Hosted by MCN Data & Insights SIG co-chair, Elena Villaespesa, this hangout is an introduction to Google Analytics. Brian Alpert, Web Analyst at the Smithsonian will join Elena and show you how to get a handle on this important analytical tool.   Topics covered:  Introduction to digital analytics  Navigating Google Analytics reports  Setting goals and targets  Google Analytics features Segmentation  Custom reports  Event tracking Views and filters  Dashboards  Resources & tools  Q&A Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQDCWS4bye4

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Introduction to Google Analytics
MCN SIG Data & Insights
Brian Alpert (@balpert) & Elena Villaespesa (@elenustika)

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Our Workshop Today
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• Introduction to digital analytics
• Navigating Google Analytics reports
• Setting goals and targets
• Google Analytics features
– Segmentation
– Custom reports
– Event tracking
– Views and filters
– Dashboards
– Resources & tools
• Q&A

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Introduction to digital analytics

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Search Engines
SEO
SEM (PPCcampaigns)
Optimization
Referring sites
Usual
Unusual
Trends/Insights
Createrelationships
Direct / Other
Email
Banners
Audience
Visits/Sessions
Demographics
Behaviour(time onsite, new
vs. returning,bouncerate,
loyalty, recency, browser,
mobile…)
Segmentation
Where are they comingfrom?Who they are? What are they visiting?
Content
Pageviews
Toppages, key areas,promopanel
success,click path,internal
search…
Test, customise
How are they converting/engaging?
Conversion(shop,tickets,membership,
donations…)
Email subscription
Comments
Sharingcontent
Downloads
Registration
Optimiseprocesses(funnels,page
optimisation)
What can wedo with Google Analytics?

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GA reports – User interface

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GA reports – Metrics
Users (Visitors) - measures the number of unique users that visit your site during a
certain time period. This metric is most commonly used to understand the overall size
of your audience.
Sessions (Visits) - are defined as a period of consecutive activity by the same user.
By default, in Google Analytics, a session persists until a user stops interacting with
the site for 30 minutes.
Average session duration - The time an average user spends on site in a given time
period. This is calculated as total time on site/sessions, where time on site for a
session is calculated by the time difference between when the first and last hits of the
session.
Average Pages/Session - The average number of website pages viewed by a user in
one session.
Bounce rate - A bounce is a one hit session. Bounce rate is simply the percentage of
all sessions that bounce.

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GA reports – Audience

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GA reports – Acquisition

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GA reports – Behavior

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GA reports – Conversions

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GA reports – Real time

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Universal Analytics
• Universal Analytics is the latest version of Google Analytics. It
replaces the asynchronous version (classic analytics)
• New features are only being developed for the new version
(Enhanced ecommerce, integrations of offline transactions, users
tracking across devices, new options for custom dimensions…)
• Google will disconnect the classic analytics but the date has not been
announced yet.
• To upgrade:
– Recommendation: use Google Tag Manager and run both codes in
parallel
– Change the GA code
– Update ecommerce, event tracking
Universal Analytics upgrade center
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/upgrade/#upgrade-guides

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Google Tag Assistant

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Web analytics is often about:
“So What?”
Getty Images

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What web analytics is really about:

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Your goal: use data to tell a story
 What was happening.
 What it meant.
 What you did.
 What’s happening
now.
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forbes.com

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There is a systematic, step-by-step process
 Articulate your program’s goals.
 Decide strategies to achieve
those goals.
 Decide tactics to pursue the
strategies.
 Decide what and how to measure
to validate the tactics.
 Benchmark to get a sense of
what’s normal.
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homedit.com

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Articulate specific goals
 Express what you’re trying to
accomplish.
 Make high-level goals more
specific:
 “Increase influence” - too broad.
 “Become the definitive source on
Smithsonian history” - more specific.
 Specificity makes it easier to
identify strategies and tactics.
 Not too many!
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It’s a Wonderful Life
Start the conversation! Articulate
goals & next steps on your own;
work with management to finalize.

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Determine strategies & tactics
 Strategies – the plans you make to achieve the goals.
 Employing social media is a strategy.
 Tactics – the things you do to advance the strategy.
 Producing a specific type of content is a tactic.
 Individual channels (facebook, twitter) are tactics.
 Per the example:
 Goal: “Become the definitive source on Smithsonian history.”
 Strategy: Increase engagement with history of the Smithsonian
content.
 Tactic: Make SI-history content more findable and measureable.
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Decide how to measure your tactics
 Choose measurements to learn
if your tactics are succeeding.
 Choose a few measurements.
 Trend them over time.
 Per the example:
 Strategy: increase engagement with
SI history website content.
 Tactic: make website history
content more findable /
measureable.
 Make a “history-content” segment
and measure for engagement:
 Visit frequency
 Visit depth
 Bounce rate
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History-
related visits
All
visits
“Deep history visits” were 94% higher!

