<< INDEX

Chapter 8

Google Analytics

Google Analytics Basics

Introduction to Google Analytics

• Google Analytics is used to report on the performance of your webpage
• Google Analytics provides reports on:
• Performance of all your ad campaigns
• How visitors use your website
• Understanding how users interact with your website is key to building an effective online business
• Helps answer questions like
• Why are visitors abandoning my shopping cart page?
• Is the design of my website inefficient?
• Which marketing initiatives work best?
• How are people finding my business?
• What do users do while visiting my site?
• What keywords generate the most conversions?
• Some of the things you can do with Google Analytics include:
• Evaluate ROI of all marketing efforts
• Evaluate visitor navigation to identify problem areas
• Track revenue and conversions
• Track any browser based events
• Define groups of users by age and gender
• Spend time exploring reports to fully understand the large amount of information provided
• To install Google Analytics to your website, simply place the Google Analytics Java Script tracking code within the body of the HTML on each page you want to track

Introduction to Google Analytics Settings

• Profile – one complete set of Analytics reports for one domain
• Use multiple profiles to track several domains, sub-domains, or sub-directories
• You can have up to 50 profiles in your account
• Under Website Profiles Area you can:
• Add new profiles
• View reports for each profile
• Edit profile settings
• Delete profiles
• Editing Conversion Goals
• A conversion occurs when a visitor to your site completes an activity that you have identified as a goal, such as a purchase, signup, download, or page view
• A funnel is a series of pages a user must pass through before reaching the goal

• Editing Filters
• Filters are used to manipulate your data to depict your reporting objectives
• Exclude Filters – exclude specified data from your reports
• Editing Profile Users
• A user is someone that can log in to your analytics account
• Change first or last names and access type
• Access type can be administrator or ‘view reports only’
• Add new or existing users
• Analytics and AdWords logins are separate

Tracking Your Advertising Campaigns

• Campaign Tracking enables you to monitor the effectiveness of various marketing efforts
• AdWords Ads
• Other CPC Ads
• Banner Ads
• Email Newsletters
• Offline Advertising
• Reports allow you to compare different ads side by side
• Campaign Tracking Variables are identifiers you attach to the hyperlinks that lead to your website in order to track ads
• Reports will show where the clicks to your website are coming from
• Attaching Campaign Tracking Variables to a hyperlink is called Tagging
• Tagging is not necessary for all links since Google Analytics will track some types of referrals
• You can enable auto-tagging under the Account Preferences Tab
• Tagging is not necessary for
• AdWords URLs
• Links from search engines (organic)
• Links from referral sites such as portals and affiliates
• You should tag
• All non-AdWords paid keyword links
• Banners and other ads

• Links are tagged with the following Campaign Tracking Variables
• Campaign Name – track campaign name or product promotions, use auto-tracking feature for AdWords referrals
• Source – Track where customers found your hyperlink (i.e. Google.com or Email Newsletter)
• Medium – Helps to qualify the source (i.e. organic or CPC from the source Yahoo.com)
• For AdWords auto-tagged accounts the medium is automatically CPC
• Content -  Optional Variable used to test different versions of an ad
• Called A/B content testing
• For AdWords auto-tagged accounts, the content variable is the first line of ad text
• Term – Tracks keyword or phrase that triggered the ad
• If you don’t manually tag your links, Google Analytics will automatically assign source and medium values that will show in your reports
• Automatically assigned source values are usually the domain of the reffering site
• Another source you may see in reports is “direct” which means the user had the URL bookmarked or typed it directly into the browser
• Automatically assigned Medium values will often follow the source value
• Organic – visitors referred by unpaid search engine result
• Referral – visitors referred by links that were not paid
• Not Set – visitors referred by links which were tagged with Campaign Variables, but not with a Medium Variable
• Direct/None – visitors used a bookmark or typed the URL

• Several Reports show traffic from tagged initiatives
• All Traffic Sources Report – displays all traffic that comes to your site
• Ad Versions Report – Traffic assorted according to content
• Campaigns Report
• Search Engines Report – View how well your paid keywords for a particular search engine are performing

Terms to Know

Campaign Tracking Variables – identifiers attached to the hyperlinks that lead to your website in order to track ads
Tagging – the process of adding campaign tracking variables to links

<< INDEX

Chapter 1: Introduction to AdWords
Chapter 2: Getting Started with AdWords
Chapter 3: Targeting
Chapter 4: Costs and Billing
Chapter 5: Tracking Ad Performance
Chapter 6: Optimizing Ad Performance
Chapter 7: The Adwords Toolbox
Chapter 8: Google Analytics
Chapter 9: Managing Client Accounts


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