 So I'm going to go ahead and introduce you to Brian Daniels. And just as a little full disclosure, Brian and I work together. Except I said I'm in the Dallas, Fort Worth area. Brian is not because we are a remote team and Brian and I do not work in the same office. But Brian is also a technical project manager at Square. And he's been here a little bit longer than me. In fact, I believe he's been working for the company for about six years now. Whereas I've been here for a square for about a year. And Brian is our on our team. That's most teams you have somebody that's really good at one thing and somebody who's really good at another thing. Well, Brian is our Google guy. I'll just put it that way, because if I have a question about how to use Google, I used to be really good at reading all the Google analytics and then they change the speed of life because they're Google and they can. And now if I have a question, I ask Brian. So with that, I'm going to turn this over. Hi, Andrew, welcome to the show. Welcome to the presentation. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Brian, who can tell you more and tell us all about Google. Brian, as Mark alluded to earlier, we're going to talk about Google analytics. And we'll go into that a little bit deeper. Mark also mentioned that I keep up with things Google. So there's a lot of different Google products that can help you take advantage of measuring your website, promoting your website, all sorts of cool things like that. And I think pretty much all of them are free. So we're going to look at Google analytics. That's just one of the products that they offer that will tell you a little bit about how your website is performing. OK, so website analytics, we can see here, it gives you insight and data about what can create a better user experience for your visitors or what is already creating a good user experience for your visitors. So these can include things like where are people coming from? Are they using like Google searches to find you? Are they coming social media or maybe ads? You can also get a little bit of insight into what they're searching for to find you. You can find out who is coming to your site. So it has some information about users ages and I think gender demographics is still there and also some location information. So you can see countries and cities and states and stuff like that and see maybe there's certain parts of the world that are coming to your site and maybe you want to speak to them more. You can also see how they are engaging with your site. So for example, how long they're staying on your site? How many different pages do they visit? Are they interacting with my content? Are they downloading files or clicking on things or maybe viewing some of the pages that have videos? And then we can start making some deductions or we could start thinking about things like what pieces of content are performing better. We could look at stuff like are my blogs doing better or are my case studies doing better? Are they reading about my organization's departments or looking at careers on our site? This can help us figure out what we'd like to promote more or what we maybe need to be far up a little bit more because people are visiting these pages. So the end goal of all of this is to try to convert visitors into customers or constituents. So the only reason we want people to come to our site and the only reason we want them to engage in our site and learn about us is because we have so in the past is a whole bunch of different products to figure out and how people are engaging. You see some stuff here that record screencasts and conversion metrics and all that stuff. And they've got all confusing because you had 10 different places where you had to go pull things together and make some deductions. So now Google Analytics brings a lot of that stuff together in one reporting system and it's absolutely free. So some stuff out of the box here is you can tell how many different users are coming to your site. How many pages are getting page views? The page view is basically like how many times a page is loaded so we can see 100 times our home page was loaded. There's something like that. The average number of pages visited. So for example, we could see when a person comes to our site they on average go to three different pages of our website before they bounce or leave the website. They average time on site, how long they've been on the site before they actually leave. Demographic information we've touched on earlier, what types of people are coming to your site or where they're located and what devices they're using. So we could see are they using a tablet, a desktop computer, a mobile device, these can help us gain insight into do we need to improve any of the performance here? If we've got a whole bunch of people coming to our website from mobile, we better make darn sure our mobile website is user-friendly. And then figuring out where they are coming from. So again, we mentioned maybe you'll see that a lot of people are coming from Google search engines or maybe they're coming from social media or maybe they're not coming from social media and they're not can tell you okay, maybe to beef up our social media campaigns to drive more traffic from these other sources. We can also tell you a little bit about how some of your pages are loading. Google, I think once pages loading between two to five seconds or something like that. So