 Hello. Who's ready to learn about Google Analytics? Woo! This is exciting stuff, right? I'm going to try to make it exciting. I'm Pam Monkst of Pam and Marketing and Stealth Search and Analytics. Both companies specialize in search and analytics. So that's what we're going to talk about today, Google Analytics. First, I want to start by saying that there are so many ways to improve upon your Google Analytics skill set that we couldn't possibly cover them all in full today in this short 30-minute block. But these slides are chock-full of information. I'm going to do an overview on some focus areas that are really important. And you might want to look into each one later. So there's tons of links in these slides to look into each one more later. So I highly encourage you to download the slides. The link is right there. And I will show the link again at the end. So why improve your Google Analytics skills? I think this quote sums it up nicely. The quote says, the goal is to turn data into information and information into insight. But what's the difference between data and information and information and insight? Well, basically data is a bunch of characters and numbers in a maybe semi-organized but not totally organized manner. And data, when segmented in a logical way, becomes information. Information, when segmented in a logical way that can answer questions, becomes insight. For example, do our paid search visitors convert or engage with our site as well as our organic search visitors or vice versa? The data, when segmented in a logical way, in an organized way that can answer that question, can answer that question. It says, yes, organic users bounce less, stay longer, and consume more content. And the insight that can be gained from that is that we should invest more in SEO. I'm a big fan of data-driven marketing and investment decisions. So that's how to turn data into information, into insight. But in order to do so effectively, there's three things that need to happen with your data. One is it needs to be accurate. Two is it needs to be comprehensive. And three, it needs to be segmented in a way that can answer questions. So that's what we're going to go over today is how to do that in Google Analytics. Improving accuracy with things like these. Improving comprehensiveness with conversion tracking and event tracking. And segmenting data to answer questions with tips and tricks like these. But first, before I dive too deep into any one of those, I want to go do a quick overview of account structure. Because I'm going to use words like property and view along the way, so I want to make sure you know what that means. If you go into the admin section of your Google Analytics account, you'll see three columns. There's account, property, and view. One account can have multiple properties, usually used for multiple websites. And one property or one website can have multiple views where the data is segmented or filtered in some way, narrowed in some way in that view. So I just want to make sure that's semi-clear at this point that one account can have multiple properties, multiple websites, and each property can have multiple views. So now that that's clear, how do you make your data more accurate? First and foremost, you want to check that your tracking code is implemented properly. This is responsible, incorrectly implemented tracking code is responsible for a whole variety of accuracy issues that may not be immediately apparent in the data. So you definitely want to check that this is done correctly. You need to have one copy, not more than one, we see that a lot. One copy of your Google Analytics tracking code placed in the head section of the website after the opening head tag and before the closing head tag, ideally right after the opening head tag. But as long as it's in the head area, it should be okay. And to make sure it's okay, you want to use the Google Tag Assistant Chrome extension. That is quick and easy way to know if your tracking code is implemented correctly and working properly. You'll get a simple sad smiley face if you're not good and a green happy face if you're good to go. So definitely start with that. After you've checked your tracking code, another accuracy issue you can look for is called self-referral traffic. That is where it appears that new incoming traffic is coming from your own domain. So if you go to the acquisition all traffic referrals menu and you see traffic from your own domain, that's a problem because sessions are then being double counted that are really the same session within the site and conversion data can be inaccurate. So if you see that or just to preemptively prevent that, you can go into your property settings, middle column in admin, and under tracking info you'll find the referral exclusion list. Just add your own domain name there and that will take care of that problem if you have it or prevent it if you don't. Additionally, similarly, you want to, if you are collecting payments on your website, whether it's e-commerce or any other payment collections going on, and you're using third party external payment gateways like PayPal, you also want to add those to the referral exclusion list because a similar issue can occur when someone goes to PayPal to check out and then they come back in. Google Analytics can count that as a new entering user or session I should say for the same user, but it's really all part of one session for that user. So if you add the third party payment gateway domain to the referral exclusion list, Google Analytics will then automatically unify the returning visitors, quote unquote new session with their original session from before they started check out and treated as one. We'll have time for a couple of questions at the end. Also sort of similar in nature is if you have a user journey that crosses several domains, so let's