Week 1:

Paradox of data: a lack of it means you cannot make complete decisions, but even with a lot of
data, you still get an infinitesimally small number of insights

Digital Analytics - process of analyzing digital data from various sources like websites, mobile
applications, among others.

- Provides an insight on how users or customers are behaving, plus ideas for the areas
that need improvement.
- By doing this, we can design personalized experiences for your customers (ex:
Marketing Campaigns)

Analytics Evolution:

Predictive vs Prescriptive Analysis:

- (1) Forecast potential future outcomes

- (2) Give recommendations for the next step

Web Analytics 1.0 and Clickstream Data – Its limit is that we realize this is great for the what,
but not the why, getting lots of data, but few insights

- Examples of “the what”: What pages did people view on our website, What was the
average time spent, …

Web Analytics 2.0 - Thinking differently about making decisions on the Web. Realizing data is
not the problem and people might be focusing less on accuracy and more on precision

- More critical than the why was to know why people do the things they do on your site
- So include not just the why, but also key questions that can help us make decisions

Multiplicity is the only way for you to be successful at Digital Analytics.

 - A company will need to solve for the Five Pillars: Clickstream, Multiple Outcomes
Analysis, Experimentation and Testing, Voice of Customer, and Competitive
Intelligence

The what (Clickstream) - Base data you get from Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and other
Clickstream tools.

- Helps you measure pages and campaigns and helps you analyze all kinds of site
behavior: Visits, Visitors, Time on Site, Page Views, Bounce Rate, Sources, and more

The how much (Multiple outcomes analysis)

The why:

- (Experimentation and testing) – Important since failing online is cheap and fast
o Examples of questions: Why not launch a new product on Fnac online first
rather than at a Fnac store and see how it does?
o Why not experiment with a few different promotional offers via email or
search ads before you finalize your strategy and launch it using radio ads, TV
ads, or print?

- Voice of Customer (VOC) – We can do surveys to better understand customers and

their interaction with our website:
o What is the purpose of your visit to our web site?
o Were you able to complete your task?
o If you were not able to complete your task, why not?

The what else (Competitive Intelligence):

- On the Web, though, you can gather tons of information about your direct or indirect
competitors
- Unless we are competitive, we will be irrelevant

Why Measure Data? Allows you to better know your customers and take better decisions.

- Measuring allows keep track on the success of an action

- Measuring works as a basis to optimize and evolve
 - Measuring allows you to follow trends and behaviors
- Measuring helps us find the best strategy

How to Measure Data? Pick solutions that allow you to measure and monitor our strategy's
assessment indicators

How to Change to Succeed in the world of Digital Analytics?

- Strategic shift: a change to the mental model you apply

- Tactical shift: challenge your current thinking about tools and how to use them.

ESE(P) Simplified implementation by Bruno Amaral

Week2 notes:

Analytics – Dimensions + Metrics

Dimensions – Source of traffic

If we change a page, the expiration time starts again

Long form – a good case when expiration times may be extended (rare)

IF we refresh a page we get a new page view

Direct Traffic – Click on the bookmark

- If we type the address, instead of doing a google search

 - Or when google analytics can´t understand where you came from

Pageview example – what articles made more money

Unique Pageview – what are the most read articles

Week 2:
Metric is a quantitative measurement of statistics describing event or trends on a website.

Key Performance indicator (KPI) - metric that helps understand how are doing against your
objectives (unique in each company)

Base Metrics Analysis:

Sessions:

- Session: Count of all the unique session ID’s during a given time period
- Number of times a visitor has been in your site
- If inactive for 30 minutes or more, we attribute a new session, if not same
session

- Engaged Sessions: Sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds OR Viewed 2 or more
pages OR Had conversion events (Purchase example)

Users or Unique Visitors: Someone that visits your website

- The first time a visitor enters the website counted as an additional session and an
additional user.
- Any future visits counted as additional sessions, but not as additional users (through
cookies)
- Universal Analytics uses Client ID a unique, random value, stored inside a cookie
- Not the most accurate, any interference with the cookie will affect your user data
(using ad-blockers or cleaning your cookies), and is stuck inside the browser (no track
among other devices)