this can also tell us okay, there's these pages, they're loading really slow for some reason. There is a chance that maybe Google won't rank them as higher as other pages. It tells you about which pages are performing better than others. We can tell you about how your ads are performing. So if you have a Google ad placed directing to a specific page, you can get some information about or can how many clicks we're driving people from my ads to this page. And again, your social media impact is there your marketing efforts and social media actually working. It has custom goals that you can set up. These can get as granular as you want. Like maybe it's somebody fills out my contact form, that's one goal. Or maybe it's something very specific. Let's say that you're a full profit selling products or something like that. And you want your goal to be, first the person views my product page, then they go to the cart, then they go to checkout and then finally they can complete their checkout. That helps with stuff like Google ads because you can start seeing if they follow the funnel, they call it rather than jumping around. So it just gives you some options in creating different goals. And they have pretty good e-commerce reports. So I mentioned like funnels of how they get through your goals. They can also tell you things like which products are performing the best and how much revenue I'm bringing in total or per product, how many times a specific product is going to purchase. So what does this look like? I've got the swear Google analytics folder and it's after an hour. So we don't have too many visitors right now. But we have real-time reports which is what I have pulled up here now. And first off, let me point out that I am looking at a universal analytics report and we'll go into why I'm saying that so loud and clearly right now, later in this presentation. So here we have some real-time information. How many people have visited the sites in the last five minutes? What pages are they looking at? Where are they at in the world? Again, you can drill in to see which city they're in, downs, etc. We have some information on the audiences themselves. So here we have, like I mentioned earlier, demographics, ages, genders, where they are, behavior, are they new versus returning, technology, such as wish browsers and stuff they're using, are they on mobile, tablet, et cetera. Acquisition is related to how people are getting to your site. So we touched on this a little bit. Maybe they're coming from ads or from Google searches or social campaigns. And then we can see our behavior on the website. So what are they doing once they get there? And here you can see our top performing pages, how many times these pages were viewed. And we can get into things here like I was saying, site speed. If you have search on your site, what are they interming in your website to find things, et cetera. And then there's conversion goals. This is what we were talking about earlier. Maybe there's a goal of, I want somebody to fill out my contact form. So that is the goal that you set out. And then we'll tell you how many times somebody has filled out that. Brian, I'm gonna jump in. This is Susanna. I see somebody's, hi. I see somebody's raised their hand. Are you willing to take questions in the middle or do you want to wait till the end? Sure. I'll give it a shot. That page appeared like magic. Could you go to the homepage, let's say people.com, show us how you got that. How we got to the analytics reports? Yeah. About the point of the browser, the user set the homepage to Google.com. Just like that. You can always search for Google Analytics. I should be the first thing that pops up. There is also, I know the URL. It's analytics.google.com. And so once you're taking there, if you're already logged into your Google account, then it should start showing you your dashboard. Otherwise, it's going to take you to the standard login G or Google account login page. And then I believe you'll just get redirected back to the analytics dashboard. Okay, so that's the dashboard page what you love. Correct. Yeah. Andrew, just to jump in here, you get the Google Analytics to work on your website. Brian, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you still have to put the custom code in the head of your website? Yes. Yes, you do. We'll get into that a little bit deeper in a little bit. So, yeah, so Andrew, you went to Google Analytics right now. You wouldn't see, unless you have a site set up already, you wouldn't see much of anything other than offering to walk you through how to set something up on a website. Yeah, so I think the first time if you don't have anything set up, I think there's like something that tells your URL and all that stuff. But there are a few steps for it to start getting information from your website into this Google Analytics platform. And again, we'll go a little bit. Okay. So, tacking on to that, there are several Google products that can work together with Google Analytics. There is Google Tag Manager, which is something that can be used to put the Google Analytics tracking stuff on your website. It can also help people do some more advanced things, like maybe I wanna track Facebook ads or a number of clicks on my website. All that stuff can be set up in this Google Tag Manager and that feeds them to Google Analytics. And there is a wealth of information on the internet about how to connect these