 So, first of all, why should you improve your Google Analytics skills? Why spend time on this? I think this quote sums it up kind of nicely. The quote says, the goal is to turn data into information and information into insight. So what's the difference, though, between data and information and insight? Well, data is just a bunch of characters, really, letters, numbers, not necessarily organized in any meaningful way. So that's data. But when you do organize them in a meaningful way, you then have information. And with information, you can gain insight by using the data, if it's structured in the right way, to answer questions. For example, question. Do organic search visitors engage with our website more so than paid search users? Well, the gobbledygook of data and letters and numbers is not in any particular order, that question but structured in the right way in the right type of report, that question can be answered. Yes. Organic users bounce lists, stay longer, and consume more content. And the insight that can be gained from that is then more in our SEO. So that's why it's worth spending time on getting better at Google Analytics so that you can turn your data into information and your information into real actionable business insight that will actually help you make more money or achieve more of your goals, whatever they are. So to do that, to turn data into information and into insight, specifically within Google Analytics, the information needs to be accurate, needs to be comprehensive, and it needs to be segmented in a way, those are the three types of things I'm going to do my best to show you how to do today. So we're going to talk about how to make your data more accurate by doing things like checking your tracking code implementation to make sure that the data that's being collected is accurate, removing self-referral issues, and I'll explain what that means, cross-domain tracking, I'll explain what all of these things mean, removing internal traffic, and removing referral spam. We'll also talk about making your data more comprehensive through version tracking and event tracking. And we'll talk about how to make your data to answer questions through secondary dimensions, custom segments, custom dashboards. So that's a lot, so let's get right to it. But before we get right to it, I want to make sure that this thing is clear because I'm going to refer to things like account and property, make sure it quickly touch upon what the difference between those are. So in Google Analytics, if you go into your admin section, you'll see three columns, and very lightly at the top in gray, it says account, property, and view. So the difference is that one Google Analytics account, which is really just associated like with your email address, your Google email that you log in with, one account can host data for multiple websites, that's the second column, and then one website can have multiple, it's kind of sliced and diced and reported on in different ways. The one account can have multiple properties, typically means multiple websites, and then one website or one property can have multiple views to slice and dice the data in different ways. Does that kind of make sense? Good. So let's get to making your data more accurate. First and foremost, definitely check your tracking code implementation. The proper way to implement Google Analytics tracking code on a website is that a single copy of the tracking code must be placed before closing the head tag, ideally right after the opening head tag. So before the closing one, ideally right after the opening head tag in the header of the site. It's a very common thing actually to copies of the Google Analytics tracking script to get injected into the website. The original web developer of a site may have manually put it into the template, and then someone else out of just go to your website and view source and make sure you only have one. And that it is before the closing head tag, ideally right after the closing head tag. Even easier though, use this Chrome extension called Google Tag Assistant. And just see if you, so you install that Chrome extension, go to your website, and then run that tag assistant and see if you get a red frowny face or a green smiley face. So make sure, and actually even if you visually go through the view source thing in the browser, I'd still recommend doing this. Because just looking at it won't tell you if it's missing a comma or a period or something that your eye may miss, and it's not actually working correctly, communicating with the server correctly. So highly recommend Google Tag Assistant for checking the implementation of the code. All right, next up in the realm, we're going to talk about self-referral issues. So self-referral checks, and you look at your referral sources, which is supposed to tell you traffic from your own website, coming to your own website. That's how the session's being double counted, conversion tracking, accuracy issues, all sorts of issues, and you don't want to see. So if you see that, or even if you don't, as a preemptive measure, it's a good thing to filter out referral, self-referral traffic, or maybe shouldn't say filter out. You want to add your own domain name to what's called the referral exclusion list. So in that admin interface, under the property column in the middle, there's something under the tracking info header, something