say you have a main website, rsite.com, and you have a courier site, our couriersite.com, and it's very common for users to travel amongst those and back, that can cause a similar issue where one user is really just interacting in one session with all your properties, but it looks like in Google Analytics it can look like multiple sessions per user visit and that's just not true. So in this case you want to implement something called cross domain tracking, and there's a link there, it does require a little modification to your tracking code, so there's a link to read more about how exactly to do this if you need to do this, but the concept is basically that you're going to use one property, although properties are usually used one per website, in this kind of a case you want to use the same property across all of the domains, and then use separate views to segment the traffic out. You can have one view where you can see it all together, but then you can have separate views for each site as well, and this will avoid accuracy issues by making all the user visits that are hopping amongst domains look like brand new visits when really they're just in one session moving around. All right, and another thing for accuracy that you want to make sure to do is get your own self out of there. Your behavior, your browsing behavior on your own website is not representative of your target client or prospects behavior on your site, and so you're going to skew your own site-wide average metrics if you're recording your own behavior and that of your staff. One really easy way to take care of this is the GA opt-out extension for Chrome. Just install it, activate it, and you will no longer be counted in your Google Analytics metrics. That's the easy way. There's an advanced way. My slides are not changing. There we go. Advanced way is IP filtering, and this happens at the view level in your admin. You go to admin, view filters, and you can filter out your own and your team's own IP addresses from your view. However, if you do this, definitely, definitely, definitely create another unfiltered backup view. Whenever you filter anything out of your main view, it's gone forever. So if you make a mistake and it's really easy to accidentally put a dot in the wrong place or something, if you make a mistake, that day is gone forever. So definitely always create one view that's an unfiltered backup view just in case. All right, last but definitely not least is referral spam. Who's heard of referral spam? All right, about a third, maybe. Referral spam, as spammers always do, they figure out how to spam us in every area of our lives, including your Google Analytics account. Spammers have figured out how to send fake traffic hits to Google Analytics accounts, and they do it at random, just like spammers call you at random or text you at random. So you likely have some referral spam in your Google Analytics account. And it's just to get your attention, like this uptime site is just sending fake hits to get you to check them out. And often they will have bot-like metrics, like a 100% bounce rate, one average page per visit, and zero seconds session duration. So that will really skew your overall metrics. When you're trying to learn about your whole site's bounce rate, your whole site's average pages per session, et cetera, that's going to get messed up by this type of traffic. And it often has those characteristics exactly, but referral spam, some spammers have figured out how to fake those metrics. So they're not just easy to spot like that. So how do you get it out? The referral spam should be filtered out with filters. So again, always, always, always create a backup unfiltered view if you're going to try to do this. But how exactly do you get it out? Because there's hundreds of different websites doing this and hundreds of different metrics that they're sending with their fake traffic. One word, Carlos. This guy has got this figured out, and you can do it yourself by following his instructions and or you can pay him to do it for you. But he has got this down pat. He's really made a business for himself taking care of referral spam and Google Analytics, and I'm not affiliated. I don't earn any money by recommending him. He's just the best. So either follow his instructions carefully, they're incredibly complicated, but you can do it yourself if you want to. Carefully follow the instructions. So the pro to this is that it's free, but you do have to update it manually whenever new spam sources come out, which is pretty much weekly. But you can sign up for his email. He'll send you an email when there's a new one to add to the filter and tell you how to do it. Or you can pay him. His current pricing is not published on his website, but we sign up for it. It's very affordable. So those are your options for getting referral spam out of your Google Analytics account. All right, so we talked about a lot of ways to make the data more accurate, but we also want to talk about how to make it more comprehensive and to segment it to answer questions. So let's talk about comprehensiveness. For comprehensiveness, of course, you want to track all of your actual conversion actions as goals or transactions in Google Analytics. You'd be surprised how many sites we see from really established brands that are not tracking all of their actual conversion actions in Google Analytics. So this is key. And I say actual conversion actions. This is a pet peeve of mine. Viewed contact page is not a conversion. A conversion is when someone either purchases something or actually inserts themselves into your sales cycle somehow using some kind of form fill or something. So those are the things you want to make sure to track as conversions, as goals or transactions in Google Analytics. The easy way to track a form is to after submission, redirect that form to a