August 7, 2018

6.2 : Accessing data in Google Analytics

6.2 : Accessing data in Google Analytics

Dr. Gordon Fletcher, Senior Lecturer, Salford Business School, UK

Google Analytics is important and familiar because Google, the search engine, is so popular and so well used, but also because Pay Per Click advertising on Google is so popular and probably for most people the first type of social media engagement and first piece social media data they see via Google Analytics.

Google Analytics helps you to understand:

  • Who is the audience of your website
  • What channels bring visitors to your website
  • How those visitors engage with your website

Google Analytics is important because what it shows you and tells you is what people have done once they’ve clicked on that pay per click link. It can tell you where people come from, both in terms of if of the previous site and, if it’s from Google itself, the search terms they’ve been using to find you, but also what country and potentially, if you’re lucky in cases of the US and other areas, it can potentially get down a region.

What you should be learning from Google Analytics is about what your buyer persona expects from you when they land at your website. This means you can find, from Google Analytics, how long they’ve looked at your particular page, how many pages they may have reversed to go beyond on your website or whether they bounced straight back to Google, iIn other words they didn’t find what they were looking for. All of this tells you a lot about the content that you are presenting as part of your pay per click advertising to your buyer persona.

Colin Telford, Managing Partner, The Candidate Ltd, UK

We use Google Analytics by logging in on daily basis. We change the goals that are on our website depending on the strategies and different marketing activities that we undergo, and we can see clearly what’s happening.

The Candidate Ltd used Google Analytics to identify a major trend of mobile users interacting with their website. They acted upon the data by redesigning their website to be user friendly to mobile devices

What’s really interesting for us when we recently launched a new website was how the time on page changed, how the bounce rate differed, and we were able to compare how our new responsive website performed on mobile versus desktop and look at the different conversion rates, the different channels, and the differences in terms of traffic across those different areas. It’s all really powerful stuff, and we’ve invested more in that responsive website because of the positive information that we’ve taken from Google Analytics.

Alex Charalambidis, Digital Marketing Strategist, MONKS, Greece

First of all we are it’s one platform we are trying to combine and find information for all our online activities. It’s a free tool, have synergies with everything online but again you cannot find the whole pictures because they have some issues and they cannot measure the whole traffic. So always you will have some gaps and you will have some missing metrics.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool but you have to be aware that it is still not perfect – therefore use it as a guide for trends spotting

But it’s one platform – helps you to see what is going on live in your website, live data, and second you can group information from your whole digital activities.

Exercise

Google Analytics set up tips

Aferdita Pacrami is a CEO of a Digital Marketing agency and she has linked up with us on Skype to share her top set up tips for Google Analytics.

If you are new to Google Analytics watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1Dm-eQhcqo

The links to the resources in this talk are:

You can create your own custom reports, segments and dashboards.
https://www.google.com/analytics/gallery/#landing/start/

Blogs to follow
http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
https://blog.kissmetrics.com/
http://analytics.blogspot.co.uk/
http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/

Why bother having a blog?

Aferdita has also written a blog post to help you to recognise the value of blogging for an organisation.

Her blog post on Why bother having a blog? is here for you to read and comment on http://90digital.com/content/why-bother-having-a-blog-8477.html

If you have any questions to Aferdita please do share your comments in the above blog post comments – this is the way to get feedback and learn from the community beyond the life time of this MOOC

Additional materials

Digital Analytics Fundamentals

Who better to teach you about the use of Google Analytics but Google themselves?!

Have a look at the Digital Analytics Fundamentals course this offers all you will need to know about the basic Google Analytics set up – here is the content for the first three units that offers basic understanding on the Google Analytics set up:

Digital Analytics Fundamentals – Lesson 1.1 Course overview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPZSSdkGQhM

Getting started with digital analytics

Lesson 2.1 The importance of digital analytics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbXNS3NjIfM

Lesson 2.2 Core analysis techniques

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi0w57kr_jY

Lesson 2.3 Conversions and conversion attribution

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLJt5A-NeQI

Lesson 2.4 Creating a measurement plan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpDA3XaELqs

Lesson 3.1 How Google Analytics works

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyltEFyZ678

Lesson 3.2 Key metrics and dimensions defined

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW3gx4t4944

For more advanced resources have a look at https://dashthis.com/

References

MOZ Absolute beginners guide to Google Analytics

 https://moz.com/blog/absolute-begi…

Google Analytics KPIs: Key metrics and dimensions defined

 https://analyticsacademy.withgoogl…

Analytics Training and Support

 https://support.google.com/analyti…

Google analytics best practices

 https://www.e-nor.com/publications…

For chapter 6 relations sections, follow:

6.0 The importance of ongoing monitoring and learning from your engagement
6.1 Understanding of Social Capital and its importance case study
6.3 Accessing data from Facebook
6.4 Accessing data from Twitter
6.5 Using spreadsheets to analyse and populate reports
6.6 Learning from digital results
6.7 PPC report