Google Analytics Basics

Google Analytics Basics Training Manual

Contents

Google Analytics: An Introduction

Google Analytics: An Introduction........................................................................................3

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet

data for purposes of understanding and optimising web usage. (Definition:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics)

Google Analytics Features........................................................................................................ 3

Google Analytics Interface..........................................................................................................
Changing the Date Range......................................................................................................... 8
Graphs.......................................................................................................................................... 9
Put Stats into Context............................................................................................................. 10
Analysing Trends.......................................................................................................................11
Understanding Metrics........................................................................................................ 12
Visits, Visitors and Page Views............................................................................................... 12

Google Analytics is an analytics tool, hosted by Google, which provides you with
insight into your website activity, providing you with information to allow you to
make informed decisions on your website performance, design and conversion.
Websites and web activity can be accurately measured to provide much greater
insight about your site. It allows you to answer questions such as:

New Vs Returning Visits, Unique Visitors & Unique Page Views...................................... 14

Is my site content working/ Interesting?

Traffic Sources .......................................................................................................................... 15

Are customers dropping out from my checkout? If so where are they going?

Keywords Report...................................................................................................................... 16

Is my online marketing working?

Content Reports....................................................................................................................... 16

Do PPC (Pay per Click) visits convert more than e-mail visits?

Google Analytics Goals......................................................................................................... 17

Goal Funnels.............................................................................................................................. 18
Overview................................................................................................................................19

Google Analytics Features

Some of the basic features included in Google Analytics include:

Map Overlay - helps you understand how to best target campaigns by

geographic region.

AdWords Integration - which makes it easy to track Pay per click AdWords
campaigns and allows you to use Google Analytics from your AdWords
interface.

Internal Site Search - allows you to track how people use the search box on your
site. This information can be used to set search synonyms on the site, or to feed
back product requests to the Buying Team.

Funnel Visualisation - so that you can optimise your checkout and conversion
click-paths (ie make your checkout easier to use to stop you losing sales).

There are many more features included, which we will cover as we work through
this training.
2

Google Analytics Basics Training Manual

Google Analytics Interface

The Google Analytics screen is set out as follows:

The following section reviews the Google Analytics interface to provide a clearer
overview and a better understanding of how to find and analyse the reports
effectively.
On logging into Google Analytics, you will see the following screen:

Click on View Report to access your analytics reports. This will take you to your
Dashboard which provides you with a high level overview of the last months stats:

1. This link takes you to the Analytics Settings page, for an overview of all your
Analytics accounts and profiles. From there, you can navigate to the Profile
Settings page, where you can view your tracking code, and create goals and
funnels.
2. You can also navigate to any account using this pull-down menu.
It is a good idea to use the Dashboard to give you a quick overview of the important
stats or website KPIs that you need to know/ keep up to date with on a regular
basis.

3. The Settings page is different from the Analytics Settings page. Here, you
can set the e-mail address associated to your account, your account language,
and your e-mail notifications settings.
4. The My Account link takes you to a page listing all your Google Accounts if
there is more than one.
5

Google Analytics Basics Training Manual

5. Google Analytics Help Center.

6. Click to log out

Google Analytics has over 80 reports to help you gauge your sites performance
-- whether by usage metrics, return visit numbers, or time on page. Below is a
list of reports that are available - although as Analytics is continually releasing
new features and reports, this list changes and grows and these reports may
now be available via a slightly different looking navigation menu.

14. Click on any of these help resources to get information on the specific report
youre viewing, tips on how to interpret and use the information for your
campaign, or learn what other peoples common questions are.
15. Select from this pull-down menu to jump to another Analytics account.
16. Apply the advanced segment you created to a report and compare it side-byside to other graphs.

7. Visitors

17. Select a date range.

18. Graph your report by day, week, month, or hour (where available).

This section provides information on visitor interaction with your site, the type
of visitors, and information about how they are viewing your site.

