Review [CRO Minidegree Week 6] — A Beginner’s Guide To Google Analytics (Part 1)

Google Search Console

Google Analytics plays a central role in my work because I mainly try to understand the behaviours of people online. CXL’s CRO Minidegree has given me a more comprehensive understanding of the platform. Continuing with our overview, here’s part 1.

Analysing Google Analytics can help you learn how a website user behaves and why they do what they do. Basically, the tool allows you to see how your users are using your website and what marketing efforts are yielding results.

Google offers two main analytics packages as part of its Marketing Platform. Among their packages, one is aimed at small businesses and includes only Google Analytics. The second package is the enterprise edition package with more advanced features to allow you to manage websites at the enterprise level.

The Google Marketing Platform also includes Google Tag Manager and Google Data Studio and their goal is to:

1. Collect information by using Google Tag Manager’s tracking script
2. Store information with Google Analytics in their database
3. Create reports with Google Data Studio on the data stored

Due to Google Analytics already storing vast amounts of data concerning website traffic, Google decided to take advantage of that information and create more specialised tools such as Tag Manager to combine it and create reports in Google Data Studio.

GA can be installed on your website by following these steps:

1. Using built-in integrations
2. Copy and pasting tracking ID
3. Using Tag Manager

I’ll walk you through the steps of setting up Google Analytics correctly so that you can take advantage of the data as much as possible. Specifically, we’re going to go over the “Account” and “Property” tabs.

The admin page

By clicking on the gear icon on the bottom left of the page, you can access the Admin page. Here, you can adjust settings on three levels: Account, Property, and View.

Source: Google

Whenever a GA Account is created, it can have multiple Properties, and each Property can have multiple Views.

Account

Accounts are tied to a Gmail address by default and are the highest level.

Source: Google Analytics Demo Account

Making sure everyone has the proper access level is paramount when setting up the “Account User Management”.

Your properties will be accessible to anyone who is added here.

Admins also have the power to delete or add users to their accounts. The same goes for you. It is important to remember this when adding or removing users. You won’t need to worry about the others during the initial setup, but you may find them useful later on.

Property

You will need to create a Property for your website or app, so the tracking ID can be associated with it. It is at this point where the most important things take place (Refer to the image above).

Take note of some of the settings listed here:

Property Settings

1. Tracking Id: You’re likely to use this a lot, so this is where you will find it.
2. Default URL: Your website URL
3. Default View: New accounts have only one option. Nevertheless, when you begin creating multiple views, this is where you pick the “default” view.
4. Industry Category: Although it is not that important, if you wish for Google to make use of benchmarks and GA templates that are relevant to your industry, then you should choose the option that applies to you the most.
5. Advanced Settings: If you check this setting, Google Ads will stop tagging your Adwords links automatically, so all of your traffic will appear as organic traffic in GA reports. Make sure you only check it when you have a very compelling reason to do so.
6. Demographics and Interest Reports: If you would like demographics and interest reports in your Audience section of Google Analytics, you will probably want this on. For an understanding of how this works, please read this.
7. Search Console:
8. The reason this is essential is that you will be able to view detailed data related to your Google organic traffic within your GA reports. Create an account in GSC and link it to GA here.
9. Users Metric in Reporting: This is on by default. This means that GA reports users instead of sessions in their reports by default. Turn it off if you want it the other way around. This is not something I recommend, as it’s harder to think about things on the basis of sessions rather than users.

Source: Google Analytics Demo Account

Tracking Info

1. Tracking Code: You can find your Global Site Tag here, gtag.js. This is your actual Google Analytics tracking code, which will be injected into your site.
2. Data Collection: These options allow you to use remarketing and ads personalisation, which is ideal if you run ads. Data collection is becoming an increasingly sensitive subject, so make sure you know how it works.
3. Data Retention: What should the retention period for user-specific information be? The setup is done here. If you don’t intend to change this setting, you should leave it as-is.
4. User-ID: In most cases, it is best to leave this tab turned OFF since it is quite advanced. If, however, you need to track users across devices using their “User ID”, then enable it. Following the instructions and adjusting the Global Site Tag will get you set up.
5. Session Settings: By default, sessions end after 30 seconds of inactivity on a page (no events are recorded). However, imagine if you had a 20-minute video on one of your pages. The session will expire while the user is watching the video. Similarly, if the user continues their session, GA will consider it a second session. This will be incorrect. The example above merely illustrates the point. In such cases, you should adjust the session timeout on your website.
6. Organic Search Sources: The default search engines that appear in your reports as organic traffic are listed here. If you want to add another search engine, this is the place to do it.
7. Referral Exclusion List:This is a very important feature. Your referral traffic corresponds to the traffic you receive from other websites, so knowing where the traffic comes from is important. Sometimes, however, you may not want some sites to appear as sources. Classic examples are 1) your own website (that’s why it’s there by default) and 2) Paypal because when you use Paypal for payments, the user is redirected to paypal.com and then redirected back to your website. Did your traffic come from Paypal? Actually, no. This was just an essential step in the purchasing process. Therefore, you should exclude it.
8. Search Term Exclusion List: The search terms you enter here will prevent them from being considered “search traffic”. You could, for example, type your brand name here so that the traffic that comes from people searching for your brand name will be considered “direct”.

Product Linking

This is where other Google products can be linked to GA. Go to “All Products” to see them all.

Although the tools may differ from site to site, Google Ads and Google Search Console are the most popular and frequently used. Make sure you have a Gmail account (using the same address for maximum convenience) and admin permissions for each product so that you can create links by following the instructions provided.

Audiences

You can find this view under Audience Definitions

Remember when you activated the remarketing campaign? In this section, you build the remarketing audiences based on your specific criteria. In my opinion, the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery’s best practices criteria are pretty good, and you can import them into your own analysis software.

In the next article, we’ll explore the “View” tab in Google Analytics and how to set it up for the first time.

See you next week!