GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE MODASSIC MARKETING

Table of Contents

Intro - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 04 Setting Up Google Analytics - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 05 Excluding Traffic From Your IP - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 06 Audience - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 07 Acquisition - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 09 Behavior - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 11 Goals - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 13 Conclusion - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 14

THANKS! Thanks for downloading this guide to Google Analytics. As marketers we rely on data to guide strategy and show us what is working and, most importantly, what isn’t. While we now have access to more data than ever, to properly utilize that information you have to be able to gain actionable insight from the data. We hope this guide will at least get you headed in that direction. Enjoy! RYAN SHORT // Founder of MODassic

GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

Insight, not just data Google Analytics can be a powerful tool for marketers who want to analyze their website in order to better understand their marketing efforts. It offers a platform that can help you recognize where your traffic is coming from, how people interact with your website, what parts of your site capture their attention, and what elements leave something to be desired. Used efficiently, Google Analytics provides powerful insights that can help you grow your audience. But it’s not just about the data, it’s about how you apply it. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data that Google Analytics provides, therefore the next step isn’t always obvious. For this reason, many marketers become lost. They have the information they need, but they get too wrapped up in the numbers to know how to turn it into something tangible. If you can’t make sense of the information it provides and create actionable insight, Google Analytics is useless. To gain that insight this guide covers the main four sections in Google Analytics and what you should look for in each section.

Audience

Acquisition

The Audience section provides reports that

The Acquisition section shows you where your

detail the characteristics of your website’s

site is traffic is coming from.

users.

Behavior

Goals

The Behavior section reports on how your site

Goals allow you to track your website’s ability to

users are behaving, like what pages they visit

drive conversions for your business.

and how long they stay there. modassicmarketing.com

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

Setting up Google Analytics To sign up for a free Google Analytics Account, go to google.com/analytics. Setting up your account is easy, and should only take a few minutes. If you already have an account, great! Make sure you have an Edit permission and log in. From there, you’ll need to set up a property–that tells Google what website(s) to track. Select the Admin tab at the top of the page. Under the Account dropdown, select the account to which you want to add the property. In the Property column, select Create new property from the dropdown menu, and choose Website. Then, enter the Website name. It’s helpful to use a descriptive name if you plan on having several properties. Next, enter the URL. Select an Industry Category, and then the Reporting Time Zone. Click Get Tracking ID and you’re ready to move on.

Setting up the tracking code Now that you’ve told Google what you want it to track, you need to do some work on your end. At this point, you’ll need to have access to your website’s source code, or at least be able to work with your developer to get Google Analytics set up. Select the Admin tab again. Select the Account you want to use and the correct Property. Next, click Tracking Info > Tracking Code. Your code snippet will appear, and you’ll want to copy and paste it into the source code of every page you want to track. There are some nuances to this, though, depending on how your website is set up, so it may be helpful to view Google’s explanation or work with your developer. modassicmarketing.com

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

Exclude traffic from your office It’s wise to make sure the data you’re viewing is clean. This means excluding all traffic from your office’s IP address from Google Analytics. By excluding all internal traffic, you can ensure your data isn’t skewed by the traffic from your office to your company’s website. These visits can alter organic and direct percentages, as well as important metrics, such as users and bounce rate.

Not sure what your IP address is? You can simply google “What is my IP” to find out.

How to create a filter to exclude internal traffic To create a filter that excludes internal traffic, begin by selecting the Admin tab at the top. In the Admin view, under the column labeled Account click on All Filters. Clicking on the red +Add Filter button will bring up new filter options. Give the filter a descriptive name like “Exclude Office IP” or “Office IP Exclusion”. Next, for Filter Type, choose Predefined, then make sure the Exclude radio button is checked. Next, select traffic from the IP addresses, and from “select expression” choose that are equal to. If your office has a range of IP addresses, you may want to explore the other option to block a range of IPs. Enter your IP, select the website view to apply the filter to and click Save. You’re all set!