- Different to Universal Analytics, GA4 has a range of user-counting methods

- User ID – it can only be used if a website has login/authentication
- Google Signals – Isn´t that accurate. Measures what adds you interact with
 - Device ID – same concept as Client ID

- UA vs GA4:
- (1) Less accurate, more prone to fail due to single use of
cookies, only uses Client ID
- (2) Bigger range of user-counting methods, + accurate user
tracking, ML capabilities
-

Average Time on Page & Average Session Duration:

- Session Duration: Time a visitor spends on the site

- Average Time on Page - How long a visitor spent on a particular page or set of pages.
o Does not apply to exit pages for your site
- Example:

- Bounce / Single Page Sessions: number of single-page visits to your site

- Bounce Rate - Enter website and leave without clicking any other page
by session (Bounce rate = Bounces / Sessions)
- Helps measure quality of traffic (who is engaging), and understand
where/how the website is failing
- All bounces are exists, not all exits are bounces
- Exceptions: One page site or people would see just one single webpage and get all the
information they need and leave, blogs
- Action 1: Check Referring URL's / Sites
- Actions 2: Measure bounce rate of Google Ads
Campaigns, compared to site average
- Action 3: Measure bounce rate of your top
trafficked pages
- To 20% ok, over 35% meh, over 50% bad
- Ver slides para actions sobre cad um (53)
 - Tabbed Browsing – What if I open several tabs of the same site?
- More and more popular among users, no way is perfect
- Way #1 -> Two sessions, one for each tab, 1 user

- Way #2 -> One Sessions, visit

“reorganized” by time stamps, 1 user
- Used by Google Analytics

Average Engagement Time per Session: replaced average session duration on GA4

User Lifetime Metrics: how visitors behaved during their lifetime as a user on our website

Pageviews and Unique Pageviews:

- Pageviews: Count of pages seen by visitors while navigating on the website

- In GA4, their called Views, and are collected as events inside the platform
- When we refresh a page, we get a new pageview

Exit Rate: Number of times a particular page was the last one viewed by visitors

Conversion Rate: Outcome divided by Unique Visitors

- Outcome: Reason that the site exists, a sale, a subscription, number

of people who completed a task, …

- Goal completions -total number of important actions or goals

performed in the site - 100 sales, 100 goal completions

- Goal conversion rate percentage of sessions on a site that result in a conversion goal
being reached - 100 sales / by the sessions *100
How web works:

Cookies First-party vs Third-party

- (1) Set up using the domain of the website itself

o Deleted/rejected a lot less, so better at tracking. Also, because they are
needed to access most sites (sites ask for them)
o Google Analytics only offer the option of having first party cookies.

- (2) Set up by third party, allowing to track visitors across different websites. No good
o Susceptible to auto deletion by anti-spyware and malware

For mobile: Most common used metrics Firebase

Engagement Metrics:

- Engagement time on mobile goes even beyond, by measuring screen sleep time, or
captures the time in the foreground for a mobile device, to determine how a user is
engaging with your content
- Instead of Pageviews, for Mobile Apps, Events are the focus for most tools
- Each action in a screen can be tracked as an event

Downloads and Crashes

- Number of installations done. The closest metric in Google Analytics is new users
- Crashes is the number of critical errors that can occur during execution

Week 3:
Google Analytics - free web-based platform to measure digital properties and provide statistics
and analytical tools to study and evaluate users’ behavior and navigation trends

- We can measure visitor behavior, traffic sources, search trends, buying habits, ROI, …
- We only have to paste small snippets of code to track user interactions, such as events,
screens, actions, etc…
 - Uses JavaScript to work and cookies to identify and track users on the website

What are cookies used for:

- Distinguish unique users - and their value

- Remember the number, and date of previous visits
- Remember traffic source info
- Determine end and start of a session

These phases are also called: Collection, Configuration

(Customize how data is collected), Processing and Reporting

Main Reports:

Real time: Allows to detect significant changes over time, check if analytics are tracking users

- We can monitor the usage of site or app every second

Home:

o Your home page report will quickly answer:

o Where do new users come from?
o What are your top-performing campaigns?
o Which pages and screens get the most views?