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You can’t set targets w/o benchmarks
 You need at least six months of
data.
 Data is seasonal.
 Depends on your traffic.
 Balance targets with factors
beyond your control:
 Are the improvements you’re
seeking difficult to achieve?
 How much resources will you have
to implement tactics?
Drinks Enthusiast

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Keep it simple!
 Don’t do too much!
 Minimize the number of
measurements.
 If they turn-out to be
inconclusive, change up.
 It’s an ongoing process!
arvinddevalia.com

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 No actionable data
 Sessions (previously Visits)
 Users (previously Visitors)
 Pages (a.k.a. Pageviews)
 Establish scope / context.
 Measure growth / acquisition.
 You can’t improve your site by
measuring these.
 Reporting them out of context can be
misleading.
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Satisfy your boss!
The inevitability of “Quantity of Stuff”
Source: Occam's Razor
“All data in
aggregate is crap.”

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 AAA wanted to make their
content more accessible to
younger students.
 They worked with Wikipedia
to expand their offerings.
 We compared segments of
Wikipedia visitors to other
visitors.
 Wiki-referred visitors were
increasingly less likely to
(need to) visit the AAA site
many times.
 This contrasts with the stable
trend of all visits.
All visits, high
frequency
Wikipedia visits,
high frequency
Validation!
Archives ofAmericanArt Wikipedia Case Study

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Here is the bottom line!
 Your measurements validate your
tactics (or not).
 To work the process and improve
your site, you need meaningful data:
 Engagement metrics
 Segments
 Goal completion / Conversion rates
 A-B tests
 Qualitative data (surveys)
 If your goal is purely audience
acquisition, you can use “quantity-of-
stuff” metrics to tell your story.
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NY Daily News

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GA features

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Improve your program!
Segmentation: GA’s most powerful feature?
 Analyze subsets of traffic.
 Search engine visits
 Social media visits
 Demographics
 Import expert-made
segments from the “Gallery”!
 Google Blog
 Kissmetrics Overview
 Examples (Cutroni)
 Examples (Kaushik)
Segments are accessed
from this pull-down arrow.

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User segments are a big step forward
 “A user is the tool’s best-guess of an
anonymous person.”
 User segments represent all data
associated with a user.
 I.E., all session data the user generated
during the timeframe.
 Built-in segments:
 Single-visit users
 Multi-visit users
 Create your own:
 "Users in Massachusetts who spent > $100." User segment: facebook
mobile users who stayed
>30 seconds.

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There are various types of User Segments
 Under
 Demographics
 Traffic Sources
 Ecommerce
 Conditions
 Sequences
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 Create your own reports.
 Import expert-made
custom reports from the
“Gallery”!
 Reports can be scheduled
for delivery via email.
 Create and manage Custom
Reports (Google)
 12 Awesome Custom Reports
Created by the Experts
(Kissmetrics)
 3 Awesome, Downloadable,
Custom Web Analytics Reports
(Kaushik)
 5 Google Analytics Custom Reports
FTW! (Kaushik)
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Create and access
Custom Reports from
the ‘Customization’ tab.
Improve your program!
Custom Reports can save you time & effort
Careful! Custom Reports make it easier to
mismatch dimensions and metrics!

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 More sophisticated Goals typically involve creating “Events”:
 External links
 Sign-ups, form submissions
 Downloads
 Many types of conversion goals
 To use Events:
 Define and categorize your events.
 Configure and add the javascript code, usually right in the link (not always).
 Many social-share widgets automatically add Events.
 Google Analytics Event Organizer (Michelle Herman)
 The Complete Google Analytics Event Tracking Guide Plus 10 Amazing
Examples (old code, good examples)
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Improve your program!
‘Event Tracking’ is super-important

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Views (profiles) - Filtering your traffic
- Unfiltered
- Main profile
- Main profile showing full URLs (useful for microsites,
subdomains)
- Specific website section (e.g. Online Collection, Blog,
Visit, microsite…)
- Users using your website at the museum (filter via IP
address of the Wi-Fi)
- Mobile, Tablet, Desktop traffic
- SEO (filter organic traffic only)

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 Create a view that has no
filtering of any kind.
 Leave it alone – it is protection
against unintended
consequences.
 GA filters are powerful, but
irrevocable – if your data is
hosed by a bad or misapplied
filter you are out of luck.
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Marquette Educator
An add’l ‘playground’ view is
a good idea too, to test those
new filters (and anything else)
You need an unfiltered backup view

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Filter – IP address (eg. Exclude internal
traffic, Wi-Fi at the museum…)
What is my IP address?
GA Create an IP address filter: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034840?hl=en

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Filter – Website section
Example: Online collection http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection

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Filter – Mobile traffic

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Building a dashboard
• Selection of metrics
• Type of dashboard: strategic, tactical, operational
• Automation and update process
• Share options (internal / external dashboard)
• Frequency of updates (real time, weekly, monthly, snapshot of the
year)
• Data sources (Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics,
Surveys…)
• API available?
• Type of widgets (number, graphs, text, real time feed, embeds…)
• User interface
• Design and brand