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

Audience Now that we’re looking at good data, navigate to the left sidebar and click on Audience. You arrive at the Overview, which shows a month of traffic by default. You can change the date range in the top right date bar to different presets or a custom date range, and also look at the distribution of traffic over time, by hours, days, weeks, or months. With the default view in days, you will likely notice some regular ups and downs, with most B2B websites taking a dip over the weekend, and if you’re looking at several months at a time you’ll likely notice some seasonality or hopefully traffic growth. Instead of looking at linear growth, we recommend comparing a period (month, quarter or year) to the same time frame the previous year. This considers seasonality and also keeps you from falling into the unrealistic trap of trying to beat yourself out every month. It’s much better to compare June of the current year to last June as that takes into account seasonality. To do this, choose a full month, then click Compare to and choose Previous year. Be sure to select previous year and not the default which is previous period as that would compare the current month to the month before it, not the same month a year ago. When comparing years we recommend shifting the days you’re comparing so that your days of the week line up.

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

Your report under the Audience section will show a lot of different metrics, but what do they all mean? Each of these data points can provide a good overview, but they don’t tell the whole story, and as you’ll see in some of the following examples, it’s necessary to dive deeper to gain that actionable insight. Users may be up, down or flat, but at this high level you aren’t going to gain any insight as to what is really going on without diving deeper. Therefore the key thing to look for in the Audience overview is big picture trends and to identify spikes or declines in traffic. If you notice a significant spike in traffic you can narrow the date range to reflect that specific day, and then look under Acquisition for sources that drove traffic that day. Was there a mention on social media or a popular website like Reddit? Use this information to understand what works well— and what doesn’t—for your business. More on Acquisition later.

Sessions

Users

The number of times visitors are actively

The number of individual visitors that

engaged on your website over a default

have tallied at least one session on your

period of 30 minutes. A single user can

site. Note a single person visiting from

have multiple sessions.

different devices can count as two users.

Pageviews

Pages per visit

The total number of pages visited. This

This the average number of pages

number should be higher than the num-

viewed during a session. This metric

ber of sessions, unless your site

speaks to visitor engagement.

consists of a single page.

Session Duration

Bounce Rate

This the average length of a visitor’s

This the percentage of visits that consist

session. Longer sessions typically mean higher engagement, but not always. In some cases a longer session could mean the user is having a hard time finding what they are looking for. modassicmarketing.com

of only one page. If a visitor has arrived and not found what they need, they may leave or “bounce” from the site. But it also could mean a visitor found what they were searching for and left. 8

GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

Acquisition After viewing the Audience Overview to get a basic big picture view, we want to dive a little deeper by going to the Acquisition tab to understand how they are getting there. That way, you can use your resources wisely and devote time and money to the channels that are most successful for you or that have the most potential. Navigate to the left sidebar and click on Acquisition, then Overview, which gives you a general rundown of the sources, or Channels, of your traffic and a breakdown of the behavior and conversion rates that those different channels lead to. However, conversion rates by channel are only shown if you have Goals set up for your account. For more information on Goals, head to page 13. Channels are set up by a series of rules that define a dimension, operator, and value. You can create custom channel groupings, but the Default Channel Grouping is a great place to start. Organic Search is traffic that comes to your site via search result on Google or another search engine, but not by clicking on a paid ad that may be displayed on a search results page. Direct traffic is defined as visits directly to your site without a referral source, like by a user entering your URL directly or clicking a bookmark link. Referral traffic comes to your site by clicking an inbound link from another site (excluding search engines). Social traffic comes to your site via a social media network. Paid Search traffic comes to your site via clicking on a PPC campaign ad on a search engine. Other Advertising traffic comes from online advertising outside the realm of search and the Display Network, like cost-per-view video advertising. Display traffic comes from banner ad display campaigns, like AdWords remarketing campaigns or other media. Email traffic comes to your site via an email link. Affiliate traffic comes from any affiliate marketing efforts you may be involved in. modassicmarketing.com

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

Looking at the Channels section of the Acquisition page is very important. While Overview gives you the basic information, Channels gives you a detailed report on your top sources of incoming traffic and how many sessions and users those channels led to in a given time, as well as the bounce rate of traffic from those channels and other useful information. For example, we had a client that came to us concerned when they saw a lot of red on their statistics on the Audience page. With this client we were focusing exclusively on organic search, so when they saw that across the board things weren’t looking good they of course were upset. However, we showed them how important it is to dive into the Acquisition section and look at traffic by channel to get the real story. Paid Search was down, of course, because they stopped doing it. But other channels, like organic search, direct traffic, and referral traffic, were up—way up! Overall traffic is important, but looking at the sources of your traffic can often provide a lot more insight. Without diving into the channels they may have incorrectly assumed that the organic search work wasn’t effective and stopped doing that as well.

