Google Analytics is a service that gives any business information about how people interact with websites. We will be able to learn who visits our site, how they reached the site, and what people do on our site. We can also track how long people stay on some pages and which pages are viewed the most.
We can get also get data on visitors, such as which languages they speak, on which device they browse like desktop, laptop, or mobile devices. All this information can assist us in our marketing so that we can bring in our expected audience to our website.
Goals in Analytics
One of the most important aspects of Google Analytics is conversion tracking using Goals. Goals are particular actions that we can set to track visitors who complete an action on our website.
The main types of Goals in Google Analytics that we can set up are:
Destination: This Goal can be achieved when a specific page in our site loads. The basic usage of this type of goal would be keeping track of several purchases and confirmation pages that load when people purchase products, register for email subscriptions, etc.
Duration: These goals record how often people stay on our website for particular periods. A Duration Goal can be applied to specific pages of our site, or this Goal can be implemented site-wide.
Page/Screens per session: We can set these goals to see whether people who come to our website are clicking to view more products or get more information. For example, we can set the number of page loads per session.
Event: An Event Goal is fulfilled when visitors complete some actions on our site which include clicking social media buttons, playing a video, clicking an ad, or making a purchase.
Source/Medium Reports
This report includes valuable data about the source of our traffic (such as Google, Yahoo or our email marketing) and the medium of our traffic (search ads, display ads, banner ads, email, etc.)
Also using Goals, this report lets us see how different types of traffic are converting into leads and sales. With this information, we can easily decide where to allocate our marketing budget. Using the UTM parameters in all of our marketing campaigns is essential to guarantee precise and useful report results.
Channels Reports
Instead of seeing data for channels according to specific referrers or types of traffic, the Channels report shows a big picture according to broader traffic categories such as paid search, email, or social media traffic.
Here, we can get most of the default grouping from the following channels: direct, organic search, referral, email, paid search, social, display, and other advertising. To obtain further channel data, the criteria for each type of traffic can be altered or new channel groupings can be added.
Website Traffic by Device
Running the Website Traffic by Device report can highlight whether a site needs extra work in optimizing for mobile and tablet devices. So, if it has a compatible and easy usage across devices, then it becomes easy to get traffic and sales here.
Here, we can compare performance differences between visitors using a desktop, tablet, and mobile browsers.
The next part of Google Analytics is Conversions. We have started with the Conversion report on the previous article, where we touched upon the Goals. The next major reports are E-commerce reports.
Ecommerce
The Ecommerce report can be grouped by:
- Products, Product Categories(Enhanced E-commerce)
- Sales
- Transactions
- Time taken to Purchase, etc.
Multi-Channel Funnels
With so many methods to communicate with our audience, it can be hard to tell what is working.
This report tells us how various channels supply into the funnel.
We can track things like,
- Assisted Conversions
- Top Conversion Paths
- Path Length
Attribution
Attribution refers to the rules used to allocate credit to points on the conversion path.
For example, if someone reads our email, then downloads an e-book, then made a purchase?
The attribution model we choose decides how the credit for the conversion is divided between the email and the e-book.
The Model Comparison Tool allows us to compare how various models allocate credits.
Tracking Social Media Conversions with Google Analytics:
Conversions:
Conversions can be configured for e-commerce sales, Form submissions, email subscriptions, sessions including visits to a certain page, and other goals we set up such as Purchase or Checkout goals.
We can separate social media traffic as a segment to view conversions here.
Conversions in Google Analytics are classified by what source a visitor entered the site (direct, SEO, PPC, social, email, referral, etc.) when they met the conversion criteria.
Assisted Conversions
Assisted Conversions can help design a complete picture of the influence of different channel sources.
Assisted conversions are credited when Google Analytics has tracked many sessions for a user before a conversion. It gives credit to sources that a user entered the site through in sessions before the final one where they took a conversion action.
Top Conversion Paths
While assisted conversions are consolidated info for channels that drove visits earlier in the customer visit, it’s important to know what specific path led to conversion based on sessions.
This report is great at showing the particular combinations of sources driving visits to the site and frequency of the combinations.
Social Reports in Acquisition
This report from Acquisition particularly focuses on Social media. While we can access all this information in other sections of Google Analytics by going into the separate reports and selecting social media as the filter, here we can have all of it to measure social traffic.
The reports include:
- A Summary.
- Info on particular social media sites that are sending traffic.
- Top landing pages for traffic coming from social media.
- The Conversions specific to Social Media networks.
- The flow of users on the website showing how they engage with content once they are on our site.
These reports can provide important insight into whether our social traffic is meeting our goals once visitors are on our site.
If the goal is to get users to our site, we need to know as much information as possible about what they do when they get to our website.
Campaign Reports:
The Campaign report shows how our paid campaigns are performing and how they compare to other attributes.
We can sort data by,
- All Campaigns
- Paid Keywords
- Organic Keywords
- Cost Analysis
Using the respective UTM tags, we can easily differentiate the campaigns. Other data we can easily obtain from Google Analytics which helps our site are direct data such as, Real-time reports, Locations, Traffic Sources, Content, Events, Active users, Audience, Demographics, Interests, Geo, Behaviour, etc.