things together or how to set up Tag Manager and stuff like that. There's also a product called Search Console. And this is specifically related to how people are using the Google Search Engine. So for example, what they're typing in into Google Search in which pages it took to. What are the highest performing pages from a Google Search? So specifically to Google Search Engines only and then that can feed into your Google Analytics account. So you do got kind of this robust tracking options here plus stuff coming from your Search Console. And then they also have a Google Data Studio, which is just a real fancy report builder. They can give you some beautiful charts and stuff like that. And that can pull information from Google Analytics as well as some other data sources. There we go. Okay. So some of you may already have Google Analytics installed on your website. As I mentioned before, very briefly, we were looking at universal analytics. And this is a version of the analytics. It is actually also Google Analytics 3. And now they have Google Analytics 4. So that means that this universal analytics that we were looking at a minute ago will be reaching its end of life in July of 2023. So there's about a year or so that it's in left and then they're gonna be making everybody upgrade to this Google Analytics 4. So Andrew, when you set up your account, it's going to just automatically set you up with this Google Analytics 4. You won't even have to worry about universal analytics or any of that stuff should be looked at already. You're gonna see the newest and latest and greatest version. As I mentioned, it's reaching its end of life in 2023. For those of you that are already using it, definitely upgrade to the newer version as soon as you can. They've completely changed, I guess you could say under the hood of how they're tracking everything. And there is a line in the span. So by that, when you start using Google Analytics 4, all of your data starts fresh. You don't have access or you don't have your old universal analytics, historical data in your Google Analytics 4. Obviously this is upsetting a few people, but the reason is because again, there's been a complete overall of how Google Analytics is working. Now you will have a limited amount of time to access that historical data. So I think they said about six months after the end of life, you'll still be able to see all of your old universal analytics data, but by about the end of 23, that stuff is just going to be gone. So point being, upgrade sooner than later. You can do it now. As soon as possible, you can start collecting some of that data in the new format then you don't have to worry about missing out on some data in your future. One of the major advantages of Google Analytics 4 is there's a whole lot of options to customize reports and dashboards and stuff like that. Again, one of the ways reasons that they're getting rid of the old data and making you start fresh is because it changes how it tracks the activity. So before, this may be a little technical, but when a person comes to your website, they would drop a little tracking cookie in your browser that would follow your activity through the site and they would count these as sessions, which is the point that you went to the site to when you leave the site. Now they've gotten rid of this whole sessions tracking in order to make it more specific to a user itself, which is actually great because it has better way of de-duping and unifying data. So for example, in the old way or the universal analytics way, somebody could go to your site and now and then they could go to your site again in an hour and they could go to your site again tomorrow and each one of those times it would say, hey, there's a new session or hey, you would think there's a new person visiting your site, but in actuality, there was just the same person three different times. So they've done a better job of doing that now. So you can get better analysis of the parties returning people or brands of people. It also allows you to do some more advanced stuff on the box, such as seeing how far people are scrolling down your pages. Now that might be helpful. Imagine then you have a blog article and it's really long and you get some insight into, okay, people are only scrolling down halfway through my article and then leaving the page. Maybe your next article, you maybe want to write a little bit short or something like that. And you can also get things like clicks out of the box. Are they clicking on links? Are they downloading files? Are they playing videos on my site? If you're using YouTube videos, then you can actually see some information. The percentage of videos that were watched, they'd be watching 100% of my video, they'd be just watching 50% of my video, et cetera. Now again, a lot of this can already be set up with universal analytics by using the Google Tag Manager, but it takes some time to set up. The through I would explore, that's a lot more readily available out of the box. Now one of the coolest things I think is they have, they call machine learning insights. And this is kind of big brother artificial intelligence, but it can start looking at some of your data, analyzing your data and learning your things like trends or anomalies. Like for example, we touched on a minute ago, okay, there's a bunch of people that are coming from social media and they're going to this page and they're reading half of your