Week 3— My Journey into Data Analytics — DA Minidegree Review — CXL Institute
Welcome to Week 3 of Google Analytics Journey. This week, was all about debunking the myths related to GA and understanding the concepts and “Hows” of this gigantic tool. If you are new here, I would recommend that you read up my Week 1 and Week 2 Posts and join me as I learn Data analytics one step at a time.
Diving into this week’s lessons, Let’s go!!!!
Understanding Traffic: Types of Traffic
To understand where the traffic is coming from, we need to access our Acquisition reports. As discussed earlier in our Lessons the Source/Medium report reveals the Brand and Type of Audience we are receiving eg: Socials, Paid, Organic, etc, and Referral Report states the referral Traffic such as External Websites.
A very important point to note here is that all your traffic should be tagged for better reporting and visualization. A lot of times, we see the direct/none in the source/medium report, this can be a result of various sources i.e emails, affiliates, podcasts, members logging directly, etc, to minimize this, we need to tag our traffic through UTM
Protip — Dig deeper into the direct/none and set up the secondary dimension as the landing page to see the source of the direct traffic.
Understanding Traffic: Customizing Traffic Sources — Part 1
To customize the traffic we need to Tag the Traffic through UTMs (Urchin tracking module)
Example Template
There are five different UTM parameters.
- Traffic Source — The source parameter allows you to track where the traffic originated from eg: &utm_source=facebook
- Medium — The medium parameter tracks what type of traffic the visitor originated from — CPC, email, social, referral, display, etc. eg: &utm_medium=cpc
- Campaign Name — The campaign name parameter allows you to track the performance of a specific campaign such as Facebook Ad campaigns or email campaigns eg: &utm_campaign=test
- Content — If you have multiple Links directing to the same URL, this helps to identify which link was clicked such as Image 1 or Image 2 in the email. eg: &utm_content=image1
- Keyword Term — The keyword parameter allows you to track which keyword term a website visitor came from. eg: &utm_term=tshirt
Note: Google analytics is Case sensitive, so either make sure that we have all links in lowercase or use a lowercase filter for a particular view.
We can either create UTMs manually or through the campaign URL Builder
Protip — Always plan ahead for Tagging the Traffic (Brand, Type, and Purpose of Traffic), Mercer advises maintaining a Sheet to correctly group similar traffic eg: Naming the Paid Ads as facebook/cpc and google/cpc rather than facebook/ppc and google/cpc making it easier to answer the question — What is the revenue from overall Paid Efforts.
Understanding Traffic: Customizing Traffic Sources — Part 2
Finding the Story after collecting the data is important and that is only possible if the data is easily readable and can be grouped to compare. For this we use filters, let’s suppose the Facebook traffic is collected as
m.facebook.com/referral (Traffic from Mobile Server) l.facebook.com/referral (Traffic from desktop through malware scanner)
We can filter this using combine filter for campaign source i.e ^.^facebook.com$ — which means any link in campaign source which ends with facebook.com. Hence now, the traffic will be grouped as facebook.com/referral, if we want to drive down and understand which device it came from, we can use a secondary dimension — Device category
Protip: Always TBV (Trust but verify) in Test view and then implement in Production View.
Understanding Results: Destination Goals
Goals are unique to the View. Goals are 3 Kinds i.e ACE — Awareness Completion and Engage
Destination goals are not just completion goals i.e Purchase or Lead sign up but can also be used for Awareness and Engagement.
The Goals contain Goal setup (Industry template or custom), Goal Description, Goal Details (Type of Goal with match type, Value, Funnel)
There are 3 Match types Begins with, Equals to, & Regular Expression
- Equals to — for standard, fixed URLs
- Begins with — to eliminate trailing URL parameters
- Regular Expression Match — for matching on multiple criteria
Destination Goals Examples
Awareness — Goal for Product Page View
Engage — Goal for Add to cart
Completion — Goal for Purchase of Product
How to verify the goal a destination goal
- Always use UTM and check the goal firing in the Real-time report
- Sometimes the goal takes around 30mins or more to reflect, you can check if your location is visible in the real-time report and if it’s matching the landing page mentioned in the Goal destination.
