5 amazing things that Google Analytics can do -

There are all sorts of information that you can get from Google Analytics. In fact, if you’re someone who’s obsessed about your target audience or how to make your website the most user-friendly version possible, then Google Analytics can be your playground.

Of course, there are various reports available, which I covered in this article. Reports like Real-time, Audience, Acquisition, Behaviour, and Conversion can tell you the profile of your website visitors, what they do on your website, which pages they love, which pages are causing them to leave your site, and how well your website is converting.

In fact, a lot of optimizers are using Google Analytics to find out what’s preventing site visitors from making the ultimate conversion – whether that’s payment for e-Commerce sites or sign-ups for SAAS products.

By looking at the figures and knowing how to read them, optimizers can find out how much $$$ a business is losing from not having an optimized website. By simply looking into the data and knowing how the figures get there, they can spot where the money is “leaking,” and by how much!

It’s amazing how much Google Analytics can show you, as long as you know how to read it.

#1 Account-level setup

When you have a Google Analytics account, setting up your Account properly is key as you get started.

Account Settings allow you to deep dive into account-level setup including the following:

Users – you can add users from your team and provide different levels of permissions and access

Filters – did you know you can set up filters that can take care of those recurring settings that you want to apply in multiple views? You can create filters at the account level, and then apply them to one or more views. Filters are used in Views to break down the data into smaller groups, and can be applied to get rid of unwanted data (like traffic coming from you as the publisher) or find/replace pieces of info. We’ll talk more about Views and Filters a tad later!

History – you can keep track of changes being made to your account through “Change History”

Tracking code – GA gives you a tracking code that you need to copy and paste on your site (or your client’s). You can of course have a developer do it. But the important thing is you embed this code into the website that you want to track so it sends information to Google Analytics.
Google Tag Manager – installing the Google Tag Manager script is recommended. GTM allows you to tag and update certain events in your site and can be used for conversion tracking, site analytics, remarketing, and so much more. Here’s how to set up Google Tag Manager.

#2 Segmenting data

When you finally hit the ground running and your Google Analytics account starts collecting data, you have the ability to segment them in a way that makes it easier to produce insights.

By clicking on the “Add a Segment” button, you can add up to 4 segments, or ways by which you want to filter within the actual report.

Segments help you cluster specific types of data together under a certain report. For instance, if you are under the Audience report and looking at the Demographics data, you can further segment these data according to their traffic sources. Which of them are from Facebook, your podcast, or organic (those who looked you up on Google)?

Here’s what Google Analytics will return:

#3 Multiple views

Now this is when things get really interesting!

Before I took the CXL course, I only used Google Analytics with its current view. That’s my one and only view. I learned from Mercer who delivered the GA courses that it’s HIGHLY IMPORTANT to create multiple views, especially when testing. This is because when you set a filter on a particular view, the filter will permanently alter the data. And there is no way to get the previous data back in the unfortunate incident that you mess up the filter.

This is the main difference between filters and segments. The latter are temporary filters that you can use to segregate certain data according to types, i.e. traffic source, devices used, bounced %, converted, etc. The former permanently change the data once you set and apply it on a view.

So it’s highly important – and recommended – to create at least three views:

The current view sans any filter and goals, which you can name as “BACKUP VIEW.” You (and your team) should know better than make any changes in this view, as this will contain the original data provided by Google Analytics without any filters or goals applied. Once you label this view as a backup, leave it and don’t touch it. In case you make a mistake in the other views, you have the BACKUP to at least refer to.
TESTING VIEW is – as the name suggests – for testing. This is the view that you can feel free to alter and play around with before you finalize a certain view into the…
PRODUCTION VIEW. This is the one that you or your team would want to spend the most time analyzing. This is “the view” that you use for key decision-making and tracking your site progress.

If the idea of views is esoteric for you at this point, perhaps this video can help explain it in a visual way.

#4 Filters

Okay – back to filters.

Filters can help you either highlight or get rid of data in your views. Some marketers use Filters to clean up their data, exclude unnecessary traffic (like those coming from your team), and avoid fractured reporting (when data are under the same classification but Google Analytics presents them in separate groups because of errors in setting up things like ads, tags, names, even capitalizations).

So filters like these are created to help clean up multiple views and present data in a more accurate and efficient way:

Here’s what setting up a Filter looks like: [1]

Again, if the whole idea of Filter sounds abstract, here’s a video that may help explain it better:

#5 UTM

You may have, at some point, seen “UTM” in certain links or URLs. Something like this:

If you ever wondered what they’re for, and why some links just don’t come in shorter versions, well there’s an essential reason behind it.

UTM – short for Urchin Tracking Modules – is a set of five query parameters usually added to a link that leads to your website. (Trivia of the day, Urchin comes from Urchin Software, which created this whole thing before Google acquired them.)

The five parameters are:

utm_source – required
utm_medium – required
utm_campaign – optional but highly recommended
utm_term – optional
utm_content – optional

Putting UTMs in your URL helps you track where the traffic is coming from… in a more specific way. This CXL article puts the importance of UTMs perfectly, as follows:

Identify sources of traffic and their properties;
Organize incoming traffic into meaningful buckets;
Attribute results (conversions) to the correct traffic sources.

For instance, with the sample below, Google Analytics can tell me where a particular traffic comes from (a user went to an original post called “25 Social Media Strategies” in Buffer.com and clicked the image to land on the 25 Social Media Strategies landing page).

You can also do something cool like track which of the images on your email, for instance, your visitor clicked to get to a landing page. If you send an email with three images and want to track which part of the email your users normally click on to get to your landing page, then you can assign three different tags/UTM for each of the images’ URLs. This is incredibly useful if you want to test which images or text/copy resonate well and engages your target audience.

If you want to use UTM parameters but everything just seems overwhelming, don’t worry. There are UTM link builders available, like Google’s URL Builder.

If you want to know more about UTM parameters, this CXL article explains it further.

Hope you enjoyed this article!

I suggest you play around and get yourself familiar with Google Analytics using Google Analytics’ demo account from their Google Merchandise store. Feel free to tinker around, explore what each of the reports does and get some insights about the numbers and graphs. It may look overwhelming at first, but just keep exploring it and you’ll eventually get the hang of it.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below! You can also email me@tinasendin.com or connect with me on LinkedIn.

5 amazing things that Google Analytics can do

#1 Account-level setup

#2 Segmenting data

#3 Multiple views

#4 Filters

#5 UTM

Hope you enjoyed this article!

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