Google Analytics, also commonly known as “GA”, is an analysis tool capable of giving you an in-depth look at the performance of your website or mobile application. It integrates seamlessly with other Google-branded marketing and advertising platforms and products, such as Google Ads, Search Console, and Data Studio, making it a perfect choice for all website managers and marketing teams already using and appreciate the tools offered by the American search engine and digital technology giant.

If you have a lot of data to exploit, and more importantly, you have the time and ability to analyze it and act accordingly, then Google Analytics is a solution to consider in order to improve your online marketing action. Be careful though, as this complex product takes time to configure, learn, implement, maintain and use.

There is a free and a paid version of GA, which is called Analytics 360. Small and medium-sized businesses will definitely find all the features they need in the free version.

But if you want to get and work on the following, the paid version will be essential:

• Full-funnel reporting and powerful attribution models
• Cumulative Reports
• Ability to get additional views, dimensions and statistics per property
• Unlimited, unsampled data

On top of that, Analytics 360, the paid version of GA, also gives you access to dedicated support and a personal account manager. Does this justify the subscription fee, which is a minimum of $150,000 per year (billed monthly)?

As you will have understood, Analytics 360 is reserved for companies of a certain size, which have a fairly significant financial capacity.

That said, if you have both the budget for this type of service and for an agency or in-house analyst to manage your data analysis activities, this solution may be worth a shot.

Now, let’s look at the different steps you will need to follow to properly configure Google Analytics. Then, in this guide we will see how to use this tool, before showing you everything that Google Analytics reports allow you to measure and analyze.

I- How to configure Google Analytics

Before you start using Google Analytics, you will need to create a Google account. This means you need to have a registered Google account email address and password.

Once your Google account is created, this does not mean you automatically have access to GA. You will indeed need to register for Analytics. In addition, to correctly configure GA, you must first understand how the tool is structured, in particular the notion of “hierarchy”.

– The hierarchy of Google Analytics

The GA hierarchy is made up of the following 4 elements, ordered from largest to smallest: Organization, Account, Ownership, and View

Let’s examine each of these components in detail:

1- Organization

The organization is the highest level of the GA hierarchy. It represents a company, in general, and can therefore encompass several Google Analytics accounts.

Organizations are recommended for large businesses, but not required.

2- Account(s)

Accounts, on the other hand, are not optional. Use of Google Analytics requires at least one account.

An account does not strictly speaking mean a user account. It is possible for an employee of any company to log in to their company’s various Google Analytics accounts using their personal Google email ID, provided they have permission to do so.

It is still interesting to note that it is possible to assign one or more properties to each account. Each account can contain up to 50 properties.

You can grant user permissions for an entire Analytics account, or just for a property in an account or a view in a property.

3- Property

A property is actually a website or application. Each property can support up to 25 views.

4- View

At a minimum, you need two views per property:

• One without configuration, i.e. a “raw” version of the view
• One with filters configured to exclude any traffic from your own business (i.e. a filter for your IP address) as well as bots and spam traffic.

A view only captures information after your configured filters and settings have been applied. And once you delete a view, that data is permanently lost. For these reasons, it is essential to maintain an unfiltered view of your data.

Now that we have seen the main procedures for configuring GA, here are the steps necessary to use the tool.

II- How to use Google Analytics

Here are the steps to follow if you want to use your Google Analytics account as quickly and efficiently as possible.

1- Create a Google Analytics account.

First, you will need to create a Google Analytics account, or simply log into your current account.

2- Add the name, URL and industry of the website you want to track.

Choose the account you want to add the property to. You need to create and name your property at this stage and enter the website URL along with the industry and time zone for the analytics reports.

3- Add a view to your property.

Navigate to the account and property you want to add a view to. To do this, use the “Create View” menu, and name your view, select the type of view (web or application) and you will have to answer a few more questions to complete the process. Remember that you can add up to 25 views to a property with Google Analytics.

4- Add your tracking code directly after the <head> tag of your website.

When you create a property, you gain access to a unique tracking ID and tag for your website (“Site Tag,” a code you must add to each site page whose performance you want to analyze). This is how you can collect data in your property.

Next, paste your tag right after the opening <head> tag on each site page you plan to measure.

You will also be asked to choose your type of site (static, dynamic, web hosting, Google Tag Manager) in order to be able to configure data collection precisely.

5- Check your Google Analylitics portal to see if the code is working well

Finally, verify that your code works. You can do this by viewing the “Real-Time Reports” section of your GA dashboard while clicking on your site in another tab or on your phone. The report should show at least one visitor to the site, and that is of course you.

And there you have it, you’re almost ready to take action.

But before that, it is essential to understand the notions of dimensions in relation to metrics/or statistics/performance indicators and a few other things.

III- Other important elements to understand before starting your data tracking action with Google Analytics

– Dimensions and metrics with Google Analytics

Dimensions can be described as categorical variables, while metrics correspond to quantitative variables.

Example dimensions include: browser, location, landing page, device type, customer type, etc.