8. Traffic Sources

19. The selected date range, graph by view, advanced segment or metric is viewed
as a graph here.

20. Get at-a-glance views of your accounts key metrics here.

Find out how different offline or online sources sent traffic to your site. View
which sources are driving the most traffic to your site and spot trends from the
provided graphs and charts. You can now also view limited Webmaster tools
data about search queries searched for in Google which result in your site being
returned amongst the search results but which may not result in someone
clicking through to your site.

21. Add or delete report snapshot modules to your dashboard. To add a module, go
to your desired report and click Add to dashboard at the top of your report. To
delete one, click the X on the upper right-hand corner of every module in your
Dashboard report.

9. Content

These reports are all about the pages in your site and how visitors interacted
with each one. Use the data here to find time on page, landing and exit page
information, and a navigation summary for pages. Another free Google
product, Website Optimizer, has been useful for advertisers looking to increase
conversions by testing different versions of their content. You can learn more
about it here.

10. Goals

If youve set goals for your Analytics account, then you should see data in these
reports.

11. Ecommerce
12. Custom reports.
13. Settings - Advanced Segments and E-mail.
6

Google Analytics Basics Training Manual

Changing the Date Range

Graphs

By default, the past months stats can be seen. However should you wish to look at
a different time range: Click on the calendar tab and click on the start and end date,
or you can type in the date range into the Date Range Box. Alternatively by clicking
on the Timeline tab, you can access a re-sizable date slider to cover any range of
dates, allowing you to see traffic trends quickly and easily.

Most reports also allow you to Graph By set time periods. You will see the Graph By
Tabs on the top right of most of the graphs:

You can also compare date ranges to allow you to ascertain if there have been any
significant differences in traffic levels across comparable dates. When using the

Additionally on some reports, this will be expanded to allow you to see hourly
reporting, for example on the Bounce Rate report:

Rolling over graphs will provide you with additional pop-up statistics about the
graph you are currently viewing:

By default graphs will show only one graph line. However if you wish to compare
more than one metric on the one graph, clicking on the Visits Tab (circled above)
will provide additional metric options, allowing you to create multi-line graphs.
Timeline to set comparison dates, check the Compare to Past box and you will see
two sliders instead of one. Set the dates you wish to compare using the sliders.
If you set comparison dates, this will be applied to every report you view thereafter
until you un-check the Compare to Past box.

Google Analytics Basics Training Manual

Put Stats into Context

Analysing Trends

When analysing your traffic, avoid focusing on just a single metric as it often placed
into greater context before sense can be made of it.

Identifying trends can be a useful method in further contextualising your website

stats. It is important though to bear in mind that some trends may be weekly or
seasonal, so ensure that you familiarise yourself with typical website stats and
weekly, monthly and seasonal trends to ensure that any difference in trends you
are looking at are not just typical seasonal variations.

For example the page views result by itself isnt useful because you
dont know what the number really means. In addition one visitor can
view multiple pages and therefore perform multiple page views.
However when you consider page views alongside other metrics, then it starts to
become more useful.

The following chart clearly shows typical weekly visitor trends, and also seasonal
trends.

Now compare the visitor trends with the page view trends for the same time
period, (by clicking on the visitors tab (circled) and choosing to compare the two
metrics.

BOUNCE RATE: The percentage of people who enter a page and then immediately
exits/ click the back button without looking any further.

This trend now shows that there was a disproportionate increase in page views on
a few occasions and would therefore give reason for further investigation.
10

11

Google Analytics Basics Training Manual

Understanding Metrics
Visits, Visitors and Page Views
Page views are recorded every time a web page loads up correctly (remember the
earlier section- if the page fails to load correctly and Google Analytics Javascript
doesnt load, then no page view can be recorded). In addition if a user refreshes or
re-loads as a page, this will be counted as an additional page view.
Page views are a very different metrics to a visit, since one visit can result in
multiple page views. To help make this better understood, if someone comes to
your site and views the home page , then the Web Only Offers page, then the home
page again, and then leaves your site - the total page views for the visit is 3. Whilst
this all occurred during just one visit.