called referral exclusion, one main name there so that you don't have self-referral issues. But it's a leading exclude, real data that you shouldn't be excluding or deleting. So it's saying to Google Analytics, if you see one session that is already on my website, and then for some reason that session entry and double count, it's just going to unify the puzzle pieces and put them back together. And you actually want to do this to PayPal, or if you have integrating your site with a Shopify cart or something, leave to go finish another session, especially problematic, because then all of the sales and the revenue numbers, that's not where they originally came from, and you can't learn much from that. You need SEO, paid search, social media. You need to know exactly where they did come from, the first place not that they can't give you money. So you want to add your third-party external payment gateways to the referral as well. All right, next up in the accuracy category is cross-domain tracking. So what that means is if you have multiple websites, but users that tend to travel between them. So in this very simplistic example, it says rsite.com, rcareersite.com, and then rsite.com. So if someone goes to your main site, but then you have like a separate careers website, and they go there, but then they come back. That can lead to similar issues to what I was just talking about before too, because it's really the same user, and it's really the same session. But it's going to get counted as new people coming in, and then another new coming in, and vice versa. So you can set up cross-domain tracking to avoid those issues, and real quick overview of what that looks like. In cross-domain tracking, individual properties are for individual websites in Google Analytics. But there is the same property code on multiple different websites called a linker plugin. It's just a little additional piece of script, and that link will tell you more about it, that then you can actually put the same property tracking code on multiple different websites. And it's good in this use case, because then you won't have the sessions being split and divided. It will all look the same. Google Analytics will know that it's the same user traveling amongst multiple websites. And then you can set up separate views to organize that property into this website only. So you can see it however you want. Use case where typically individual properties are individual websites, and use case where it does actually make sense to have one Google Analytics property be used on multiple websites. All right, and another item is removing internal traffic. So yourself, your app, your freelancers, those users will use your app to necessarily reflect that of your actual prospects, your users, then the extra users that are playing. Which are the ones you really want to learn about. So you want to get yourself and your team's data usage of your website out of your account. Easiest way to do that, again, a Chrome extension. This one's called the Google Analytics Opt-Out Add-On. If you go to the Chrome extension store, you add this Google Analytics Opt-Out Add-On. And enable it, that's it. You're now not counted in Google Analytics when you go to your own website. What else is a website? But since we're on our own website, and now we're not counted for them either. So we shouldn't be doing that. So that's the easiest way. You can also filter out by IP. And if you have a static IP and you know what it is, admin section and filter out your freelance or home office or whatever it may be. One quick note about filtering, if you do this or any other kind of data, an unfiltered view as a backup. So you go into the admin and you use the actual filtering capability on a view or property or anything. Once you filter data out, it's gone forever. And if you make a little mistake and accidentally filter out more than just that one IP address that you meant to filter out or whatever it may be, that data is gone forever. So always, always, always make a view. Again, one account can have multiple properties, and a single property can have multiple views. So your one website Google Analytics tracking code can be sliced and diced into multiple views. If you're going to filter out your IP address from your main view, make sure to also create a backup view that has no filters whatsoever, just in case. Because it definitely happens. That mistakes are made when filters are created and you want that unfiltered backup view. All right, last but certainly not least is referral spam. How many people have heard of referral spam? All right, maybe a third or so. Annoying, right? Yeah, so for those that aren't aware, spammers have figured out how to spam us in almost every area of our lives, our cell phones, our email, our regular phones, whatever, direct mail. You just hit with spam all the time, and now it can even happen inside of your Google Analytics account. So spammers have figured out how to send what is essentially fake traffic to your Google Analytics account, making it look like someone visited your website coming from their website, making it look like they referred traffic to you when they really didn't. They just want their website to show up in your referrals often, just so you click on that link and check it out. And it really works because every single person that I've talked to that spots it, they're like, what is that? I