How is google analytics implemented

The Acquisition report shows you where your audience is coming from in the world as well as online. For example, after some digging, you might discover that the blog post was posted in a relevant Facebook group that really engaged with the post. The Acquisition report is very important and can help you determine the ROI of specific marketing campaigns.

This better informs how you should approach social media and SEO marketing campaigns in the future. The Behavior report shows you how your users move through and interact with your website.

More broadly, it shows you how many pageviews your site gets total, as well as how many pageviews individual pages on your site receives. This breakdown can be incredibly valuable. This is a visualization of the path your visitors most often take on your website. This follows the user from the first page they typically visit all the way to the last page they typically visit before they leave. This can be a good way to gut check your assumptions about how your visitors approach your site.

The Behavior overview also gives you a good breakdown of each page individually. It showcases how many views those pages are getting, the average time visitors spend on those pages, as well as unique page views. This is a very important report you should become very familiar with if you want to improve sales overall.

Google Analytics is a must have for any digital marketer. Drive more traffic to your website from social media using Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can manage all your social media profiles and measure success. Try it free today. Get Started. We could have SWORN you were someone who wanted to blow your competition out of the water on social media.

Our bad. Google Analytics is absolutely free. Table of Contents. Why you need Google Analytics. The gtag. Keep in mind that gtag. Google Tag Manager is a free tool and is useful for websites that use multiple analytics or advertising performance tools from multiple campaigns.

Source: Google Analytics Documentation. If your website is already using Google Tag Manager, then gtag. Either way, we recommend that you add Google Analytics to your website, so you can keep track of all your event data. One way of digging deeper into your data is through a cohort analysis. In this article, you will learn what cohorts are and how they can be used to generate insights. Google Analytics is a very powerful web analytics tool that can help you understand many facets of your business.

When you start the program, just open your website in a browser and see what is passed as cookies. Here is a list of profiles you should have for one ID:.

As a best practice, leave the first profile of a property as the master profile. Here are the 3 types of filters we need to setup for this clean profile:. By default one Google Analytics profile can hold up to 20 goals 4 sets of 5 goals each. Recently Google Analytics and Google AdWords streamlined the process of connecting the two services, replacing the old, tedious process.

Now all you have to do is:. You need to be assigned as site owner in Google Webmaster Tools. Then click on the button Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing. This will take you to the property setting of the account in GA Admin. From the section Webmaster Tools Settings click Edit.

Select the site you want to associate and click Save. Confirm the association and from this moment forward the Search Engine Optimization section in your Google Analytics profile will start to gather data. Our next setting will be ecommerce tracking. The easy part here is to enable ecommerce tracking from the same Profile Settings window in the Admin section by choosing Yes, an Ecommerce Site see the screenshot above.

The more complex part is to add the special ecommerce tracking script to your order confirmation page. In most cases the third party shopping carts have easy to setup settings for GA ecommerce tracking.

If your site is running a custom shopping cart though, you should refer to Google Analytics documentation page for all details. Now when you go to create a new goal you can start with a template where the suggested goals are grouped in 4 categories:. You may also decide to go for a custom goal. After you select your goal type, you can use the default name or give it a new one. The Destination goals are maybe the most popular goals identified by visiting a specific URL, like a thank you page.

The conditions you can choose from are Equals to, Begins with or Regular expression. Please note that whatever condition you select here, the same will apply for the funnel steps.

While Equals to and Begins with are self-explanatory, the Regular expression could look scary. Next is the Goal value. You should set a Goal value for non-monetary goals only. The Goal value is very useful to evaluate visitor interactions and understand the most valuable pages. You may also assign a funnel for your Destination goal where you specify the path you expect visitors to take.

Both of these goals measure user engagement. The newest goal type in Google Analytics is Event. You can use event tracking for any flash element, AJAX elements, page gadgets, file downloads, load times for data, etc. All user activity on such elements is calculated and displayed as Pages in the Google Analytics reporting interface. One of the disadvantages of using pageviews is that they artificially increase the number of pageviews. All user activity on such elements is calculated and displayed as Events in the Google Analytics reporting interface.

With campaign tracking you add parameters to your URL which are variable-value pairs and contain the campaign information you define for source, medium, campaign, term and content. You can either write them manually or use Google URL builder to build them for you.

Your tagged URL will look like this:. Now that you have everything setup and you can start collecting and analyzing your data, the advanced segments and custom reports in Google Analytics can be very valuable. Here are some of them that you can setup from the start.

The advanced segments allow you to slice the data in your GA profile. There are some default segments like New visitors, Returning visitors, Search traffic, Visits with Conversions, etc. The other helpful tool in Google Analytics are the custom reports. They allow you to group the metrics and dimensions you need very quickly and easily. You should be careful, however, when combining different metrics which are hit-based and visit-based please read this wonderful article on hit and session dimensions by Avinash Kaushik.

With this warning in mind, here are my favorite custom reports:. The Dashboards in Google Analytics show summaries of different reports as widgets on a single page. Also, this useful article from Econsultancy shows 10 useful Google Analytics custom dashboards. You need to name your custom alert, choose the profiles you want to apply it to, and select how often you want to monitor the data daily, weekly, monthly and the email address to receive notifications. In the Alert conditions section specify the segment of traffic you want to monitor, the metric and a triggering threshold for the alert.