Examples of metrics include: sessions, page views, conversions, bounce rate, session duration, etc.

In all Google Analytics reports you will see, dimensions are represented as horizontal rows while your metrics/performance indicators appear as columns.

– Custom dimensions and metrics

Google Analytics allows you to create personalized dimensions and statistics from Analytics data, but also from external data, such as those from your CRM. For example, let’s say you’re tracking the membership type of customers who created an account in your CRM. Well, you can combine this information with GA’s “page views” indicator to actually display the pages viewed by customer type.

Or, if you run a blog, you probably want to understand the impact of audience engagement on other performance indicators/metrics like conversions, pages per session, etc.

For example, you can create three personalized dimensions for each type of visitor:

• Users who paid for premium access to your blog
• Subscribers who signed up for your mailing list
• And those who share your posts on social media

Using these different dimensions will undoubtedly provide you with valuable information about each type of visit to your website.

– What is a Google Analytics audience?

An audience is a group of users who have something in common. This common point can be, for example, a geographical origin: perhaps you are targeting consumers in Belgium, so you have a “Belgian audience” dedicated to them, or an age group. You are particularly targeting millennials for your online business, so you will create a “25-40 year old audience”.

Fortunately, Google Analytics has several built-in audiences, including the ones we just mentioned, location and age. You don’t have to do anything to configure them. Once you install the tracking code, GA automatically breaks down your visitor data into these audience reports.

However, you can also create custom audiences. If, for example, you are only interested in millennials from Belgium, you can create a personalized audience that only includes visitors living in Belgium and located in the desired age group.

Creating an audience is therefore extremely simple. What remains more complicated is determining the user characteristics that will help you achieve your business objectives.

– What is a Google Analytics segment?

A segment is like a subset of your data.

You can create segments based on the following:

• Users (e.g. users who have already purchased something from your site, users who have registered, etc.)
• Sessions (e.g. all sessions generated from a specific marketing campaign, all sessions where a pricing page was viewed, etc.)
• Results (for example, each time a purchase exceeded 50 euros, or when a specific product was added to the cart)

Just like the audiences we talked about before, Google Analytics offers you several predefined segments, but you can be even more precise in your segmentation with GA’s “Segment Builder”, which provides almost endless possibilities.

Before moving on to the “Reports” section, it is important to specify that it is possible to apply up to four segments at a time in any report.

IV— Google Analytics Reports

When you look at the left sidebar of Google Analytics, there are five reporting options, which themselves have different options if you click on them.

• Real-Time
• Hearing
• Acquisition
• Behavior
• Conversion

So let’s go through each type of report.

1- Google Analytics real-time reporting

As the name suggests, Real-Time Reporting gives you an overview of what’s happening on your site right as you look at your screen. You can see how many visitors are on your site, what pages they visit, what social media platforms they come from, where they are located, etc.

While this report is fun to look at occasionally, it’s actually the least interesting of the lot. But here are some ways to use the real-time report wisely:

• Discover the traffic generated by a new post on social networks or a blog
• Immediately observe if a sale or event organized during the day generates views, visits, or conversions
• Ensure that the tracking URLs and custom events you just configured work as they should

As you will see, the other types of reports are much more captivating.

2- Google Analytics audience report

The GA Audience Report gives you an overview of the property you want to view. You can therefore observe this report once a day to get an idea of ​​your general trends.

By clicking on “Audiences”, you will see expandable menus regarding “Demographics”, “Interests”, “Geography”, “Behavior”, “Technology”, “Mobile”, “Multi-device”, etc. . but also several other categories that we will decipher below.

– Active Users

In reality, this category of “active users” does not refer to users currently on your site, since this information is included in the “real-time reporting” section.

The Active Users report shows you the number of users who visited in the last day (1 day active users), last week (7 day active users), or more (14 day active users, 28 day active users, etc.)

What is the value of this report? Well, if you have more one-day users than long-term users, it shows that you are struggling to retain your audience. People don’t come back to your site or app. And you will have to try to understand why.

You can also use this report with different segments, and you will be able to see that users of a certain age group have a much better retention rate than the average.

– Lifetime Value

The “Lifetime Value” report gives you an idea of ​​how much users are worth to your business, similar to Customer Lifetime Value. For example, you can see the lifetime value of users you generated from email marketing, compared to those you acquired from organic search. Armed with this information, you can decide which channel is best to invest more in.

Lifetime value is capped at 90 days. The acquisition date range, however, which you can adjust, reflects all users you have acquired during that period.

Imagine you want to look at transactions per user for users you acquired in the week leading up to Black Friday. You adjust the date range specifically for this week. Next, you’ll see the average transactions per user for that cohort over the next 90 days.

– Cohort Analysis

Some marketers consider cohort analysis to be the most powerful report provided by Google Analytics.

How it works ? This report groups users by a characteristic, “Acquisition Date”. Acquisition Date is the day a user visited your website for the first time.

From there you have several options. First of all, it is possible to choose the size of your cohort: day, week or month. Next, choose your main performance indicator, or what you want to explore for this cohort. In addition, you can benefit from even in-depth analysis thanks to the “per user”, “retention” and “total” options.