- Acquisition Goal: Find where users came from

- Example: If organic traffics is main source,

invest more in it

Engagement: Know how users are interacting with the

website (through events when there is info you want to
track, but GA doesn´t track it (button, url, forms)

Three Dimensions of Events: Category -> Action ->

Label

- Click social media link (action), social media (Category)

Some features of Universal Analytics:

 - Time segmentation, comparison metrics, key indicators, evolution graph, advanced
search…

Advanced Search: Allows you to filter effectively and analyze elements from total, segmenting
results for relevant conclusions, and refine info for more relevant indicators

GA4:

- Better cross-device tracking

o Web and mobile are measured into one property to
improve cross device analysis
o Data is stitched together via User ID, Client ID, Google Signals

- Data is event based (any interaction can be captured as an event)

- User metric become primary metrics: GA4 is strongly user oriented

- Fixed reports are limited and miss several features from UA reports (to bridge the gap,
we access Analysis Hub functionality inside GA4)

Free formed Reports inside GA4 have 3 components:

- Variables: here you can select the data you plan to use
in a report by choosing the data range, segments,
dimensions, and metrics
- Tab Settings: on this tab, you can configure what the
report will look like
- Output: once everything is configured, you will get
access to the report to analyze data

Differences Between GA4 and UA:

- AI insights and predictions powered by machine learning

- Removal of monthly hit limits – instead of a monthly limit of 10M hits, GA4 will limit
their property to 500 different types of events
- Free connection to Google Big Query – this cloud data warehouse enables very large
and complex data sets to be queried very quickly. This platform takes the data out of
GA and gives you the ability to interrogate it without the issues of sampling
GTAG (Global Site Tag) - It’s a new version of Google Analytics code that can integrate several
kinds of tracking. It’s Universal Analytics + new & more adaptive approach to Google products

- Benefits:
o Future-proof conversion measurement: Benefit from the latest features and
integrations as they become available so that you'll be better equipped to
continue measuring conversions accurately if non-Google changes occur.
o Code-less tag management: Turn measurement features on and off within
your Google Analytics account without having to manually change tags on your
page.
o Faster and easier integration: Seamlessly implement and integrate with other
Google products, such as Google Ads and Google Optimize

Examples of Dimensions: Page, URL, Age, Gender

Example for a company: Transaction id (dimension) Price (metric)

When to apply funnels: When everyone enters through a specific page and exits through
another specific

- View cart (Toda a gente que compra vai lá)

- O nº de users vai descendo à medida que avançamos

Channels / Default Channel Grouping:

- GA automatically knows where you come:

- Organic Traffic

- Direct Traffic (We don´t know where it came from)

- Referral Traffic (go to a website from another)

- Social Traffic (going from Facebook)

- GA doesn´t know where you come from

- Paid Traffic (Paid search, display, affiliate)

- Email
Week 4:
Dimensions are pieces of information that give context to the metrics

- Dimensions: Row level // Metrics: Column level

Information about website sessions on GA4:

- Users, New Users, Average Engagement Time, Pageviews,

Purchases, Sessions, Engaged Sessions, Conversions, Bounce Rate,
Event Count

Understand The Different Pieces of GA:

Audience Reports: With GA, we can know several data about users, such as location,
language, gender, age, interests, … We can get this info on:

- Retention (Life Cycle)

- Users Collection (Demographics and Technology)
o We can see by language, geography, new and returning, age, gender, interests
o Allows to better understand who the visitors are
o We can use the insights about the visitors to refine the ad campaign strategies
o We need to enable google signals and update privacy and cookie policy

We can get information on the devices, through Technology and Mobile, we get:

- Browsers & OS, Network, Mobile, Devices, Engagement, Screen Resolution

How do we know which traffic sources generate more value? – Through Acquisitions

- Identify major sources of traffic, the quality of the traffic, and make decisions
- Main Traffic types: Direct, Organic Search, Referral and Campaigns
- Other Sources: Social, Affiliate, Display, Paid Search
- What can we see?
o Acquisition by channel, campaign, keyword, and source/medium
o Behavior on site by pages per visit, visit duration, and pageviews
o Conversion patterns by transactions, revenue, ecommerce conversion rate,
goal completions, goals value, and goal conversion rate
- In the traffic acquisition, is called session default channel
grouping
 - Source: Every referral to a web site has an origin, or source. Possible sources include:
“google” (the name of a search engine), “facebook.com” (the name of a referring site),
, and “direct” (users that typed your URL directly)
- Medium: Every referral to a website also has a medium. Possible medium include:
“organic” (unpaid search), “cpc” (cost per click, i.e. paid search), “referral” (referral),
“email”, “none” (direct traffic has a medium of “none”)
- Keyword: The keywords that users searched are usually captured in the case of search
engine referrals. This is true for both organic and paid search.
- Campaign is the name of the referring AdWords campaign or a custom campaign that
you have created.

Week 5:

GA4 vs Universal

UA Uses a cookie that is active for 2 years

How do we install GA?

- Copy tracking code, paste on every page´s HTML we want to track, before the </head>

Custom Campaigns: Control what GA knows about where users are coming from

- Allow to record info from other platforms, even if aren´t websites. Ex: emails.
- Measure online and offline campaign performance

Traffic Sources Considerations:

 - Search traffic should be about 50% of total website traffic, if it is more then it
means you are over dependent on search engines which is a high-risk strategy.
- Organic traffic > Paid Traffic, must focus on always reducing traffic acquisition
cost
- Direct Traffic around 30%, If less than 15% then you are either not good in customer
service or you have got branding issues.
- Referring sites traffic around 20%, If too low then people don’t link out to you much
and there are some issues with your link building and content marketing campaigns.

How do you know which sessions visitors are more interested in? Content Reports

- Evaluate interaction on pages

- Observe how visitors behave
- Identify points of entry and exit
- List pages more interesting and useful
- Content Drilldown: Lists each directory and page of your website.
- Landing Pages: Show only the pages that were the first one to be seen by the user.
- Exit pages: Show only the pages that were the last one to be seen by the user
- Request URI: part of the URL after the domain name (“/” represents the homepage)

Advanced Segmentation and Explorations:

Week 6:

Benchmarking: We should compare our performance with other websites in the same industry

- With GA we can compare based on Channels, Countries, Devices

Types of Advanced Segmentation and Explorations:

- Free-Form Analysis: Flexible, can act as a simple table,

pivot table, can have graphs, …

- Funnel Analysis: Visualize the steps users take to complete tasks

and see how we can optimize and understand user experience
- If, between the click of an ad, and a registration, only 30% remain,
then we are only converting 30% of visitors to registered users

- Segment Overlap Analysis: Knowing the different

user behavior is key to better design our strategy.
We can identify segments of users who meet the
criteria.

- Path Analysis: Visualize the path users take as

they interact with the website / app

- User Lifetime Analysis: Explore user´s behavior and value over their
lifetime as a customer

- Cohort Analysis: Understand how users

behave over a period of time, such as return
users coming back or purchasing again

Advanced Segments vs Filters:

Week 7:

Why Measure? If we can´t measure it, we can´t manage it

- Keep track of success, following trends and behaviors

- Work to improve and evolve towards the best strategies

Analytical Thinking:

- Creating (Gather ideas from different sources to create new products)

- Evaluation (Compare ideas, identifying weaknesses and strengths)
- Analysis
- Application (Applying the theories in real situations)
- Understanding
- Knowledge

Cycle of Analytics – Measure and Optimize

Digital Analytics will allow you to better know

your customers and take better decisions.