A visitor is a uniquely identified user of your website. As discussed, when a visitor

comes to your site their browser is issued with a cookie. The visitor cookie records a
random, unique visitor ID and also records a time stamp of the users first visit. The
random visitor ID and the time stamp are combined to create a unique ID for that
visitor.
So to recap, a visitor can visit a site multiple times, and during each visit can
conduct multiple page views. The visitor metric therefore tends to be smaller than
the visits metric, and the visits metrics tends to be smaller than the page views
metric.
The following diagram helps break this down:

The Pageviews metric can be found in the Visitors Overview and in

the Content section reports. Most of the other reports show Pages
Viewed per Visit instead of Pageviews.
It is important to note that most other reports in GA show Pages
Viewed per Visit instead of Page views.
A visit (also known as a session), is the period of interaction between your website
and the users browser. In the case of Google Analytics, if a user closes their browser
or window, or doesnt actively use their browser for a period of 30 minutes or more
(lets say they go on lunch without closing their Internet Explorer), then this will
end the visit or session.
What is important to note however, is that if that person returns from lunch after
the 30 minutes, and continues on where they left off- i.e. clicking about on your
website in the browser window they have open, then this will start a new session or
visit- and the person will have this registered as their second visit.

12

13

Google Analytics Basics Training Manual

New Vs Returning Visits, Unique Visitors & Unique Page Views

Traffic Sources

As well as having visits, visitors and page views, GA also records unique visits,
unique visitors and unique page views.

Traffics sources show you where on the internet your website traffic comes from.
This also makes it possible to separate and compare these traffic sources or
channels against one another and against other metrics (such as sales), to show
which source sends the best quality traffic.

A unique page view represents the number of visits during which that page was
viewed -whether one or more times. In other words, if a visitor views page A three
times during one visit, Google Analytics will count this as three page views and one
unique page view.
Unique Pageviews is only found in the Content section.

A unique visitor is a visitor who has visited your website only once during the
defined time period you are looking at (as identified by the visitor cookie). If
you want to identify the number of unique visitors or users of your website over
a period, the Absolute Unique Visitors report counts each visitor during your
selected date range only once, thereby allowing you to ascertain the number of
absolute unique users of your website.
The New vs. Returning report classifies each visit as coming from either a new
visitor or a returning visitor. So when someone visits your site for the first time,
the visit is categorised as Visit from a new visitor. If the person has browsed your
website before, the visit is categorised as Visit from a returning visitor.
If your website has more new visitors then your website is successful at driving
traffic. However if you have a higher level of returning visitors, then your site is
engaging enough to ensure that visitors return to the site on a regular basis.

14

Direct traffic occurs when a user accesses your site by typing the URL or web
address directly into their browser. This also includes those people who have
Bookmarked your web address.
Search Engine traffic indicates any visitors who have clicked on search results
on any search engine results page (Google/ Bing/ Yahoo). Search Engine traffic
includes both paid and organic search.
Referring Sites are any sites that send traffic to your site. These could be banner
ads or links featured on blogs, affiliates, or any site that links to your site.
Note: You can sometime see referrals from Google. This is usually
referrals from Google groups posts/Google Images/static pages
on other Google sites.
The All Traffic Sources report is particularly helpful because you can identify your
top performing sources, regardless of whether they are search engines or sites.
However as already shown in an earlier section, just looking at traffic levels alone
will not provide you with a great deal of information, as a source which drives a
large amount of traffic may indeed result in poor conversion.
Some indicators of poor quality traffic include: high bounce rate,
low sales conversion, low total conversion rate of all goals, high exit
rates, unrelated/ non-sensical keywords.

15

Google Analytics Basics Training Manual

The Content by Title report lists the web pages that received traffic in order of the
highest number of page views- however in this report the page TITLES are visibleso that you know the actual page name that was viewed rather than just the URL,
therefore it can be a little easier to interpret.
The Content Drilldown report groups pages according to directory. You can click
on a directory to see the pages in the directory.
NB - Directories are top level navigation / categories under which other sub
categories lie.

Keywords Report
The keywords that people are using to find your site can offer a wealth of
information on the effectiveness of your campaigns.