You can also set up the funnel and this can be view in funnel visualization. please note that the funnel goals follow the match type of destination. It is important to set up a funnel to understand the audience flow and behavior till goal completion eg: Drop off (We can identify the problem pages causing the drop-off and fix them)
Understanding Results: Duration Goals
A duration goal is triggered when a session lasts a specific amount of time or longer. For example, you can set up a goal that fires when the user spends more than 5 minutes on a particular page i.e Blog
Note: These are time-based and cannot be tested in real-time ->conversion reports, they need to be checked in source/medium reports.
But before we set up duration goals it is very important to understand How time works in GA. We need to understand 3 terms — timestamp, engagement hit, page hit.
Our landing page has timestamp — 0, our time on the existing page is dependent on the Next Page Hit or Engagement Hit,
Use Case 1 — If we spend 10 mins on the Page, and there is no other page hit or engagement hit, the time recorded is 0.
User Case 2 — If we click on Page 1 at 10 am, Page 2 at 10.05 am and Page 3 at 10.10 am and then exit page 3 at 10.15 am, the total session is 10 mins only as we did not hit a consequent page and remained on page 3
Use case 3 — If we click on Page 1 at 10 am, Page 2 at 10.05 am and Page 3 at 10.10 am and engagement hit on Page 3 at 10.15 am and Exited the page at 10.20 am, the Session time will be recorded at 15 mins
Protip: Be cautious about “time” in GA. It’s a representation, not an absolute
Understanding Results: Pages per Session Goals
A pages per session goal is triggered when a user views a specific number of pages or screens during a session (e.g. 10 pages or more have been loaded).
Note: If you have a SPA (Single Page application), you need to set up the events for pageview through tag manager as due to no other Page Hits or Engagement Hits, the session time is recorded as 0
pages per session goal is useful to understand the engagement of visitors. These do not show up in real-time reports, hence we need to check it in source/medium report using UTM.
Understanding Results: Event Goals
Events are behavior data points, they are not directly fed to GA and need to be set up. Event goals can be triggered when actions such as “video played,” “slider interaction,” or “social share clicked occur.
The event goal is divided into Event category, Event Action, Event Label. The events are set up through the tag manager.
Eg: I have a video on Landing Page, I can measure the engagement by setting up events through tag manager such as Video played for 10sec, Video Paused, Video Play — 50%.
Once the event is setup up, we can create the goal and when it matches the criteria i.e Category or Action, it gets triggered.
Understanding Results: Ecommerce
Ecommerce reports are mainly two types Standard Ecommerce and enhanced eCommerce. Mercer introduces the concept of FiGS( Find, Grab and Send). we need to make sure that the Ecommerce setting is turned on in our view and also we can use Website Integration apps to smoothly set the eCommerce.
Note: Shopping and Checkout behavior is only present in enhanced eCommerce. Also in Product Performance in Enhanced eCommerce we have additional details such as Initiate checkouts, Refunds, conversion rate.
We shall be mainly using the Product performance report to understand and make decisions on our Products i.e Which are our slow-moving products, what is the source for major transactions etc
Other reports to look at are sales performance, Internal promotion, Order Coupon, Product Coupon, and Affiliate Code
Analyzing Reports — The Basics
Mercer wraps up the course module leaving behind the basic report analyzing framework i.e QIA ( Question, Information, and Action). Before entering GA, we need to ask ourselves specific Questions and then find information based on it and finally take the action.
Final Verdict
As a beginners course module, this was a very thought out, Informative, and Engaging module that encouraged the learner not to just skim through the views but practice them. I am determined to ask myself many questions and seek answers to them. I am pretty excited to start my Google Analytics — Intermediate Course this week.
Concluding with Mercer’s quote which lingers in my mind
Truth is in Trends and Power is in Patterns