blog. That's a trend that they may identify for you without you clicking around and trying to make some analysis on your own. They can also tell you some anomalies, like for example, every once in a while, a website may get hit by some sort of spam bot or something like that, which will just totally skew your analytics stable like maybe you normally have 50 people viewing a page and then for some reason the next day, you're like got 5,000 people looking at the page but you have no idea unless you start to get to those reports. So that's something that the machine learning utility going on here, you might want to look in like a way to purchase things on your website. This maybe not just products, but these could be membership dues being paid or donations or event registrations. It can also help predict some of that purchase information for even a specific user. Now, this would require somebody actually logging into your site but let's say somebody regularly registers for an event. Let's say that everybody logs into TechSoup website, registers for events and they all cost money. We can start getting some predictions of, hey, Brian usually registers this many times for this many paid events. We assume that he's going to be during for this many events next time. So you could start getting a little bit of insight into how much money you may be bringing. Hey, Brian, Pete was wondering if you still need to use Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics 4. That's a great question. Technically no, but I always recommend that we use Google Tag Manager just about any time. As a matter of fact, I always tell everyone, if you want to use Google Analytics, go ahead and install Google Tag Manager. The main reasons are, like we touched on earlier, there's a whole lot more advanced stuff that you can do. We talked about like picks and skulls and all that stuff. There's even more things that you can do with Google Tag Manager than those things. And again, you could search online. There's so much information about some of the stuff you can do with it. Another thing that I love about Google Tag Manager is you can do some of that stuff or pretty much all that stuff without a developer. So you have your developer one time with this Google Tag Manager code snippet on your website, then you just go into the Google interface and you can set up all these cool little tracking things without having to put any other code on your. So in other words, every time you want to track something new, you don't have to go to a developer and say, hey, now you got to put this thing on my website and then you got to wait two weeks for them to do it and maybe they didn't do it right. You have to go backwards. And there's a lot more features from Google Analytics for a lot of them. I'm still learning myself, even though it's been around for several months and still getting more familiar with it. I know one thing, again, is related to monetization or getting information about revenue and universal analytics is basically focused on e-commerce stuff, products and stuff like that that people are buying directly from my. In the new reports, you can start tying other things together. Like for example, if you're selling ads, how does my ad revenue factor into how much money I'm bringing in? If you have an application like a mobile app that somebody has to buy to download, you can pull that data in or you see all these in-app purchases now, you can pull all that data into Google Analytics and get a more broader idea of where your money's coming from. Okay, Andrew, I think this is where you were getting at earlier. So the very first thing that you have to do is sign up for a Google account if you don't already have one. And I think it's just like accounts.google.com. You can just do a quick search for get a Google account or sign up for a Google account. Now it'll walk you through. Now, if you already have something like Gmail or really any Google product, you already have an account. So if you have a Gmail account, you already have a Google account. Once that's set up, you need to go to that site we saw earlier, analytics.google.com, where you can do a search to find it. And then it's going to walk you through the little wizard to set everything up. That's ultimately going to give you a tracking script, which I'm sorry, I jumped over this. The tracking scripts are different from universal analytics to Google analytics and I'll elaborate more on that in a second. But they'll give you a little tracking script that you'll copy and paste. And then again, my recommendation is to set that up through Google Tag Manager. So just like the analytics, you can go to the Tag Manager website after you already logged in, click the create, whatever they call it, they call it containers. You don't have a little wizard that'll walk you through everything. And it's pretty simple. There's some boxes that say, set up Google Analytics and you just paste in the little code that they gave you when you're setting up your analytics. And then again, if you're using Tag Manager, this is the code snippet that you'll want to put in. So after you go through this wizard, they're going to give you another code snippet. And that's really all that you would care about once you have tagged your setup. Because again, you give it to your developer, they would put that one code on there and then you could do whatever you want with that bother. I mentioned earlier, where's