Title: Morning Coffee Music for your morning coffee: 3 Hours of Morning Coffee Music Playlist
Hi everyone and welcome to Platypus Digital's webinar.
Today we're going to talk about Google Analytics.
I'm just going to dive straight into it.
Measurement is key in all digital activities, so knowing the basics of Google Analytics
and web analytics platforms is really important for anyone doing anything digital.
What we're going to cover today,
we only have half an hour,
so this is going to be an overview of the absolute fundamentals of Google Analytics
with some signposting at the end to some more details and useful resources for you to look at.
Some of you in our survey asked us to look at things like dashboards, I'll do an overview of that today, but
we're not going to have time to go into that in depth,
but we will show you some other resources that you can look at.
There will be time for questions at the end, too.
If you want to just type them in the box as we go along and we will have 15 minutes for questions at the end
Why analytics?
Having analytics in place is hugely important for any business, whether you're a charity or not.
Analytics platforms like Google Analytics allow you to see data
about your website visitors
and at the most basic level you can see who's visiting your website, where they're coming from and what they're doing on your website.
So in summary,
analytics allow you to know whether your digital marketing efforts are effective.
Know which digital channels are performing the best.
You can look at trends over time, get support to insights as well and
and maybe most importantly identify areas for improvement.
Google Analytics is the most widely used web analytics platform for charities,
it's free and pretty easy to use once you're set up with it and you know your way around.
There are other web analytics platforms out there, but this webinar will focus on Google Analytics.
The first thing to note with Google Analytics is that it is never 100% accurate.
You might ask why, there's a few reasons.
Cookies have to be accepted or people might be in incognito mode or be blocking cookies
or have a firewall that are blocking cookies, so that's one reason why Google Analytics won't collect data.
Another reason is, it might be the same device with a different user.
By that I mean, I might log on to a public computer in the library and then I
might visit your website, and then someone else might come along to that same computer and visit your website from that computer.
That is two different people, but Google Analytics doesn't know that it's two different people.
It works the other way around as well,
so it can be the same user on a different device.
I might visit your website today on my laptop and then later on my way home
I might look at it again from my iPhone and Google
doesn't always know
whether that's one person.
And the other way is with sampling and Time Lag.
Google Analytics sometimes samples data
and it's not always completely real-time up-to-date.
There are some real-time statistics that you can get, but it's safer to assume that there's a 24-hour Time Lag with Google Analytics.
Another reason, which is a little bit more technical, is that Google Analytics relies on JavaScript.
If that's not enabled then Google Analytics won't collect any data.
What can we actually learn from looking at Google Analytics?
We'll take a look at the platform itself in a minute, but first,
it's really important to understand the basics of what we can look at and where to find that.
The platform itself is split into tabs,
which there's a screenshot of here.
The ones we're going to look at today mainly are audience, acquisition and behavior.
And
put simply, audience is
looking at who is visiting your website, so you can see things like demographics,
geography, interests, and what devices people are using.
Acquisition is
where people are coming from, or how are they getting to your website.
They might have clicked a link from a Facebook post or been referred from another website.
Behaviour, and I've put conversions in here too because it's kind of related, is what people are actually doing on your website.
Which pages are they visiting, how long are they spending looking at them.
So remembering this who, where, what analogy can kind of help you
when you're first looking at Google Analytics for where to find certain
pieces of information.
If you're looking for
things about who what devices people are using, then you're going to look at your audience tab.
So let's dive straight into it.
Just gonna pause a minute while I get Analytics up.
I'm using
Google's sort of demo Analytics account here, it's the Google Merchandise Store
and that's available to anyone, so if you want to have a play with Google Analytics, you can use this.
When you log in, you land on this home tab
that just gives you a summary of some of the information that Google thinks is appropriate.
The first thing to look at, I'm just going to click into the first tab audience here,
and I'm going to go to overview.
The first thing, and I'm always forgetting to do this, is to check the date range.
Just make sure that you're looking at the date range that you want to be looking at for whatever data
you're trying to get.
I'm just going to leave it as it is, but just to note, that
there's an option here to compare to a previous period as well so you can set
whichever period you want and then compare that to the period before that
and you can also enter a custom
comparison period.
There you go.
So now you can see the two pieces of data for the two periods.
I'm just going to turn that off for now.
So that it's simpler.
The audience section, there's a lot of information in here and all of it is as useful as other bits of data and
The overview tab shows you, again, basic information.
There's an overview tab on each of these different sections,
so you can see basic information about your users, new and returning visitors,
number of new
sessions and page views here. You can also see things like bounce rate, and how long people are spending.
