DIGITAL ANALYTICS MINIDEGREE / CXL — BLOG 2
In the last blog post, I talked about Google Analytics in general and new capabilities of GA4. In this blog post, we will explore Google Analytics Universal features in detail with the second part of CXL Digital Analytics Minidegree.
You can go to the CXL website from here.
Reports
Google Analytics universal has 5 different reports in general.
1.Real Time Reports
Real-Time reports give information about the users in real-time, it provides information about the users who are currently on the website, how many of the website pages are being viewed per minute and per second.
Users vs Pageviews
The real-time reports will show information about a user and the respective page view in approximately the last five. minutes.
2. Audience Reports
The Audience reports provide more information about the website visitors, how many sessions are there on the website over a particular period of time. A Google Analytics user can choose to see the hourly, daily, weekly and monthly reports. From Audience reports, we can learn about the demographics, Technology used by the visitors, visitor interests etc.
3. Acquisition Reports
Acquisition Reports shows how we are acquiring the visitors meaning how the visitors actually came to your site. It will provide information about the direct, organic, referral and traffic coming from social media channels.
4. Behaviour Reports
The Behavior reports answer the how or the actions of the visitors and how they are interacting with the website content. It will also show the Flow of the visitors from the landing to the exit page.
5. Conversion Reports
Conversion reports depict the actions of the users before conversion (making a transaction, buying a product etc). This will show the process map taken by a visitor towards the conversion as well as the number of conversions. There are three important tabs within Conversion (Goals, Ecommerce, and Multi-Channel Funnels ) which will be discussed in subsequent blogs.
When we look at the display features in Google Analytics in descending order, we see that Account, Property and View come. I will briefly explain these terms below.
Account:
Account is the highest level in the Google Analytics hierarchy and represents the overall organization under which all of the properties fall.
Property:
Property is the second level of hierarchy in Google Analytics and represents the entity linked to a single tracking code.
View:
View is the third level of hierarchy in GA, consider it to be the subset of an individual property which has its configurations, settings, and defined data within the property.
Traffic
Traffic, as it relates to Google Analytics, can be best understood by dividing it in two sections:
1. Understanding the defaults
2. Understanding Customizations including custom Filters.
Source and Medium
The source is the where and Medium is the How. The source is where the traffic is coming from (eg from another website) and the medium is how the traffic is coming from that source.
1. Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is the traffic that you get directly to your website from the URL. Direct traffic can be very helpful in understanding to which specific page the visitors are coming on the website.
2. Referral Traffic
This is the traffic that we get from the referrals. This is the traffic that comes to your website from other websites.
3. Search Traffic
Traffic coming from any search engine goes within the search traffic bucket. This would include the paid searches as well as Organic searches from the search engines. This is very helpful as it provides valuable insights on the queries that people are searching on the search engines which are leading to the people landing on your website.
4. Campaign traffic
Traffic may come from different campaigns. It may include Google AdWords, social media shares, banners and other campaigns.
Campaign data can be collected with custom URLs as well.
utm_source — What is sending the traffic.
utm_medium — The general type of traffic (cpc / share / e-mail).
utm_campaign — The name of the campaign.
utm_term — The e-mail subject or advertisement headline. (get-20-off)
utm_content — Used to describe the details of the advertisement or link to differentiate this exact advertisement / massage from others.
Now, In Google Analytics there is something called “Other” Traffic as well which tracks the data from the unidentified sources. It may be channels that do not allow third-party cookies or the “incognito” users.
Attribution
Attribution in Google Analytics brings free, cross-channel data-driven attribution to all customers. An Attribution project allows you to:
- Accurately report conversion totals, de-duplicated across all digital channels
- See a consolidated, consistent view of all digital performance
- Build understanding of your brand’s customer journey.
GA uses the last-non-direct model as a standard in Google Analytics attribution reports. In this case, the effect of the other channels is ignored, while the channel in the last step is incremented in the conversion. However, as I mentioned in the previous blog, with GA4, users can change the attribution model and make different measurements.
Filters
Filters are tools within Google Analytics that can be used to limit, control, and modify the data which is collected within the view. Filters are one of the most important features that can be used in Google Analytics. Filters can be used to edit the views by including, excluding, or modifying the data. With filters, one can create unique views as well that will show only the most critical/important information.
In this post, I tried to cover the basic features of Google Analytics Universal related with the traffic, traffic sources, filters and reports. Especially with GA4 lots of features can be customized for helping us get more insights into the data from different traffic sources. Although Google Analytics Universal has many different and detailed features, all investments will be made to GA4 in the near future and it will come to the fore with the use of web + app. Therefore, if you are just starting to learn about Google Analytics, I suggest you learn about GA4 and go into detail.
See you next week with a new blog post containing details from the CXL digital analytics mini degree program.
Thanks,
Mert Kolay