the Google Search Console, which tells you about how people are searching through the Google Search Engine. You're going to want to make sure that you have that setup on your site. Again, there's a little wizard that can walk you through it. And there's also a little wizard that tells you how to connect it to your Google Analytics to bring all that data together. And then I was touching on this earlier. If you already have your Universal Analytics and you're upgrading to Google Analytics 4, that little tracking snippet that they gave you originally is going to change. So this is why we're seeing that if there's the line in the sand, you're going to have totally new data in your new version of Google Analytics because basically it's coming from a different tracking script. Now both of those can be installed on your site at the same time. So you can have Universal Analytics tracking script on installed and the new Google Analytics 4. So basically what that means is you'll start getting data to two different accounts, which would be good if you start looking at some of that historical information and then just know that eventually in July or a few months after that, only your new G-Port slipped us down to the lookings. Has asked, is there any reason to use Google Data Studio if you are only using Google Analytics and Google Search Console, not any ads or other data sources? The short answer is no. I find that the Data Studio is really more for managers, I would say, because they can give you the options like there's templates and stuff like that where you can say I want pie charts and graphs and all sorts of visual aids, which a lot of managers lead up where they can just say, oh, look at this pretty report and they can give email to them every week or whatever, they're happy. But you can get all this stuff out of the Google Analytics reports themselves. Yeah, I have a side-by-side here. Go ahead, Mark. Oh, the other question is, if you upgrade to Google Analytics 4, will it delete your old account or will it preserve it until it's endable? It will preserve it. So let me back up for a second. It's all controlled through these tracking scripts. They're little code snippets. And there will be one for Universal Analytics and one for Google Analytics 4. And you can put both of them on your site at the same time. So it would continue to track your Universal Analytics all the way through its end of life. At the same time, you could start collecting data in Google Analytics 4. So you would have data being sent to two places. Just eventually, the old version will stop working. Here on the left, I have the new version of Google Analytics 4. See, it's a little bit cleaner. They've tucked things away a little bit more. So come on, slow computer. As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot more customization options in Google Analytics 4. And they have different templates you can go through. You can click on some of these and pull in, I want cabed users. I want demographics and stuff like that. This is also a lot of what's in the Data Studio. So they have templates and stuff like that in the Data Studio that look very much like this. Should have mentioned earlier. One of the other advantages of the Data Studio over these reports is really you could get stuff from a whole lot of other places, not just Google. So if you have other platforms and products that you use that aren't even Google related, you can pull all that stuff into a single report using that Google Data Studio product. What we're seeing here in the new version of Google Analytics is only stuff related to what's in more Google Analytics account or in other words, what is coming from Google. Now our version of Google Analytics 4 is not really set up. So you're not really seeing much information here. But I think the key thing to show you is if you're already familiar with the old version, things have moved around. If you need to find things, they've got this wonderful little search here. You can start typing in something like demographics. I don't know where my demographics report is anymore. I just moved it. The search can help you find things a little bit easier. And then you have little report builders where you can create custom reports. You don't have to use a template. You can do whatever you want. You can add them to different dashboards. So when you log into the account, you have a little dashboard, or I guess you could say dashboards, all those different little things. And you can customize these, put them wherever you want and stuff like that. You can also automatically send reports from the Google Analytics here. So let's say you create one of these reports or maybe you already use one of the templates or reports that are here. There's options to say email this person, this email address based on some frequency. So I could say email mark this report every Monday or email this mark to mark the first of every month. So you do have those ways of automating those beautiful reports with graphs and stuff like that without actually having to do anything. It's almost for double. Let me show you real quick. I'm about done here. But again, Andrew has, we do five and eight. Yeah, one second. Let me pull it up on another monitor real quick so I don't have some sensitive information on the screen. So this is tag manager. And when you think of a tag, you could almost think about it as a type of tracking or a tracking script