don't know, I've never heard of that. They're sending us traffic, let me check it out. It could be, it could be. So it could be dangerous to check it out. One of the telltale signs, it's not always there, but one of the telltale signs of a referral source being referral spam is a 100% bounce rate, a perfect 1.0 average pages per session, and a zero second, zero minute, zero hour average session duration. That's kind of a telltale sign that it's bot traffic. All those spammers referral have gotten really good at actually spoofing those numbers as well. So it won't always look like that. So how do you filter it out if there's no telltale sign? Again, always, always filter this out. But those guys pretend to be an expert at this. He is the expert at doing it. You can, if you want, you can follow his instructions for how to do it. Because this is what happens as soon as you figure out which ones to filter out. He's on top of the ones to filter out his block. So that's the DIY. Maintain your own filters for free that way. The service to take care of it. Yeah, use them, yeah. So it's worth it sometimes to pay a small amount to get that done. So not easy to get your numbers. But it's important to do so because it does skew the site wide averages. If your boss, your clients, or whatever, that you don't have session duration, and all this bot traffic's coming in and messing that up for your site wide averages, then, you know, it's hard to achieve your goals and to know what's part of what you're doing and what's not. All right, that's how to make a whole bunch of ways to make your data ways to make it more comprehensive. First of all, conversion tracking. If a lot of you probably have this set up already, but if you don't definitely want to convert, which I mean like a real action, someone has done an action to either give you money or give you order, or the content of a conversion. That is not an action that turned someone that converted. I don't consider that a conversion. And it's a little bit of a pee that I see that a lot. Or spending a certain amount of time on a person to convert themselves to a lead. But if they filled out a form, or they made a purchase, so that you can learn more about what's working on your website. So form tracking is one of the most common conversion you have to track. So how do you do that? The easy URL. And then if it does, you can go into Google Analytics and set up a goal for to get to that confirmation URL is no index. That was a complete. So that's the easy way. That doesn't work for. So you may have to do it another way, which is through tag manager. Sorry, that is not the form that the slide that I was looking for, this one. Actually, I'll go back to this first. So form fills the easy way. Thank you, Paige, confirmation URL. E-commerce tracking is another thing you definitely want to track. And the easy way to do that with e-commerce tracking means it really gave money. There was a transaction and revenue. Easy way in this world, there is a plug-in for WooCommerce, the enhanced e-commerce tracking plug-in, take care of that for you. That's the really easy way. So advanced ways that you can't just simply redirect to a thank-you URL or for e-commerce tracking where you can't just simply use the visit these URLs here. Basically, both of them use Google Tag Manager to complete those goals. But they're a lot more complicated than the first two options. So if you can, on a form, redirect it to a thank-you URL, set up your e-commerce extension for e-commerce. If you can use the WooCommerce extension, just do that and be done. But if you have to, those are links that you can consult. All right, so there may be other actions that you want to track that aren't true conversions, but are very important actions. And that are part of convert and become a lead. What you want to use to track those actions is event tracking. So event tracking can be used to track pretty much anything that's not already tracked by default analytics, such as video views. You can use for YouTube and there's instructions if someone would know whether they paused the video or played the video all the way through and so on. Clicks on mail to call links or outbound links, actions that aren't tracked by default by Google Analytics. But you can set up with n clicks on images or other elements, just really anything else. And knowing if they clicked, traveled from one page to another within your site. But it doesn't tell you which page they clicked or if they clicked and went off. So that's very interesting information about event tracking. But again, those aren't conversion leads. So I recommend those actions be tracked as events and actual conversions or as goals or conversions. All right, last but not least, this firehose information. How to segment your data to answer your questions. All right, my favorite is a very simple thing called second name, but it's a simple thing. It's basically, well, so here's a use case for it. If I'm looking, and this actually happened, I was making these slides, I was looking at our data and I'm like, hmm, our careers page is one of our top most popular landing pages. I wonder where all the traffic is coming from to that page. So I wanted to know my traffic sources. Not from my whole site, but just that page. So I clicked into that page, drilled down to that page. And by default, it didn't tell me the second column here. But