you can use GA to track sales activity and performance.

• The Ecommerce reports show you your site’s transactions, revenue, and many other commerce-related metrics. . – the products that were purchased from your online store– your sales revenue– your e-commerce conversion rate, and– the number of times people visited your site before purchasing

• E-commerce metrics are also available on the Ecommerce tab which appears in many reports.

• In order to use e-commerce reporting, you’ll need to do three things:

1) Enable e-commerce reporting within your Analytics website profile.2) Add or make sure that you’ve added the GA Tracking Code to your receipt page3) You’ll need to add some additional e-commerce tracking code to your receipt page so that you can capture the details of each transaction => See next slide!





3.8. E-Commerce






3.8. E-Commerce


_addTrans() – Creating the transaction

•Your code will need to dynamically retrieve the values from your merchant sofware to populate these fields. You can type single-quote single-quote to leave an optional field blank, but note that Order ID and Total are required.





3.8. E-Commerce


_addItem() – Providing Product Details

•As with _addTrans(), you can leave only some of the fields blank.Your code will need to dynamically retrieve the values from your merchant sofware to populate these fields. You can type single-quote single-quote to leave an optional field blank, but note that Order ID and Total are required (use the same Order ID that you used in the previous step)





3.8. E-Commerce


_trackTrans() – Recording the Transaction

•This happens to send the transaction information to Google Analytics. •Remember that all of the e-commerce code must appear afer the Google Analytics Tracking Code calls _trackPageview().





3.8. E-Commerce


• Generally, you’ll be placing ecommerce tracking code on a secure shopping cart page. • The standard GA Tracking Code automatically detects when an https

protocol is being used. • So you won’t need to add any special tracking code for secure pages.

• For many e-commerce websites, the checkout process occurs on a separate domain or subdomain.• you’ll need to add some code to some of your pages so that you can

track activity across domains and subdomains.• The specific methods you’ll use are listed here (more on it in the

module on tracking domains and subdomains)





3.9. Revenue


• The Goal Conversion tab displays a metric called Per Visit Goal Value. It is calculated based on the goal values that you set.

• The Ecommerce tab displays three revenue related metrics: Revenue, Average Value, and Per Visit Value .• The diference: Per Visit Value is calculated using e-commerce

revenue. Per Visit Goal Value is calculated using static goal values.

• There are a few places where Goal Value and Ecommerce Revenue are summed: – On the Clicks tab, the Revenue per Click, ROI, and Margin are based on

the sum total of Goal Values and Ecommerce Revenue.– In the Content reports, the $ Index metric is also based on the sum

total of Goal Value and Ecommerce Revenue (see next)





3.9. Revenue


• The $ Index metric appears in most of the Content reports and it allows you to identify the pages that have the most impact on site profitability.

• The calculation for $ Index assigns the highest values to pages that are frequently viewed prior to high value conversions or transactions.





3.9. Revenue


• $ Index uses unique pageviews. This means that a page is only counted once per visit, even if a person views the page multiple times before converting.

• Also, only pageviews that precede the conversion or transaction are counted.

• If you aren’t tracking ecommerce revenue in Google Analytics and you haven’t assigned values to your goals, all of your $ Index values will be zero.

• Finally, $ Index is most useful as a point of comparison or a ranking metric, not as a standalone number. It’s designed to help you identify the pages on your site that are most valuable.





3.10. Domains and Subdomains


• A domain is a hostname that represents a numeric IP address on the internet. It allows us to easily identify a website by a name instead of having to use a long string of numbers.

• You may sometimes need to track activity across multiple domains: if a session spans multiple domains, it would not be possible to track the session as a single visit attributed to one visitor. So, you’ll need a way of sharing the cookie information between the two domains.

• Using the _link() method, allows GA Analytics to track a user across multiple domains by sending cookies via URL parameters (2 steps)







• To track across domains, you’ll need to follow two steps.1) Add a few lines to the GATC on all pages of each site:

Call _setDomainName() with an argument of “none”. call _setAllowLinker() with an argument of “true”.







2) Update all links from Google.com to YouTube.com (following example) and vice versa using _link(). Now, when a user clicks on a link that takes them to the other domain, the session information is preserved and the user is identified as being the same visitor across both domains.







If you use a form to transfer your visitors from one domain to another, you will need to use the _linkByPost() method instead of the _link() method.

• This situation occurs most ofen with third party shopping carts, to send cookie data to other domains in pop-ups or iFrames.

To use forms to transfer from one domain to another, you must modify all the appropriate forms with the code.

The _linkByPost() method will change the form action by adding query-string parameters to the value in the action attribute when the visitor submits the form.







• You may also sometimes need to track across multiple subdomains. A subdomain is part of a larger domain and frequently each subdomain contains the pages for a specific department or ofering.

• As with multiple domains, you need to explicitly share the cookie information between subdomains or you’ll lose session information. If you don’t share cookie information between your subdomains, it may appear as though your own site is a referrer since only one domain is recognized as the main domain.







• To track across multiple subdomains, call _setDomainName() and specify your parent domain name as the argument. This will allow the GATC to use the same cookies across the subdomains.

• A side efect of using this method is that your reports may not diferentiate between visits to identically named pages within the various subdomains.

• You can prevent this with 2 best practices:1) Create separate profiles for each subdomain. This way, you’ll be

able to see reports for each subdomain.– Set up duplicate profiles - one master profile, plus one profile for each

subdomain.







2) If you track several subdomains within one profile, your reports may not diferentiate between visits to identically named pages within the various subdomains:

– This is because the reports only show the Request URI. The hostname is stored in the Hostname data field in GA.

– So, once you’ve called _setDomainName() to set your primary domain name, visits to both subdomains will be interpreted as the same page.

• To correct this, you can set up an advanced filter to include the subdomain in your reports as shown:

















Technology

Google Analytics IQ Lesson 3: Fundamentals