But the real insights come from these sort of deeper tabs.
The ones I'm going to look at now are
geography, this one can be a really useful one.
So we just open that up and click location
That will show us basically a map of the world
Here we go, so on this website a lot of people are coming from America and it's sort of color-coded so you can see
where most users are coming from.
If you scroll down you can see a breakdown of all the countries and various metrics for each of those countries.
I'm just going to click into United Kingdom now
so we can just see United Kingdom data and
that shows us a map of the UK, and then it's broken down by country.
But that's not necessarily very useful, so you might want to look at cities.
So we can click here.
That then breaks it down by cities, so you can see here that most people coming to this website are in London.
This can really help you know where your visitors are coming from so it can inform other activities that you're doing.
The other most useful section in here is mobile.
This will tell you what devices people are actually using when they're visiting your website.
You can see here a basic breakdown on the overview of desktop, mobile and tablet.
That's really useful information to see.
But you can also go a little bit deeper than that and look at specifically what devices are the most popular on your website.
Here we can see iPhone is the top one for this one, followed by iPads.
That can be really useful for knowing
what devices you should be testing your website on and checking that your user experiences are all working on those top devices.
There are other, as you can see, in other pieces of data here that you can look at
demographics and interests, and things like that and that, we would recommend not to look at those too much because
not all the data is as accurate as it can be.
Google only knows what it knows, it doesn't know everything about people.
It may be interesting to look at, but probably best not to base any decisions on those ones.
The next tab is
acquisition tab, so if you remember that's where people are coming from or how they're getting to your website.
Again, there's an overview here.
You can see a breakdown of all of the different
channels that people are coming from and various other things, but again the real insights come when you go a little bit deeper.
I'm just going to go into All Traffic and Channels.
You can see a breakdown of all of the different sources here.
Actually they're mediums, that's wrong.
I would explain a difference between source and medium in a moment.
You can see the top one here is organic search.
So that's people searching on Google, followed by direct,
that's people coming directly to the URL, typing it into their browser.
Referrals, that refers to other websites, so I might have linked from
another website that's linked here.
Social, is your social media.
Display is display advertising, paid search is your usually your Google ads, but also can be Facebook ads as well depending
how you track that.
I really like Source Medium. I think it's one of the most useful things you can look at in Google Analytics
I've just clicked that on the left there.
You can see all of the metrics broken down by the different source and mediums.
The source here is Google.
That is basically the specific place that someone came from and the medium is the more general Channel, so organic.
You can see here, you can also have Google as the
source and
CPC, which means cost per click, that's your paid advertising and as the medium.
That could also work that could also say Facebook CPC
There are also other various things you can look at in this section.
We're going to a little bit more detail later.
But just to note you can look at your, if you've got an adwords account connected,
you can see data within here.
Search console, that's basically all of your organic search traffic coming from Google.
Within here you can look at
queries, so that's what people are actually typing in to get to your website.
That can be really useful to inform what people actually
searching for and what's bringing them in. Whether you could maybe create some more content or adapt content for that.
You can also see landing pages and other things like that in here.
Just going back to source medium.
Again.
I'll cover this in a bit more detail and there are some links to it for you to do this later.
Your source medium,
you can actually tell Google what to put in there by using UTM tagging. That basically adds
parameters on to the end of your URLs,
which tells Google Analytics to collect that data, and show you where people are coming from.
If we've got time at the end, I will cover that in a little bit more detail.
Now looking at the behavior tab.
I really like this one, this is my favorite tab in Google Analytics.
When I was working in house in charities, this is where I spent most of my time looking at Google Analytics.
I'm going to go to Site Content and all pages here.
Here we can see, at the most basic overview of this , it's sorted by page views.
That's the number of times each page, this page, has been viewed, so the home page has been loaded
twenty thousand nine hundred and seventy six times, and it automatically
sorts it by that.
Just to note on all of these and in the previous sections
we've looked at we can actually sort these, if I wanted to see the lowest page views I could do that.
There you go.
One thing to note as well is
page views versus unique page views.
Page views is just the total number unique ones is
talking about individual users or sessions that are loading that page, so that's always going to be lower than your page views.
I'm just going to click on to the home page now, and show you how to add secondary dimensions.
Just click here
and basically,
let's say I want to know where people are coming from to land on my home page.
I'm going to select source medium under acquisition.
What that will do is that it will add a second dimension which is basically a description
and then it will show me all of the metrics for those dimensions broken down.
Here I can see from my homepage, people coming there mainly through organic search
but also some people are coming directly and about the same amount are coming through my Google ads
and then there's a few others here that you can see so referrals from YouTube and other
partner websites.