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Google Analytics dashboards
Examples: Overview, Ecommerce, Mobile, Social Media,
SEO, PPC, Content, Online Collection, Real Time
dashboard

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How to create a GA dashboard

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Adding widgets

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Adding widgets from the GA reports

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Google Analytics Solutions Gallery

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Share your dashboard
Share the template or give access
to the whole team > Shared
dashboards
Schedule emails to send the
dashboard in PDF format

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Resources & tools
 Google Analytics Academy
 Google Analytics Blog
 Absolute Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics (moz.com)
 Avinash Kaushik’s “Occam’s Razor”
 Analytics Talk (Justin Cutroni)
 Cardinal Path Training
 Kissmetrics
 Lunametrics blog
 Lunametrics Training
 Universal Analytics Upgrade Guide
 Supermetrics Data Grabber
 Automate Analytics (Supermetrics) Google Group
 Analytics Edge
 Discover the Google Analytics Platform (advanced tools)
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Dashboard and data visualization tools
• Data wrapper
• Google charts
• Raw
• Picktochart
• Canva
• Infogram
• Venngage
• Easelly
• Google Analytics apps
• Tableau
• Ducksboard
• Geckoboard
• Chartio
• Dash This
• Silk
• Power BI

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Google Tag Manager
• Tags: Google Analytics, third party tags, custom
html tags
• Trigger: when and where to activate the tag (e.g.
PDF download, purchase a product, share on
social media)
• Variables: information obtained from the web
page (e.g. URL, PDF clicked, element clicked,
page shared…)

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Omnibug: web metrics debugging tool

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Google’s “Analytics Academy”
 Free video-based courses
 Digital Analytics
Fundamentals
 Google Analytics Platform
Principles
 Ecommerce Analytics: From
Data to Decisions
 Mobile App Analytics
Fundamentals
 Google Tag Manager
Fundamentals
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analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com

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Boston Dynamics
Automation

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Supermetrics
 Commercial Excel add-on.
 Easy-to-use and customize.
 Exceptional charting capabilities.
 Schedule reports to run
automatically.
 14 days free.
 $348 per year.
 Limited documentation and
support.
 Free version for Google
Sheets now available.
http://supermetrics.com

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Supermetrics Custom Dashboard
 The two spreadsheets work
together.
 ‘Engagement’ oriented metrics
 Visit Frequency
 Visit Length
 Visit Depth
 New vs. Returning Visits
 Bounce Rate
 Conversion Rate
 Search Engines
 A foundation to make data
actionable
 “Key Trends and Insights”
 “Impact on Site/Museum”
 “Steps Being Taken”
The easily updated, trended data is
what makes the dashboard powerful.

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All Visits data tells a nice story...
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Minimal
frequency group
(purple)
downward trend
indicates
improving content
engagement
High frequency
group (blue)
upward trend
indicates same
Impact of this Data on the Site or Program
• This good-looking chart may indicate high content engagement and/or perceived value
• This data may correlate to increasing conversion behaviors
Acting on this Data
• Identify moderate and high loyalty pages as a means of duplicating, or improving others
• Examining conversion behaviors of these segments may yield add'l insights
• Correlating high bounce rate pages to one-time visits may yield add'l insights
• Test different content types in an attempt to move 'minimal' visitors into 'moderate' group
Key Trends
and Insights

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This Impact of this Data on the Site or Program
• Organic search listings are driving poorly-targeted traffic
• Will result in decreased organic search performance over time
Acting on this Data
• Refocus title tags, meta-description tags and page content for important pages
• Perform link analysis to see where other SEO improvements can be made
Minimal
frequency group
upward trend
indicates organic
listings are not
appropriately
targeted
Moderate
frequency group
downward trend
indicates same
High frequency
group trending
slightly downward,
in contrast to
previous chart’s
upward slope
Key Trends
and Insights
…But applying segmentation tells a different story

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Google Sheets Spreadsheet Add-on
 Create (simple) dashboards
and visualizations.
 Being well-versed in Google
Sheets’ data manipulation
features helps a lot.
 Schedule reports to run
automatically.
 Embed visualizations on
websites with automatic
refresh!
 Introductory video
 ‘Building a Dashboard’ video
 Google Group
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Google Sheets spreadsheet add-on

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Analytics Edge Excel Add-on
 Wizard-driven interface is clean
and (relatively) intuitive.
 Auto-refresh and schedule reports.
 Import data from text files,
worksheets or other workbooks
 Support via online community.
 Free and paid versions:
 Free Social Shares connector.
 More features - $6/month.
 Optional connectors - $4/month.
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http://www.analyticsedge.com

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Questions?

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Thanks!
 @balpert
 @elenustika