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

Behavior At this point, you know how many people are visiting your site and how they are getting there. The next step is to look at their behavior once they are actually on it. On the left sidebar, click on Behavior. This section offers a few different reports that are helpful when starting with Google Analytics. Again, the first place to look is at the Overview. The Overview section will show you some general statistics about your site, like total pageviews and bounce rate, and also will list the ten pages that are performing best. The Site Content reports can give you more in depth data. The All Pages report shows you the statistics of every page on your website— pageviews, bounce rate, average time on page, etc. A good rule of thumb is to look at your pages to about number 25. This way you can see the top content on your site and know what kind of content is resonating with your visitors. This is a great way to see what pages your visitors are engaging with the most. These pages could be viewed the most beause of obvious reasons, like because it is your homepage or a key page, or it could be viewed a lot because it’s being found via search and driving traffic to the site. The following shows how you can determine the role these pages are playing.

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

The Landing Pages report can also be very helpful. It shows how visitors are entering your site, and what they do once they get there. You can view stats like sessions, new users, bounce rate, and pages per session, and it can show you how well each page is converting if you have goals enabled. The homepage is not always the front door, so it’s important to know how visitors are finding you. Think about the path the user will take if they first come to a blog post, and think about how you can use that blog post to guide them to the next step you would like them to take. That doesn’t mean put your “salesy” content on your blog, as that user is a top of the funnel visitor. Be careful not to overpitch to a customer that is just looking for useful information. Instead, think of additional top of the funnel content you could place on that page to capture the lead. Then, nurture them by introducing the company and your offerings slowly over time via automated emails as they continue to consume your great content and resources. Conversely, the Exit Pages report shows where people abandon your site. You can use this information to know which of your pages should be improved or adjusted. For example, if you have a page that is designed to capture leads, but instead it has a high exit rate (percentage of visitors who actively click away to a different site from that page) and poor conversion rate, you know something is wrong—maybe with that particular call-to-action or with the way the page is designed. Again, the thing here is to look for major spikes or drops in traffic. If a page that normally performs well suddenly drops off, try to figure out why. Or if the opposite happens, recognize what caused that change. Did you adjust the copy? Change the layout? Run a campaign? This is why consistent monitoring is necessary. Constantly learn from the information these reports provide you and note what works best for you and your visitors. modassicmarketing.com

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

Goals Google Analytics provides you with an incredible amount of information about your website and the way people interact with it. But the most valuable metrics that it can provide are those that relate to your site’s ability to drive conversions. To track these conversions you will want to set up Goals for your analytics account. There are four different types of Goals. To set up a goal, go to the Admin tab and navigate to the Account you want to use and the correct Property. In the View column, choose Goals. Click New Goal. You can create a custom goal or use a smart goal. A Destination goal treats a page view as a conversion. A Duration goal treats an amount of time spent on a page as a conversion. An Event goal treats a user interaction with your site (like a download) as a conversion. A Pages/Screen per session goal treats a user visiting at least a specified number of pages in one session as a conversion. But what should your goals be? Set up goals that make sense for your business. Perhaps that means you have a goal for when someone fills out a contact form, views a page such as a pricing page, or goes through the checkout process. It will largely depend on what you want the user to do. After you’ve set up your goals, it can be very helpful to look at your conversion rates by Channel. All traffic isn’t equal. You could be driving a ton of traffic from one channel and think you’re doing great, but in reality a channel with less traffic may have higher conversion rates, so it would be wise to instead focus more of your resources there. Remember that traffic is not the be-all and end-all of metrics. Conversion rates are far more directly related to the actual success of your business. modassicmarketing.com

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GOOGLE ANALYTICS STARTER GUIDE

Conclusion Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides the data needed to make strategic business decisions. But it can be complex and challenging to learn how to take the raw data it provides and turn it into actionable insights. In this ebook, we covered basic Google Analytics setup and interface navigation. We also covered the four essential sections to look at and reports that you should consistently monitor. But perhaps the most valuable information we have provided is how to turn that information into something meaningful for your business. By now, you should have the foundation to take on Google Analytics. If you have questions or are interested in seeing how working with an agency can help you utilize data to gain more insight and create an ROI driven marketing strategy, give MODassic a call at 214-295-5165 or visit us at

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