You can also, this is really useful to look at, which sources are actually giving you the best engagement.
You might want to look at
the average time spent on the page. You can see here that people coming directly to the website are spending much more time
than people coming organically.
So that suggests that these people know they want to go to this we bsite
and they're engaged with it and spending more time on it.
Equally that could mean other things, that could mean people are struggling to find what they're looking for.
So it's just applying a little bit of common sense to these things.
You can also see the bounce rate,
that could be a really useful one when you're looking at campaign landing pages.
Generally you'll see higher bounce rates through things like Facebook Ads
and l ower ones through organic search and that's definitely reflected here, so that's quite low there.
And again I can sort by.
That's the exit rate, so I can sort by the bounce rate here.
A lot of them are going to have a 100%
so I'm just going to turn that the other way round.
And our lowest bounce rate,
there's a lot of zeros so you may have to do a little bit of filtering here and searching.
Just to note you can also type
things in this box,
which makes it really easy to find things.
We can also see landing pages here, as I just mentioned.
So again you could
find your top landing pages and see where people are coming from.
There's all sort of things you can learn, I can't cover them all
In this half hour.
The next thing to look at is site search.
I think this is really interesting.
If you've got an internal search on your website,
which is basically searching the content just on your website,
you can actually see what people are looking for.
This can be really useful
to identify
content gaps or most sought after pages or maybe
learn which pages people are maybe struggling to find, that you should be putting directly on your homepage or
making easier to find.
You can look here at the search terms people are using and
just general usage statistics.
Again, I won't go into too much detail here, but and that's worth having a look if you're interested.
Events, is another really useful thing and it allows us to track additional things
that Google Analytics doesn't track by itself.
Things like scrolling through a carousel on your home page,
downloading a document.
You can actually set these up, you have to set them up yourself
and and your developers, web developers can help you with that.
So events are basically made up of categories, actions and labels.
This site is obviously an e-commerce site so most of their events are going to be based around that.
If I click into event actions.
I can see that most of these are going to be based around adding things to your cart checking on a product,
removing things from the cart etc.
And your label, that could be whatever you want it to be, but here,
what makes the most sense in this context is the actual product names.
So that can give you some really useful insights into what people are actually doing on your site.
For charities, these are mostly going to be document downloads and
things like that are just going to tell you more about what people are doing.
So that is events.
I'm now going to just go directly onto the conversions tab.
For anyone who's really new to digital, a conversion is basically
something that you want people to do on your website usually.
This is a really important tab.
The most common way to track conversions is through goals.
I'm just going to go into the overview of the goals here.
Here you can see, you need to set up goals yourself as well.
Again, I'm not going to go into how to do that today,
but and if you've got questions at the end we can maybe have a look at that.
Here we can see all of the goals that are set up on this website and this analytics account
and again, they're very e-commerce focused.
For a charity this is going to be probably around donating.
So you'll probably have some donation goals set up.
I'm just gonna have a look at this one and that basically shows me how many
times that goal has been achieved and
other information about it, conversion rates and things like that.
The thing to know about goals is that you have a maximum of twenty, if you're using the standard Google Analytics package.
Yeah, you do have a limit on how many you can use.
It's good to just bear that in mind especially if lots of different teams are using analytics.
The other thing to know about them is that they can't look
retrospectively, so if I was to set up a new goal today, it won't be able to look at any historical data,
it will only look at data going forward from now.
The best way to set up a goal
for a donation, for instance, is to have a thank you page that people get redirected to once they've successfully donated.
Not all websites have the ability to do this, but if you are, if you do have the ability,
this is the best way to set up goals.
You then create a URL goal and then it will count a goal every time someone hits that thank you page.
Here they've done it as order completed, which is basically the equivalent for an e-commerce store.
You can also set up goals using events,
which I won't go into now.
But that just is another way that you can do that and there are other various ways as well, but goals and events,
URL goals and events are the most common way for charities.
There's other sections in here e-commerce tracking is really important
for your donation tracking.
And there's very various other more advanced things in here which I won't go into now.
One really useful things about Google Analytics, which you can apply across the whole whatever tab you're looking at, is segments
These are basically filters, so you can filter
so you're only looking at specific groups of users on your website.
There are presets or you can build your own ones.
Here I could just go add a segment and there's all of these ones which are preset or that somebody has created.
If I wanted to create a new one and I just go new segment
and then let's say I want to see only people who are coming
via
CPC on Facebook.
I just call that Facebook CPC and save it.
There we go, so now, I'm just looking at people who have come in from Facebook CPC.