The Top Landing Pages report lists all of the pages through which people entered
your site.
You can use this report to monitor the number of bounces and the bounce rate for
each landing page, a good indicator of page relevance and effectiveness. The more
relevant the page, the less likely a visitor will be to bounce.

Keywords which result in high bounce rates can be seen as ineffective and an
indicator that the keyword used is not reflective of your product/ the landing page
is not relevant enough in meeting user expectations.

Google Analytics Goals

Content Reports

A goal is just that- a goal, an activity or an interaction that you want a user to
achieve on your website. Typically this can be that you want the user to contact
you, to make a purchase, to register/ sign up or to book an appointment.

There are three main content reports, each of which organises the data slightly
differently. However all of the content reports are useful at helping us understand
how the majority of users browse your site, what paths they take, what they look
at etc.
The Top Content report lists the web pages that received traffic in order of the
highest amount of page views, and is useful in helping us to identify the most
popular pages on the site- or the pages which most people visiting the site look at
during their visit. The pages are indicated by their actual URLs in this report, with
the / meaning your Home Page.

16

How these goals are initially set up can have a huge impact on the effectiveness
of your Google Analytics reporting and decision making- for example if the
defined goals are not actually aligned with what your head office goals/ business
objectives for the website are.
There are three ways in which you can define a goal in GA:

A URL Destination goal is a page that visitors see once they have completed an
activity. For an account sign-up, this might be the Thank You for signing up
page. For a purchase, this might be the receipt page. A URL Destination goal
triggers a conversion when a visitor views the page youve specified.

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.

17

Google Analytics Basics Training Manual

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 youve set, a
conversion is triggered.

You can see total conversions and conversion rates for each of your goals in your
reports. Typically because each of your goals are so different, the Total Goal
Conversions and Total Goal Conversion Rate figures can be very misleading.
For example, you may have a sale set up as a conversion on an ecommerce site, and
also an e-mail form submission on a contact us page set up as a goal. Both of these
goals you will want to monitor, however in regards to the business objectives, it is
the sale goal that is the most important.
It is more likely that users of your site (unless they are having site issues) will be
completing more sale goals than contact us goals- therefore the sale conversion
rate should be much higher. BUT if you look at the total Goal Conversion rate, the
Contact us goal will substantially lower this figure, as it is not a main goal/ aim of
your website- therefore making it look less successful than it actually is.
It is therefore recommended that you look at goal conversions for each of your
defined goals separately.
You can get information on setting up goals from Google Analytics help section but
if you are not sure, ask your web developer for assistance.

Why Define Funnels?

Defining a funnel is valuable because it allows you to see where visitors enter and
drop out the conversion process.
For example, if you notice that many visitors never go further than the Enter
address details page, you should investigate a page re-design- or perhaps
the inclusion of additional information to try to encourage the sale. In addition
knowing which pages in the process cause drop-outs can allow you to eliminate
these issues and any bottlenecks to increase the efficiency of the conversion path
and increase conversion rates.
If you define a funnel for a goal, Google Analytics populates the Funnel
Visualization report, which allows you to see where people enter the funnels and
where they leave, or abandon.
This report also graphically details how many people continue on at each of the
individually defined steps of the funnel.
The Funnel Visualisation report is in the Goals section and you can choose which
goal funnel to view from the drop down menu.

Overview

Goal Funnels

Understanding what users are doing and not doing on your site can allow you to
make decisions about how you might want to change your website.

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

At the very least it also helps you understand whether or not those new potential
customers are finding your site if they search for accommodation providers in your
area (keywords reports show what they have searched for to find you).

A checkout process is a good example of a funnel. And the page where the visitor
enters credit card information is an example of one of the funnel steps.

Your website is a huge opportunity for you to get in front of a new audience- and
the more insight that you can get about these individuals, the more you will be able
to ensure that your website meets their needs and their expectations.

The goal page or sales confirmation/ thank you page signals the end of the activity
and completion of the goal. The funnel steps are the pages that visitors encounter
on their way to the goal.
18

19

Developed for NITB by Ambition Digital