thank you or confirmation type URL and set up what's called a destination goal in your admin for Google Analytics for that URL. Super simple and easy. For e-commerce transactions, if you're on WooCommerce, you're in luck. They have a plugin, the Enhance e-commerce tracking plugin. It takes care of this easily. Just install that, enable e-commerce tracking in your admin in Google Analytics, and you're done. Now, if you're not on WooCommerce or you have a really complicated form situation, you can't use those easy methods. Here are some links for using Google Tag Manager to set up both form fill tracking and e-commerce tracking for your website. So for non-conversion actions, but actions that are really important that you want to track, you can track those with something called event tracking. So anything that's an important action to track but is not someone actually purchasing or inserting themselves in your sales cycle should be tracked as an event, which can be viewed under the behavior menu and then events. And we don't have time to go through exactly how to set this up, so I gave you links, but here are some ideas for what you might want to track. Video views, there's links there for YouTube and Vimeo. Clicks on mail to links, click to call links, outbound links. Clicks on images or other elements. Those can all be tracked with Tag Manager event tracking. And I do recommend Tag Manager over inline JavaScript because it's just too easy for inline JavaScript to get accidentally overwritten and removed. So if you're going to do this, please use Tag Manager. All right, and last but not least, in our quest to have accurate, comprehensive and accurate and comprehensive data and data that we can segment to answer questions is segmenting data to answer questions. My favorite segmentation trick is called secondary dimensions. You can think of this as secondary columns. It's an easier word to remember. So if I'm looking at our reports and I'm like, hmm, our careers page gets a lot of traffic. I wonder where all that traffic to that page is coming from. I can click into that page and very quickly with this little dropdown that you may not have noticed before right at the top of the results, I can very quickly add a secondary column of information and break it down by whatever I'm curious about. So there's a lot of options in there. In this case, I was curious about the source or source medium, meaning the source and type of traffic that was coming to that page. I just quickly used that dropdown to add source medium. Now I have a second column showing me the breakdown that I was curious about and my question is answered very quickly. Similarly, to break down data in a way that can answer questions, you might want to use custom segments. This is something that will apply a filter of sorts, like a lens, to view all the Google Analytics reports through. So when you have this segment on, you can click around to any Google Analytics report and it will show you the stats just for that segment. For example, we have multiple careers pages in our careers section on the site and if I wanted to view any and all of the Google Analytics reports but only about the careers section of the site, I can create a segment for the careers section of the site. At the top of most of the reports, you'll see a button that says add segment. You put in the name of the segment, go to conditions to specify the condition that you want the segment to have and then say what it is in this case, page contains careers. You save that and now all of your Google Analytics reports will show you information just through that lens. So that's pretty handy and you can even do it for multiple segments at once. I can do the same thing for the resources section of our site and apply them both at once and view all the reports in Google Analytics through those two lenses at the same time and compare them stacked right over each other. Pretty handy. If you find yourself using the same secondary dimension options or the same custom segments all the time and just constantly having to apply them, apply them, apply them over and over again, you may want to look into custom reports. This way you can create a report that will stay there and be that way, configured that way all the time. In the custom reports you go to customization and you set up a custom report. It can look a little confusing, especially with things like what's a metric, what's a dimension. So this slide you might want to have handy if you try to do this as a cheat sheet of sorts. The dimension is basically the first column, whatever data you want in the first column. And then the metrics are the numbers that you want to come in the subsequent columns. And then the filter is that lens that you want to see it through if you want to narrow this report to only a certain type of data. And then your custom report will be available to you at all times and you can even schedule it to be sent by email just like you can with standard reports. And last but not least, custom dashboards are another very handy way to break down data in a way that can answer questions and visualize it. So you can go to the customization section and hit add dashboard. And you can either start with a blank canvas and start adding widgets of your own to it or you can go to the gallery and see if there's something similar to what you're looking for already. They're very well maybe. And then you can just tweak it a little bit and that's a lot faster. But that's definitely something to consider as well. So to recap, to turn data into information, into insight, you want to make sure your data is comprehensive, accurate, and can segment it in a way that can answer questions. And I hope this quick overview showed you some tidbits on how to do that today. And again, if you want to download the slides, the link is there and there's plenty