Obviously there's nobody on here because they are Google they're probably not doing Facebook Ads.
But you can compare different segments and you can just remove them and it will go back to all users.
Segments are really good because when you're looking at
dimensions, you can only add one secondary dimension on to, say when we're in the Behavior or Pages tab.
In any of these I can only add one secondary dimension.
What segments allow me to do is actually
get a little bit more granular and a little bit more detailed in what I'm looking at.
That is segments and again, there's so much more about them that I could say
but we don't have time today.
The final thing that I want to look at today is dashboards and that's within the
customization tab you can do reports and other things, and I'm just going to look at dashboards.
Dashboards are a really good way of
capturing data in a really visual way and in a really easy to understand way.
So you don't have to spend hours looking through Google Analytics,
you can actually just have a dashboard and just look at it whenever you want to.
Here are some ones that have been set up within this account
I'm just going to go into the e-commerce one to show you an example.
Here we can see the overall e-commerce conversion rate, how many
transactions they've been and other really useful things that they want to know at the touch of a button.
You can create these quite easily.
Again, I don't have time to show you how but it's really simple,
just create, I always select blank canvas,
create dashboard and then you basically add widgets.
Which are made up of dimensions and metrics and you can have all of these different types here.
You can also add segments to dashboards.
So again, if you've got a generic campaign dashboard
and you want to look at it for a new campaign, you can just change the segment to be looking at the campaign
that you're running and that you want to look at.
Going back to our
slides, just to recap.
Google Analytics is really great for learning about your website users who, where and what are they doing on your website.
You can stay up to speed on how well your digital activities are going,
you can find out what's working well, and not so well in your site and
critically identify areas for improvement.
Here are some useful things.
I talked about UTM tagging earlier,
sort of went over that very quickly, but the Google's URL campaign builder
is really useful for easily creating tagged URLs to help with your tracking.
We really like Avinash Kaushik
blog and he's,
he works at Google, and he's always got some really interesting insights, so check that out and
he's also written a book called
Web Analytics 2.0.
Again, really good read if you're really interested in analytics.
So homework, this is optional.
If you want to go and put into practice what you've heard today,
have a go at this.
Try looking at the last month in Google Analytics.
What was your most visited page (apart from the home page)?
what was the most commonly used device?
Which source had the lowest bounce rate?
And if you're feeling really brave,
try setting up a dashboard
to display the above metrics or maybe just some metrics that you are going to find really useful in your day-to-day work.
Questions now so I'm just going to come out this.
We have a few questions.
Nigel's asked,
can I use Google Analytics for Facebook pages, or is there a Facebook equivalent?
Probably two bits to this answer, there is a Facebook equivalent for
looking at the way people have interacted with your Facebook page and your Facebook posts, and that's called Facebook Insights
and that comes with your page, so you should be able to look at that.
But the other thing to say is that you want to track
what people are doing once they've come from Facebook to your website
and that's where UTM tagging
and making sure, that's all set up correctly, is really useful in Google Analytics.
You can look
at that source medium, see where people are coming from and whether people from Facebook actually
interacting with your website afterwards.
I hope that makes sense Nigel.
So Joseph has asked,
what's the difference between
pageviews and entrances?
Page views,are basically, it just counts every time the page is loaded, that's a page view.
Entraces is
when people are coming onto
the website on that page.
There's a little bit like a landing page in a way, and not quite, but it's.
Entrances is where people have actually entered
on that page
and page views is just how many times that page has bee n viewed.
What does bounce rate mean? Asked Cheryl.
Bounce rate. Yes, sorry. I should have explained this.
Bounce rate is basically how many people have come onto that page
and then immediately left without looking at anything else on your website.
Bounce rate can be really useful to know whether maybe you're running a some Facebook Ads for donations,
looking at the bounce rate might tell you that people are actually
not really engaging with the landing page if it's high.
Or that if it's really low, then that means people are engaging with it,
they're going on to do other things on your website and hopefully donating if it was a Facebook ad example.
Shona's asked, could you repeat why girls are better to set up than just seeing on the behavior?
I think I know what you mean here.
Goals basically allow you to, it collects that data for you.
You could go in I could just type in
'/thank you' into the all pages section, but that's not very easy, It means I have to go through a few levels.
Having a goal and allows you to count that really easily
but also it will show you the goal conversion rate.
So it will sort of compare how many people are starting that goal and finishing it.
You can get a lot more insight through goals.
CDC Local has asked, can a website have multiple users on Google Analytics
or do you need to share logins?
You can, so as an agency, we can have access to other people's Google Analytics.