secondary dimensions, a quick nickname or trick you can do is it adds a secondary column to the report that you're looking at to break down the data further from what you're already looking at. So you've got your careers page that I drilled into already, and then this dropdown that says secondary dimension is at the top of pretty much every report you're looking at in Google Analytics. It's secondary dimension, it adds a secondary column, and you pick what you want to break it down by. So I said source medium of the traffic and the type of the traffic. And so boom, boom, like to where the traffic was coming from to that page by adding a secondary column. That's my favorite quick and dirty trick for segmenting data to answer a question on the fly very quickly. But sometimes you may need to look at a whole variety of different reports, but still for a single thing. So if you need to look at all the reports that are in Google Analytics, but through a lens, like just a certain type of traffic, just a certain region, just a certain section of the site, but you want to be curious about all of it for just that type. Custom segments is really handy for that. So that allows you to view all of the filtered lens that you set up. So for example, again with our career section, I can create a segment to view activity on our careers pages through all the different kinds of reports that are in there. But I don't want to see the whole site's stats. I just want to see the stats for the careers section on all the different reports. So to do that, I create a custom segment. So I give it a name at the top. Well, first of all, I hit Add Segment. So you'll see this also at the top of pretty much every report is that drop down type thing there that will typically say all users, but you can hit Add Segment and create a new segment. And so I gave it a name, career section of site, and then you tell it under conditions what you want to filter it by, what do you want that lens to be that you're going to look at all the reports through. So I said filter by page URL continue career. And then I'm able to see any report on the whole Google Analytics through that lens of just people who went to the careers section, any careers page, but now those are the metrics that I'm looking at and nothing else is in there. Again, you can do that for a certain region, certain browser, certain anything, anything you want to just filter it down to, you create a custom segment, apply the segment, look at all the reports through that segment. And then you can do, so if I wanted to compare users of the careers section of the site to users of the resource, I can create those two segments and put them with the whole Google PageBeat algorithm update things. We've been making segments for US mobile traffic and US desktop traffic for clients that want to measure the page speed of US users, mobile versus desktop. And then we can look at all reports through those two lenses at the same time. Pretty cool. But custom segments, you have to apply them every time you go in or remember to take them off to remember that you're looking at things through a very off, so they're a temporary lens that you put on to look at things through and you have to remember to take them off or put them on again. If you're using the same custom segment, you're putting it on all the time, you may want to make a custom report instead. Custom reports are great for slicing and dicing data in a way that answers your specific questions in your specific way. So under the custom tab, which is on the left menu column, go to custom reports and create a custom report, give it a name and select what you want to be on the report. Now, one thing that's kind of confusing, dimensions versus metrics. And when you try to put it in there or you can't put a metric there, the easy way to remember what dimensions, basically the thing that you want to think, what do I want in the first, so hopefully that helps you demystify language and any issues you may run in building a custom report. Dimension first column, metric on columns. And then filters are whatever you want to narrow the traffic, so I want just organic traffic, I want just paid traffic that whatever you want it to just show you, that would be the filter. And custom reports are pretty, like standard reports, they can be scheduled to move out to you automatically, so you don't have to go in and look at them all the time. So that's when it comes in handy. All right, last way of doing data change. So, similar to the custom reports that we just talked about, quicker way of seeing a lot of little snippets at the same time, you can build a custom dashboard. So it's great for like quick checking on things, just kind of quick overviews of a variety of hand-picked metrics that may not be on the same report elsewhere in Google Analytics. Custom dashboards, you can start with a, again, they're in the customization section. So on the left hand column, go to customizations, custom dashboards, you can start with a blank, or there's this thing called the solutions gallery for Google Analytics that has a lot of pre-built dashboards that are pretty easy to edit them. So that's, typically there's probably one kind of simple, go browse through there and see if there's a dashboard close enough to what you need, and then just make widgets for whatever metric you're curious about and just build your little