Recap:

Metrics – Quantitative Measurement describing events or trends on a website

- Measure the impact of any communication action or behavior

Dimensions – Allow us to target or filter indicators to enrich information, and analyze behavior

- Ex: Geography, Language, Campaign, Medium, Page, …

Segments – Groups of dimensions that allow us to extract value from the available metrics,
and evaluate success of actions, or strategic objectives

- Ex: Visitors from Lisboa, Paid traffic that made a purchase

KPIs - metrics or key indicators to measure the success and effectiveness of a campaign, an
action, a process, a website, among others, according to the set goals

- Ex: Total sales, Page views, New users average, …

- How to choose? In line with goals and expectations, measurable

How to define goals? SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time Based)

- Business Goals – Purpose of web property

- Strategic Goals – where we should focus to achieve a business goal

Analytics Frameworks: Impact Matrix, OSGM approach, Balanced Scorecards

Why create dashboards and reports? Best way to share the insights and results of analysis, to
quickly monitor and identify opportunities and weakness of the business or strategy

Exercise:

Week 9:

There is a need to make critical changes to succeed in the world of DA:

- Strategic Shift
- Tactical Shift:
o Multiplicity is the only way to be successful, multiple user and behavior, tools,
and types of data sources
o It has 5 pillars, and it depends on business size
Touchpoints of Customer Engagement:

- Awareness > Consideration > Purchase > Service > Loyalty

ESE(P):

- Enrichment: Use custom dimensions and metrics

o Adopt user ID to allow for a unique user analysis between devices
- Segmentation: Set personas and target audience, and apply advanced segments to
analyze its behavior
- Experimentation: Set goals and KPI´s to measure success
o Use tools like Google Optimize to do personalization, experimentation, …
- Personalization: Personalize user experience based on data

User scope – we use cookies to remember info on customers, only changes if we want

In UA dimension scope levels are user scope, session scope, hit scope

In GA4 dimension scope levels are user scope, event scope.

In GA4 metrics scope levels are always event scope

Data Enrichment in GA – We can send data to the GA database to enhance our analysis

How can we set up custom dimensions and metrics?

1. Create the custom dimension / metric

2. Add tags to the JavaScript, so it sends the information to GA

Main User Identification Methods: User-ID, Google Signals, Client ID (Device ID)

To use the first two, google signals must the active, if so, analytics collects demographics and
interests, so reports will be subject to data thresholds, so users / devices can´t be identified
by those, getting consent from users, or option to opt-out

User-ID: Lets you associate a persistent ID for a single user, being able to associate data to that
individual in more than one session, device, and even browser
 - User-ID view - analyze data from sessions in which a User-ID is detected
- We unlock new reports:
- User Explorer Report: Information about the users’ behavior on your website
- Cross-Device Reports: Data on how they engage across devices
- User ID Coverage Reports: identify how many sessions come from registered/logged
users on your website, compared to the number of sessions that didn’t get a User ID

By tracking our goals, we can do the following:

- Bid on conversions: Import your conversion data into Google Ads to use with an
automated bid strategy to potentially increase conversions and lower costs.
- Attribute credit to conversions: Combine your data with data from other advertising
channels to understand the touch points along a user's path to conversion.
- Advertise to unconverted users: Use your conversion data to create audiences of
users who didn't convert and import those audiences into Google Ads for remarketing

How can we create goals for pageviews?

- We create a custom event for a page and turn that event into a conversion (goal)
- Goal types: Destination (thank u page), Duration, Pages / Session / Event (play video)

Why is funnel conversion the ultimate goal analysis?

- We analyze behavior through a desired navigation path

- Identify the blocking steps that could be optimized for growth conversions

Analytics Intelligence: Two types of insights

- Automated – When unusual changes or trends are detected

- Custom Alerts – We create conditions that when triggered, we get the insights

Week 10:

Metrics (we can sum them up) that are e-commerce metrics by default in ga:
 - Revenue
- Transactions
- Conversion rate

Dimensions that are e-commerce metrics by default in ga:

- Product name
- Product id
- Transaction id
- Product brand
- Product category

Persona: Create the profile of a person that might be a customer

- We have lots of data in analytics (if most buyers are from US, a persona could be from
the US)
- Helps focus our strategies on our specific target

With GA we can track the customer purchases through:

- Store performance
- Buying process (Related with products, transactions, and their metrics)
- Checkout process behavior (Funnels)
- Internal marketing and promotions (Buy two pay one, 10% discount, pay no shipping,
coupons – promoting product with campaigns)

Track Product data to run deep analysis on our products: Similar to Data Enrichment, product
data allows us to send info on the products, to help analyze them in more detail