So as long as you've got a Google account you can give access to people on Google Analytics
and you can set different levels of access,so if you want someone to just be able to view things and not actually
edit anything, then that's possible or and it can go right up to admin level. So yes.
You can have multiple users
Nigel has asked,
given the level of inaccuracy in things like individual users are there any standard
statistical corrections that are used to convert to a more realistic figure?
I'm not going to go into the answer to this now Nigel, but and perhaps we can
go into that later, and maybe we can and have a chat about that.
Liz has asked, what is an acceptable bounce rate, or is this not a good measure anymore?
It really depends I think is the answer to that. You've got to set a baseline for what's true for you
but also if it's really high
then like you know 99%, then it's probably something that you need to look at.
It really depends on the source so organic and bounce rates are going to be a lot lower than
paid ones, for instance.
Neil has asked, this is a great question.
Tips for getting non-digital, or comms people into Google Analytics?
This is a really tough one, and I don't understand personally because I really love Google Analytics
I think it's amazing you can find so much information from it.
Getting people excited about it.
I think if you just show them what's possible,
make a dashboard as you suggest and
show them what they can see from it and maybe hold a little
meeting at work try and show people how it works share your knowledge.
I think that's the best way if you're enthusiastic for it, then that's got to be contagious.
Somebody's asked, what UTM tagging is?
Got a little bit of time, so I will spend some time on this.
Basically.
Hopefully I'm going to explain this simply enough for you.
I'm just going to open up this
tagging tool here.
So basically here,
you can see there's some boxes
I can put in a website URL here, I'm just going to put in our website.
So that's your basic URL.
Then let's say that I am doing a Facebook post and just a Facebook post from my campaigns and from my page,
so I'm not paying for it.
My source then will be Facebook because that's the more specific part
and the medium is
going to be social, just because it's just normal social media not paid social media or anything like that.
So that's the most basic thing if I want to know whether,
when people click on that link now it will be tagged with Facebook and social, so I'll know they came from that Facebook post.
but you won't know the specific post, so I can add more specific information such as,
campaign name.
Let's say you're doing a Christmas Appeal
and and this is a social media post for your Christmas Appeal.
You just want to put
something that it's going to be
relevant to that and the key thing to note here is to be consistent in everything you do on this,
otherwise you'll end up with all sorts of different sources and mediums and campaign names.
So it's really good to set up
maybe a spreadsheet with your colleagues and agree a way of doing these and make sure that everyone follows that.
I'm going to leave it as that for now, but I could fill in things like
campaign terms, so this is kind of based on Google AdWords,
Where you'd put your keywords and things like that.
But if you're doing and something on Facebook you might
put like a Facebook ad you might use your ad set name there, and then your ad
Content if you're doing some testing in there.
But at it's most basic level that will then create a URL at the end here
and you can see in here that it's got Facebook
here as the source, the medium is social and the campaign is
Christmas Appeal.
What that will do then is within Google Analytics, obviously it won't work on this website,
but what I can do
Is within Acquisition, source medium.
That will then come up like this.
If I'd done that for a Google CPC, that would be how that appears there.
Then what I can add is
the campaign.
You'll notice I filled in the campaign here as a Christmas Appeal.
You can actually find that,you can just type in
an d there it is.
What that would do, is it would show me if it was that one that I've just done, it would be Facebook
social and then the campaign would be Christmas Appeal.
Then you can see immediately
what people are doing on your website, what the bounce rates and all of those really useful metrics are.
I hope that answers your
question
Again, if you want to know more we can chat in more detail offline.
So Anna's asked, Are time on page and session duration
reliable and accurate statistics?
And yes, I think, is the short answer to that.
Time on page can be really useful just for knowing
how long people are spending and that might tell you something about your content.
Yeah, it's
timed from when they come to the website
until they leave.
The one thing to note with it though is,
that, so a session is, basically without going into too much detail about how Google does this.
A session is basically any 30-minute session on your website.
If I came onto your website now,
opened it, but then left it for more than thirty minutes,
It would be one session within thirty minutes, but if I then came back an hour later,
it would then count me as two sessions.
There is a little bit of inaccuracy in that, yeah people
might come and go and it can't really distinguish between those,
but generally yeah, they have definitely accurate things to look at.
Just seeing if there's any futher questions.
That is all of them.
So if nobody has any other questions
we will end our webinar.
So there's your homework again if you did want to have a look at it
I'll just leave that up for a few seconds for you to take screenshots or do what you want to do with it.
And that's it, thank you everyone for attending, we will see you next week for Facebook Ads.
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