maybe even. I think it'll make more sense if I just click on, let's see, add a new tag here. So if you click on this first box here, it's the only thing, first thing you can click on, it's gonna give you all these populated options or whatever. So if you wanna install universal analytics, you can click on that one and you just put in your little tracking number here and then you would say, when do you want it to, they call it fire when you want it to trigger and you would put in here, I want it to show on all pages. So use this Google Analytics tracking all pages that are loaded and then you have your new Google Analytics 4. You can do things like put in your Google ad tracking scripts, again, this is something that you would normally have to tell your developers, push this one in with that one and put this one in but you can go in and set all these up as you create things. You crank them, Brian, what do you do? How do they become associated with the website? So for example, Google ads, when you set up an actual Google ad, they're again gonna give you a little tracking script which you would then come in the tag manager, pop that in here and that's how it would tie that information. They're actually tied to two different places. There's like an ads reporting and then all that stuff would also get brought into Google Analytics. But in short, to answer your question, this is how you would get it tied to your website is by putting these different terms or tracking scripts into the website. Okay, so let's say I've got a website, it's got one page, it's just how long is it? And how do I put the Google Analytics tag into that website? Okay, let me back up here. So again, it's gonna have a little wizard that watch you through the very first time. I'm gonna go to the Admin area. If you ran past it and need to come back, you would go to admin. And then there is a link here, install and Google tag manager. So they give you this little tracking information here. It tells you where you would put it in your website like this part has to go on your head tag, or has to go to your body tag. So this is what you would send to the developer or whoever has access to the code of your website. So they would install this thing. Yeah, go ahead. It's installing tags, requires a developer position. It's gonna be, actually, it's a snippet than the HTML. Yes, this would have to be added directly to the HTML. Yeah. And then after you have tag manager there, you can basically do all the other implementations without modeling it. Because we would use this to say, okay, now we wanna use Google Analytics tracking. We wanna use the new version. We wanna use ads. We don't have to put any other code on our HTML. This one thing can do it all. We would just manage it through this tag manager. This is, okay. Aside from just the basic things we saw with the newer version, it can walk you through things like if you wanna trap cricks, that would be in the triggering section. So I wanna see every time somebody is cricked on an external link and internally scrolling, these are things that are available now. Out of the box, we will have the manager and the new Google Analytics. So you have the flexibility of saying when you want these things to happen, not just what you want to happen. That makes sense. So I want to track it only when somebody goes through the contact thinking page. Send that information to Google Analytics whenever that happens, not on every single page. So if you have a lot of flexibility in controlling the what and the when, something happens or something needs to be true. There's a lot of information here and I think Google makes a difficult on purpose just to either frustrate you or to maybe try to get some more money from you. But again, there is a lot of information out there on the internet. They even have Google Analytics Academy and the same thing for tag manager, Data Studio and all that stuff. If you just search for Google Analytics Academy, they have some free online courses that are going to show you more about how to use these things. They have them for like beginners, advanced power users, et cetera. So you can go through these little online tutorials for free to learn more about these things in depth. So that would definitely be the first place I would start. Even before you have it installed, if you want to learn more about it, see if you even want to use it. And as Mark mentioned, we'll have this recorded. We'll be up on the internet. You can re-watch it. It's any of my wealth of information as we have all sorts of blogs and square way. If I have any other questions for Brian. Look at that, Brian. You did such a good job. They don't have any more questions. Either that or I really confused everyone. No, so my biggest takeaway is go look for Google Analytics Academy. You can do a quick search for it. It'll show you how to use things in a general overview, how to get really advanced with it. You could go through that to even evaluate it if you want to use it. The next biggest takeaway is, if you're already using the older version, upgrade to the newer version and start collecting data as soon as possible. All right, Brian. Thank you very much. Really appreciate your presentation tonight. Who's that? I just asked real quick, if you have anything to add before we wrap up the seat. No, I don't have anything to add. Just a big thank you to Brian and thank you to everybody who came. All right, thanks everyone.