Per user means that the total number of the chosen performance indicator will be divided by the size of the cohort. So if you choose “Transactions per user,” for example, you will see the average number of transactions per user for that cohort.

User retention is the number of users who returned in a given day, week, or month (determined by the size of the cohort you selected), divided by the total number of users in that cohort. cohort.

Total represents the total number of sessions, transactions, etc. that occurred for this cohort size.

Finally, choose your date range. Google Analytics allows you to view up to three months of data.

3- Google Analytics acquisition reports

The Acquisition report breaks down your traffic by source: organic, direct, referring site, email, social, paid search, display, affiliate, and more. When it doesn’t know how to categorize a subset of traffic, Google Analytics uses the “Other” category.

From the “All Traffic” tab, you can click on “Channels”. And then click on any category to explore each source in detail.

Depending on the category, you will be able to see the landing pages (from which URL your visitors arrived at your site), the source (which website brought them to yours) or even the keyword (which query the brought to your site).

To see this information presented visually, click “All Traffic > Treemaps”.

Just above, you’ll see another type of report called Source/Medium, which breaks down the general category of traffic you may have seen in “Channels.” This is useful if you want to get more specific information about how people access your site. For example, you may notice that 60% of your referral traffic comes from LinkedIn, while only 5% comes from Twitter. Depending on your marketing team’s priorities, it may be time to change direction.

4- Google Analytics behavior reports

This “Behavior Reports” section contains a lot of interesting reports, starting with the “Site Content” section, which gives an overview of all the blog posts, landing pages and web pages on your site.

– All pages

If you click on “Site Content>All Pages”, you will be able to see the most visited pages for your current view and/or segment. This is a useful feature because you should always keep a close eye on your most visited URLs, and most importantly, it allows you to analyze traffic growth or decline.

Indeed, if you go to “Site Content > All Pages” and change the date range for this month compared to last month, making sure the days of the week match, you will be able to see the differences in page views by URL, and this will help you identify which pages received the least traffic and contributed to this decline.

– Content exploration

This report breaks down the structure of your site by subdomain then subfolder.

This type of report is certainly very useful for large companies that manage very complex properties.

– Landing pages

Google Analytics defines a landing page as the first page of a session, that is, the visitor’s first interaction with your website.

There are several ways to use this report. First, if you are interested in the sources (organic, paid social, direct, etc.) that lead users to the landing page, you can add Source/Medium as a secondary dimension.

Second, if you only want to see landing pages visited by users from a specific source, on a specific platform, or in a specific category, you can add the appropriate segment. For example, if you are more interested in the landing pages that mobile and tablet users see, choose mobile and tablet traffic.

Or, if you’re curious about users who purchased an item, choose the “Made a Purchase” segment. There are many possibilities.

– Site speed

The name of this type of report is pretty self-explanatory: it tells you how quickly your site loads for users. Obviously, the faster the better, because not only do faster pages correlate with higher revenue, but Google’s algorithm takes page load time into account.

– Event flow

The Event Flow report tracks the order in which events occur on your site. It can provide you with the following information:

• Whether particular events tend to happen first — and whether they trigger other events. For example, maybe users frequently watch your demo video and then click the CTA to schedule a call with a salesperson.
• Whether certain categories of events are more common than others. The report will, for example, show you that the videos on your site are viewed much more than your PDF files are downloaded.
• Whether users act differently depending on a particular segment.

In this “Behavior Reports” section, there are many other reports, including events (which GA defines as user interactions with content that can be measured independently of a web page or page load). screen), pages and search terms, usage, etc.

5- Google Analytics Conversion Reports

If you have a website, you probably have a goal, and probably several, regarding the people who visit your site.

For example, e-commerce owners want their visitors to subscribe to their mailing list, create a user account, add items to their shopping cart and complete the order confirmation process.

Whereas media companies want their visitors to stay on their site as long as possible and view a certain number of pages, in order to maximize their advertising revenue.

B2B companies, on the other hand, want their visitors to download an ebook, register for a webinar, or book an appointment for a phone conversation with a sales representative.

Google Analytics can measure all of these things and more.

A goal is essentially a conversion that you have defined, and that’s why this information appears in the Conversion section.

There are four main types of objectives on GA:

– Destination

This goal is achieved when a user lands on a specific page, such as a product page, order confirmation page, or thank you page.

– Event

This goal is achieved when a predefined event triggers (like all events you can configure, whether watching a video or sharing a post on social media).

– Duration

This goal is achieved when a user’s session lasts longer than a duration you preset.

– Pages/screens per session

This goal is achieved when a user views a specific number of pages (or screens for an application) per session

To see how you are doing in terms of goals across the board, head to “Overview”.

And there are many other useful types of reports in the Conversion section of Google Analytics, like Funnel Visualization, which lets you see exactly where in the funnel your prospects have dropped out, among other things.

Now all you have to do is get started with Google Analytics and discover the extent of its capabilities.