Digital Marketing
Getting Started with Google Analytics
After you set up your Google Analytics the next thing to face is how to use it. One key thing to start with, is to ask yourself, what do you want to know and take away from it. Why did you set up Google Analytics from first place and what do you want to find out?
Knowing why you are using Google Analytics, can help you look at the right report on the Reporting section, as well as checking which metrics and dimensions you need to monitor.
First, things first… Let’s see what are the metrics and dimensions.
Metrics: Measure quantitative data and most often report numerical information. For instance, the metric Pages/Session is the average number of pages viewed per session.
Dimensions: Are attributes of your data. For example, the dimension City indicates the city, for e.g, “Paris” or “New York”, from which a session originates.
In addition, there are the following metrics that will be for your interest.
Engagement Metrics: (Pageviews, Avg. Session Duration, Pages/Session)
- For instance, by navigating to Network Referrals report, will allow you to see such metrics for traffic from each social network. You can see which social network referred the highest quality traffic.
Conversion Metrics: ( Goals & Conversion rate)
- Navigating to Conversions report, allows you to quantify the value of Social. It shows the total number of conversions and the monetary value of conversions that occurred from referrals from each network.
How to set up Goals & Conversions
You can set up goals under the admin tab in your Google Analytics account, and you can track things like newsletter sign-ups, account sign-ups, sales etc. Goals can be measured by tracking a specific URL or tracking time someone spend on a particular page.
Most common used goal is the Destination tracking URL: /thank-you page.
Setting up a Goal, allows you to track the actions, someone takes on your website. Every website serves a purpose even if it is a brochure download information. So, there’s no excuse not to use the Conversions Report!
Dashboards
To help you determine quick analytics of all the data, make use of dashboards. You can build a custom dashboard or import ready-made dashboards from the Analytics Solutions Gallery.
If you are an eCommerce site, we recommend you to use dashboard featuring dimensions and metrics that are related to sales, revenue and conversions, so you can easily see your ROI.
Other reports…
Acquisition Report: If you want to know what users do on your site.
Behavior Report: If you want to know what users do on your site and how well your site works.
Conversions Report: If you want to know how successful your website is achieving your goals you have set up.
