Google Analytics

[BorntoBubble]

Anyone had any experience with it and how to get the best out of it?

Ideally looking for video tutorials or recommendations to do a certain thing. Im just stumbling my way around it at the minute. I love all the stats bhut am not really doing anything with them!!

It must be a Tikay goldmine all the data that Google hold, does anyone ever check the Blonde Google Analytics page?

[mulhuzz]

what specifically are you trying to do with it?

[titaniumbean]

what specifically are you trying to do with it?

this lol

[DaveShoelace]

I use it every day, love it, but I learned purely by trial and error. Havent found any great all encompassing resources for it as such, just google search whenever I want to do something new.

[kinboshi]

Look into Google Spreadsheets and the Google Analytics addon. You can automate a lot of useful information into specific and useful reports. Much more useful than the basic reports available in the analytics dashboard in your browser.

[kinboshi]

Start here:

https://developers.google.com/analytics/solutions/google-analytics-spreadsheet-add-on

[BorntoBubble]

I don't really know what I'm trying to do I suppose that's one of the issues!

[kinboshi]

I don't really know what I'm trying to do I suppose that's one of the issues!

If you have an ecommerce site, it's a lot more obvious. You want to look at traffic (acquisition and behaviour) and conversion (sales).

Acquisition - where it's the traffic coming from? Google searches, email campaigns, offline campaigns, advertising, paid search, etc. Then you could look at how that's changing over time, how it's split geographically or by day of the week or time of the day (if relevant).

Traffic - look at the basic day stats such as number of users (new and repeat), page views and page views per visit. Look at the bounce rate, and all of these will help you see if you're giving your visitors the content they want and expect when they visit your site. A high bounce rate (people coming to your site and leaving without interacting at all) could be a sign that your navigation it's poor, or your content it's poorly laid out, or the content is irrelevant to these visitors.

Look at the content to see what it's the most popular and why.

If your site isn't transactional, you need to think about the goals of your site. It's it to get visitors to complete an enquiry form or register their interest in what you're selling on the site? If that's the case, you can set up funnel analysis and goals within analytics and it can report against these. You'll be able to see if people aren't completing the form and then you can look into why.

If you're doing pay-per-click advertising, you can use analytics to give quite detailed information about how your ads are performing, the matched search queries that have brought visitors to your site, and the value of these visitors (based on sales or goal conversions) and you can determine your return on investment in the paid search advertising from this.

It's definitely worth reading on sites such as Moz and plenty of blogs by people with experience of analytics who provide step by step advice about what and why you need to do. Remember to read more up-to-date articles as analytics changes regularly and an article from a couple of years ago might be full of good advice but some of the functionality in analytics will have changed.

[DaveShoelace]

I don't really know what I'm trying to do I suppose that's one of the issues!

If that's your starting point, take a step back IMO, you will just overwhelm yourself.

I'm assuming you have a website? If so, start by asking yourself the big questions you have always wondered about your audience, your marketing, your traffic etc. Then see if Google Analytics can help you.

For example for the website I worked for, I wondered how many times the typical user visits per day, as I wanted to know if I was better off releasing all the daily content at the same time, or staggered throughout the day. So I did a bit of research and yep, Google Analytics gave me the answer.

Post your questions here too, I love to learn and nerd out on this stuff.

[kinboshi]

A key thing to remember is there's not really much point looking at any data that you can't then influence going forward. It should indicate what you're doing well, what you're doing not so well, and that can then help determine future marketing activities, website development, etc.

For example, Analytics can show you the breakdown of visitors according to whether they're on mobile or desktop devices when they visit your site. I've recently started working on a couple of ecommerce websites and they're fairly typical in that between 30-50% of their traffic is on mobile devices.  However, their sites weren't designed with mobile users in mind, so they have usability and accessibility issues that need to be addressed - and so we can see that they're losing out on a lot of sales because of this (we can see the conversion rates according to the devices, but it could be the number of goal completions - such as enquiry forms being filled in, a lower bounce rate, more pages being viewed per visitor, etc.).

So now we're working on revamping the sites so that they're optimised for tablets and phones as well as desktop users.  The analytics gave us the necessary information to make a judgement on whether or not the investment in time and money would be worthwhile.  Once the revamped sites are live and have been running for a while, the analytics will show us what difference the work has done, and we can review the changes and see what has worked, what hasn't, and what still needs to be done.

[Graham C]

The stats Google can collect is staggering.  Not only can it tell if you are on a tablet, phone or desktop, it can tell you the make of phone or tablet.  I find it all pretty astonishing to be honest, the level of detail you can drill down to is phenomenal.

[DaveShoelace]

The stats Google can collect is staggering.  Not only can it tell if you are on a tablet, phone or desktop, it can tell you the make of phone or tablet.  I find it all pretty astonishing to be honest, the level of detail you can drill down to is phenomenal.

And the browser they use, where they are from, their age, their gender, how long they stay on the page etc.

It's bonkers what you can learn from it.

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