of links in the slides for further reading on each topic. And we do. Thank you. We do have about two minutes for questions. Oh, five minutes for questions. There was one over here first. If that's important for accuracy. Oh, okay. All right. So the question was about sites that render with both www and non-dub-dub-dub. Do you need to have, like, two different Google Analytics accounts? The best practice would be to actually have one redirect to the other because if you don't, that's duplicate content which is not great for SEO purposes. So you want to just pick a primary, have it all redirect one way or the other, and then just set up your Google Analytics the one way. Technically, it can show both, but it's the best practice for a variety of reasons to just have it one way. Other questions? Okay. So the question was, do we use any other tools other than Google Analytics that can capture data that perhaps Google Analytics doesn't show? Yes. Google Analytics is an amazing in-depth tool, but it can't show certain things, especially metrics from other platforms. Like, you know, social media platforms have their own metrics and whatnot. So we do like a variety of dashboard tools for that. Dash this is one that we use a lot. It imports from Google Analytics to a whole variety of others. Clipfolio is another good one. And on the high end, for really complicated stuff, Tableau is pricey, but great for that. Second one is Clipfolio. K-L-I-P-F-O-L-I-O. Okay. So the question was about referral spam. See it a lot. Curious if there's an actual, like, detriment SEO-wise to having that happening on your site or if it's just like a harm, like a mosquito that doesn't bite. It is like an annoying mosquito that doesn't bite. There's no SEO penalty. It's not real traffic. Right, right. You can filter it out and then they do constantly change their domains and then... Yeah. I'm not going to repeat that, but... That's why Carlos's emails are really helpful because he's on top of that, like you wouldn't believe. So as soon as there's a new one, if you really want to do it yourself and keep updating your filters and keep on top of it, that's bound. Ah, great question. When making websites for clients, should you create their Google Analytics property in your own account or create a separate account for them? I would highly recommend the second option, create their own account for them or let them create their account and let you know what the number is and let them, technically, legally, intellectual property-wise, whatever, they own their data and I've seen horror story after horror story of clients trying to get a hold of their own Google Analytics data from a web developer that vanished or won't give it to them or was extorting them. I actually was on a conference call where a web developer tried to extort money out of a client to give them ownership of their Google Analytics data. It was insane and unethical and just awful. Just let them have their own account. We have time for more. We have time for more questions. Who else has any? I'll also be at the... I feel like there might be hands up. I'm not really seeing. There we go. Sorry, it was a little hard to hear. Any kind of data that is... Ah, okay. Is there any kind of data that maybe Google Analytics doesn't measure yet but is in demand and we see coming in the future? Yes. I think the biggest thing in demand right now is proper cross-device and cross-channel attribution is getting better at that but they've got a long way to go. I mean, it is a multi-device, multi-browser world, multi-IP, and advertisers who are spending a lot of money advertising are trying to figure out their funnels of what's working between impression, click, actions on the site, and conversion and sale, and users coming back days later from a different device is just something they haven't gotten good enough at yet but seem to be trying to and hopefully will. One more question. If anyone has question... Again, I feel like there might be hands that I can't see. Thank you for pointing. Oh, sorry. We'll try to do both really fast. Yeah, so the question was about is there a service that builds in your kind of predetermined conversion funnel tracking for you? Sort of, I mean, every business is different. I think the closest thing that comes to that is HubSpot. They show you that per contact journey in a nice neat funnel-ish type of way, sort of pre-designed or they make it easy to design. They're the ones that come top of mind for the ones that come closest to something sort of pre-done for funnel tracking. Yes, last one. Good question. How often do I recommend checking your Google Analytics? I'd say that checking and analyzing are two totally different things. Checking into it to make sure all the data is flowing through and it looks like traffic numbers have disappeared is a good thing to do on a regular basis but they also have alerts for that. You can set up alerts so that if all of a sudden you have zero hits when you usually have 100 hits a day, it will alert you. For analysis, that really depends on the volume of traffic on the site. A site that gets a total of 200 visits over a whole month, you're not really going to learn anything by looking at that daily or weekly. You might as well just do month over month. But if you get 20,000 visits a day, and in between, maybe if you get 2,000 visits a month you might want to check it weekly. There's no exact formula but it's kind of relative to the popularity. It's amount of data because you need a certain amount of data for analysis to be statistically significant. Yeah, it kind of scales up with as traffic scales up the frequency of which monthly minimum for any site, even the smallest volume site for sure. I'll be at the happiness bar which has moved to RB 140 if I remember that right, by the kids camp. Thank you so much for joining me today.