How to access e-commerce in UA? Conversions – E-commerce

Why choose e-commerce instead of goals

- Different and more targeted metrics,

- All sales can be tracked within a visit, while goals track only one
Enhanced E-Commerce Offers more options to track e-commerce behavior:

- Economic Performance
- Merchandising Success
- Product Attribution
- Shopping Funnel

Data Layer: computer program which provides access to data stored in persistent storage

- An efficient one will allow to improve tracking and measurements, by sharing data and
collecting insights on several platforms

Google tag manager is used for tracking

- Don’t need to be a massive coder

- Grabs data from data layer and send it to platforms (GA, Facebook, TikTok, and other
marketing platforms): Website – Data Layer – GTM – GA
- Based on the “what to measure”, “when”, and “where”
- Tag (Define what we send to google analytics – what to measure)
- Trigger (When do I fire this data to google analytics and where)

Assisted conversion – indicate that one source performed a role in the purchase, but wasn’t
the channel where the purchase occurred (like clicking an add through paid search, but then
we go and buy through organic search) – they can pay a clearer picture to the importance of
each channel

- When everything is direct, the channels are not being tracked properly
- The conversion always goes to the last non direct source of traffic, if only direct exists
its direct
- Google saves the last website we were, so we know what channel we came from
- To know if it was social or paid, we need to use UTM parameters
- If we come from google.com (organic), then on zara (direct) then checkout (direct),
organic is the assisted channel

Server-side tracking is almost 100% accurate

- Databases of website send the order info to the platform we use

- Also good for GDPR and privacy, since we are on control of the data, we send the data
to our servers
 - We don’t use browser for anything

Advantages of server-side tracking vs client-side tracking:

- Adblocks won’t prevent data from being sent

- Accuracy of data is much higher
- With client side is impossible for anyone at 100% obey the European law, example
send European data to servers outside Europe, while server-side we have 100% control
on the data, like anonymize the user location, info, …

But UA doesn’t work well with server side, GA does

What if the last page went outside of the website? Like paying with paypal:

- Its all direct (all pages), until paypal which is referral, so it will be overall referral, not
direct like it is for traffic attribution of the session
- How to solve? Referral exclusion list inside GA

Week 11:
Experimentation - Testing allows you to compare different approaches and select the one that
will bring you higher revenue and a better ROI

- Run tests for specific audiences

- Test different layouts, texts, colors, to find the best pages/screens to show the visitors

Ways of experimentation:

Redirect (Easiest): type of A/B test that allows you to test different web pages against each
other. A redirect test contains different URLs for each variant

AB Testing: User can be associated with an experiment ID, where dimensions are connected to
the users

- Randomized experimentation process wherein two or more versions of a variable (web

page, page element, etc.) are shown to different segments of website visitors at the
same time
- To determine which version leaves the maximum impact and drives business metrics

Multivariant tests – we have the original and some changes, where we can see if these
changes improve metrics performance

Ideas on Experimentation: User experience, email marketing, advertising, videos, …

 - With email, we can test different alternatives & focus on metrics such as unique opens
o Might loose data if we have only A & B, should have A & B different, and C with
both mixed, to get the most data
- With Facebook ads we can see which are most efficient

We can use Google Optimize to test:

- We have multiple test models: Redirect, AB, Multivariant, …

- We set variables without code, and choose size of the audience, targeting base on
characteristics like geography, device, channel, …

Multi-channel funnels allow you to measure and evaluate the contribution of each
source towards the achievement of a goal or sale

Attribution Models on Multi-Channel Funnels:

- Last Interaction - last touchpoint would receive 100% of the credit for the sale.
- First Interaction - the first touchpoint would receive 100% of the credit for that
attribution model, each touchpoint in the conversion path would share equal
credit (25% each) for the sale.
- Linear splits the revenue by all the different channels involved in the journey
- Time Decay touchpoints closest time to sale or conversion get most of the credit.
- Position Based 40% credit is assigned to each the first and last interaction, and
the remaining 20% credit is distributed evenly to the middle interactions
- Last Non-Direct (Default for MCF) All direct traffic is ignored, and 100% of the
credit for the sale goes to the last channel before converting (also cross-channel
last click)