Google Analytics Education and Skills for the Professional Advertiser
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AN INDUSTRY GUIDE TO Google Analytics Education and Skills For The Professional Advertiser MODULE 5 American Advertising Federation The Unifying Voice of Advertising Google Analytics is a freemium service that records what is happening at a website. CONTENTS Tracking the actions of a website is the essence of Google MODULE 5 Google Analytics Analytics. Google Analytics delivers information on who is visiting a Learning Objectives .....................................................................................1 website, what visitors are doing on that website, and what Key Definitions .......................................................................................... 2-3 actions are carried out at the specific URL. Audience Tracking ................................................................................... 4-5 Information is the essence of informed decision-making. The The A,B,C Cycle .......................................................................................6-16 website traffic activity data of Google Analytics delivers a full Acquisition understanding of customer/visitor journeys. Behavior Focus Google Analytics instruction on four(4) Conversions basic tenets: Strategy: Attribution Model ............................................................17-18 Audience- The people who visit a website Case History ........................................................................................... 19-20 Review ............................................................................................................... 21 Acquisition- Where they came from Student Exercise ........................................................................................ 22 Behavior- What they did when they were there Conversion- The percentage of people who performed a specific or desired activity on the site. (Example: sign up for company blog) Google Analytics LEARNING OBJECTIVES PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH 1. Establish Google Analytics as a tracking tool that allows 1 Sign up for Google Analytics marketers to capture website audience, behavior, and activity data for successful marketing. 2. Expose students to the audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversion data delivered by Google Analytics. 3. Articulate the value of website audience, acquisition, behavior, 2 Add Tracking Code and conversion data to students and how to use in strategy development. 4. Show how Google Analytics’ ability to “track actions” can be the basis of building an “attribution model” to identify the very steps and sequence for conversion actions (purchase, click) to 3 Learn about your audience occur. WHAT IT IS Google Analytics is a snippet of code that may be inserted on each page of a website. The code organizes all of the site traffic data Get Started into a collection of reports. The reports are specific to a particular theme like web traffic, where visitors came from, content viewed, and more. These reports are the bread and butter of Google Analytics. They are what make the platform so valuable. https://www.google.com/analytics/web/provision?et=&authuser=#provision/SignUp/ Google Analytics 1 Key Definitions Event THERE IS TERMINOLOGY IN THE WORLD OF When users interact with a websites content, it is tracked as an GOOGLE ANALYTICS THAT STUDENTS NEED TO event. These may be downloads, mobile ad clicks, when someone LEARN. BRIEFLY, HERE ARE THE KEY TERMS. plays a video or acquiring a pdf. Conversion This action is carried out by a site user. A micro conversion may Attribution simply be clicking on a form. A macro conversion may occur two This is the process of assigning credit for sales and conversions to months later when they place an order. Everything that leads up touch points in site conversion paths. It is assigning a quantitative to that macro conversion may be tracked in Google Analytics. value to the contribution of each step in the process of an site action which may be a sale, conversion, sign up or event. Goal A series of actions that must occur for a conversion event. Attribution Mode This is set of rules established through Google Analytics that Metric determines how credit for sales or conversions are assigned to each A metric is a quantitative measurement of data. Metrics can be point in the site user’s journey. There are different types of models sums or ratios. An example is how many people reside in a city. like “last click” attribution or “first click” attribution. Example: Last Screen views, pages per session, and average session duration click attribution would assign 100% credit to the final touch point are all examples of standard metrics. before a customer purchased. Say a user went to Google, looked for a site, found a blog, clicked on a blog, read another article, and then Pageview clicked on your site. A pageview is every time a page is loaded or reloaded in a browser. The pageview metric is the total number of pages on a website Dimension viewed. One unique visitor can contribute multiple pageviews. This is one way Google Analytics organizes data. Dimension is a descriptive attribute or characteristic of data. Browser, landing page, Session and campaign are all examples of dimensions in Google Analytics. A session is a period of time that a user is active on a site. By Other examples are geographic location, city name, state, exit page, default, if a visitor is active for 30 minutes or more, any future screens and sessions. activity is attributed to a new session and they will be flagged as a repeat visitor. Google Analytics 2 Key Definitions Source These are a sampling of the metrics provided by The origin of a web visitor such as a search engine, Google, or a Google Analytics. particular domain name such as GrizzlyCiderworks.com. Medium The general category of a source. For example, organic search is the case of Google. It could be social in the case of Facebook. It could be cost per click or even a referral from another website. Bouncerate A metric expressing the percentage of visitors who left the entry page without interacting. Google Analytics 3 Audience Tracking The First major look of Google Analytics is the Audience Overview. It shows total sessions on a site within a given time frame, total users, pageviews, pages/session, average session duration (how long each visitor stayed on site) and the bounce rate. It is a true snapshot of site activity. Introduce students to this page first. Cover the six metrics. And immediately direct them to the left hand side bar. Focus their attention first on Audience and the sub-titles beneath (overview, cohort, demographics, interests, geo, behavior, technology, mobile, custom). The first page, the Audience Overview, is the 10,000 foot view what going on. From there students can drill down into the subcategory sections that deliver rich data of gender and age site visitors. The strategy implications are obvious. Direct students to become intuitive and click on the various top and side menus. The obvious is the date range on the far right hand side. Allow students to change dates and click on menu selections to grasp the depth and variation potential of Google Analytics. Google Analytics 4 Audience Tracking The richness of demographic data continues with additional data on interests, geographic location, behavior, technology and even mobile platform visitors and the devices they use, whether Android, iPhone, Google, Samsung or others. Begin to talk “Strategy” with students early on in discussion here. Pose the gains of simple geographic targeting by region, state or city Perhaps take them deeper into targeting by users of specific Android mobile devices or iPhones. Let them create a specific consumer profile and grasp the Google Analytics metrics that expose the targeting opportunity. Google Analytics 5 THE A,B,C CYCLE THE A,B,C CYCLE IS THE KEY GOOGLE ANALYTICS Acquisition Reports Google Analytics provides a series of reports that may be grouped • Reveal where you users are coming from in an ongoing cycle. Make it memorable for students by calling it The A,B,C cycle. • Outline their behavior on the site • Provide their conversion pattern A = Acquisition: How people actually get to a website. B = Behavior: The specific actions people do when they get site. C = Conversion: The way to measure success. The A,B,C cycle is the strategic environment created by the data tracking of Google Analytics’ dynamic capture of website traffic activity. Step One: Acquisition In the Acquistions section of Google Analytics are a variety of Reports that point to how people find a website. Use Acquisition Reports to identify what marketing efforts are working and which ones aren’t. From Email, to Social media, to Search Engine Optimization, these Reports will identify which Channels are bringing in site visitors and which channels are sending the highest quality traffic. To get to Acquisition Reports, select “Reporting,” from the top navigation of Google Analytics. Google Analytics 6 A,B,C CYCLE In the left-hand navigation, scroll down to Acquisition. The first screen will be the Overview Report seen here. The Acquisition Overview gives you an at-a-glance view of all of the Top Channels sending visitors to a website, as well as any associated conversions, behaviors, and details for all of those channels. Reports in the Acquisition section are broken out primarily by Channel, Source, Medium, Keyword and Campaign. Channels, or Channel grouping is where Google gathers the most common sources of traffic and categorizes them. In the example here, the channel groupings of Sources