squares into your dashboard that will allow you to quickly check in on a variety of things. All right, so to summarize, typically turn data into information to me, answer questions, firehose a lot of different ones to you, I know that was quick, that was a lot. I am gonna go to the happiness bar and this, but I think we have a few minutes for, five minutes for questions now. Sure, so the question for those who can hear about sharing, so if you create a custom dashboard, custom segment and custom report, how do you share it with others? So certain things are tied to your account and certain things are tied, most of the things we talked about are tied to your account though. So if you have access to a client's property using your account, and they have access to property using their account, if you create, for example, a custom segment, and that won't automatically be in their account, but you can share it with them, they actually just have to import it. So when you go to the customization section where you made it in the first place, there'll be a share URL, gives you a, or share button, sorry, gives you a URL to send to them to import the custom thing that you made, and then it's in their account as well. So different things are tied to different levels, so check out the documentation for exactly what's tied to what, but custom reports and custom segments are two things that are tied to the account level. Dashboards off the top of my head, I'm actually blanking on that. I think it's also the account level, but double check their documentation to be sure. We haven't shared those as much as we do the segments in the report. Excellent questions. Okay, for those who couldn't hear the questions, we're about, where do you go for additional training to go really in depth with all these things and whether to implement Google Analytics Code directly or through Google Tag Manager. So first of all, the training, there's a lot of resources out there. I mean, for quick setups of a single thing, their Google Analytics own documentation is pretty good. I put a lot of links in there to that. They also though have the Google Analytics Academy, so you can watch videos like it's an actual course that Google themselves that puts out for getting trained on Google Analytics. And there's a certification you can take too, which is actually, I think, a good learning experience, even if you don't need to be certified in Google Analytics. Go, it's like an open book test. So to just go through that certification practice with the open book thing, it's pretty educational. And then of course, there's online courses everywhere, but I usually tell people to start with this straight from Google resources. And then as far as implementing the code directly or through Tag Manager, Tag Manager is not easy or intuitive to learn, but if someone is comfortable with the scripts for a page beat up to me, slightly better to inject a hundred party scripts with Tag Manager, if you can. But it's a negligible, I don't wanna say negligible difference, but it's not a huge difference. So if you have to put it in the header. Yes, there is WordPress plugins that will help you set up Tag Manager. There's one in particular, Tom Duracell. It looks like Duracell, but it's not Duracell. There's a Google Tag Manager plugin by Tom Duracell something. I think, yeah, maybe one more question, okay? Sorry, I didn't catch all of that. A domain that forwards to another domain, like automatically redirects. Okay, so if you have one URL that automatically redirects to another URL, you don't need Google Analytics code on both because essentially no user ever actually visits the first one. So you really would just be tracking everything on the second one. Oh, it should add it to the referral exclusion list. I believe if it automatically redirects, it actually won't show up and you won't need to do that. Certainly double check on me and look on that because I haven't dealt with that that much. But I'm pretty sure it doesn't actually show up as a referral source during a 301 redirect. So I don't think you would have to. But again, preemptively, it's always a good idea to add things there that you know you don't want counted or that sessions you want it unified. So you could do it as a preemptive measure, but I don't think you have to. How do you see search keywords? Excellent question. You kind of can't anymore, unfortunately, not in Google Analytics. So several years ago, Google for reasons they claim were to do with privacy and security, they're totally debatable. Anyway, they took the keyword data. So keywords from search engines that were sending traffic, which keywords were people using to send traffic to you. They took that data and anonymized most of it into a bucket that just says not provided. So the keywords report's still in there, but you won't see much in it. It just attributes everything to not provided. But there's another tool that Google puts out called Search Console, formerly known as Webmaster Tools. I know, I know of where they can give it to you there and not there. Yeah, so there's a lot of background and conspiracy theories about that, but unfortunately that's the way it is as of today. So that's all the time I have right here. I will go to the Happiness Bar and answer any other questions anyone has. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope this was helpful. Thank you. Thank you.