What information will you receive with Google Analytics?
The most important section in Google Analytics is the “Reports” section. These are the mines of knowledge about your website. So what reports will you find and what information will you get?
- Real Time – how many people are currently on your website, who they are and what they are currently doing on your website, among others, on what subpages they are and whether they are doing valuable actions for you;
- Recipients – details about who people are visiting your website. This section includes demographic indicators such as age, gender, language or location, but also information on which devices your users use and what interests they have;
- Collection – knowledge of the users from where they come to your website together with detailed data on the quality of traffic from a given channel. Here you will find all information about, for example, Google Ads or Facebook Ads paid campaigns, but also data about organic Google search results;
- Maintenance – you already know who your recipients are, how they got to you, so it's time to focus on what they do on your website. With the Behavior report you will gain knowledge about how users explore your website or how much time they spend on it.
- Conversions Every web has a purpose. In most cases the most important conversions will be contact with the company or purchase of the product. In the conversion section you define what is most important to you and you can monitor which users are most eager to do the desired actions on the site.
Since you already know that having a Google Analytics account is important, it is time to set it up and set it up. Below you will find instructions on what to do step by step to properly collect all the above data.
How do I install Google Analytics code?
In order to collect all traffic information on your website, you must implement on your website the code related to your Google Analytics account. When an account is established, your unique code can be found in the Administration -> Tracking Information -> Tracking Code.
The given code should be implemented on the web page using one of two options:
- Paste the code at the beginning in the item < HEAD> on each page you want to follow.
- Code implementation with Google Tag Manager. One step at a time, you will find the instructions Here. (a Google Tag Manager account is worth to set up at the very beginning, it can be useful for further GA configuration, for example, targets).
Basic data
The first step in configuring a new Google Analytics account is to set the following items:
- Access of other users to the account – if you are not the only Google Analytics account user – add all people who should have access to it. Such people will be: decision-makers in the company, marketers and sellers. If you run a single business, add an additional email address with admin settings in case you lose access to the main mail.
Account access is set in the Administration section -> Account users management.
- Currency – the US Dollar ($) currency is set on each GA account by default. If you operate in another currency (sell products or spend money on advertising) change currency. This will make it easier for you to manage expenses and/or revenues.
The currency change is in the Administration -> view settings section. - Time zone – make sure the time zone on your account is right. The incorrect zone may result in incorrect conclusions, for example, about what times of the day or in what days users are willing to use your website. In particular, this is a serious problem when you generate traffic mainly from Poland and the time zone is American.
The currency change is in the Administration -> view settings section. - E-commerce Configuration* – if you are running an online store, it is your responsibility to enable the e-commerce configuration and include improved e-commerce reporting. In this way you will have GA data on the effectiveness of selling all your products.
The configuration of e-commerce can be found in the Administration section -> Setting e-commerce.
* Configure this option only if you sell products or services on your website in the e-commerce model.
How to set goals (conversions)?
If you have established a new Google Analytics account, it is absolutely a priority to determine what interactions users have to interact with you. Such actions are called conversions, and in Google Analytics they are referred to as targets.
Conversions are divided into:
- macro-conversions – these are the most important actions of the user on the site, most often leading to purchase or contact with the company. Examples of such macro-conversions are:
- micro-conversions – also valuable to you, however, not leading directly to the acquisition of the customer.
The objectives can be found in the Administration -> Goals section, and by clicking on “plusik” you can add the appropriate targets for your site. However, keep in mind that Google Analytics limits the number of goals created to max. 20 positions.
To set the target, you can use the default Google Analytics templates or define conversion yourself using the option “non-standard target”.
If the target you want to set is not in the template proposals or is not the destination, duration or number of pages per session, then you must use Google Tag Manager's help and first define events. This option is most often used when you want to set goals such as: click or copy contact details, click individual buttons on the page or show information about successful completion of the form (if there is no thank you page).
Lists of recipients, i.e. so-called remarketing lists
The second important issue when configuring a new Google Analytics account is to create a list of recipients, i.e. so-called remarketing lists.
It happens very often that users enter the website, but do not immediately make a purchasing decision. Something may prevent them from finalizing, for example, orders or they will want to think longer. In this case, Remarketing Letters come with help. These lists collect cookies from any user who enters the website, so that you can display ads to such users with Google Ads to encourage you to visit your website again. There is a very good chance that a user who has already been on your website and knows your brand will be much more inclined to return and final purchase or contact than a user who has first contact with your brand.
Thanks to the appropriate segmentation of remarketing lists, you can also divide users because of, for example, what products they watched, what subpages they visited or what demographic data they present.
Note, however, that remarketing lists will only collect user data from the moment they are created (the lists do not work backwards), so it is important to create lists as soon as possible after the Google Analytics account is established.
Remarketing lists may include users between 1 day and 540 days. This means that if you set a remarketing list with 540 Days Duration Time – the list will include users who visited the site even 1,5 years earlier.
Examples of remarketing lists you can implement on your Google Analytics account:
Connected accounts
Thanks to the implementation of GA code, you know what happens on your website. However, Google Analytics offers even more. If you use other tools or platforms like e.g. Google Ads, AdSense or Search Console, you can enable the automatic data transfer of these tools to Google Analytics by clicking on the button.
In this way, you will aggregate more data in one place and learn from it.
Enter the Administration -> Service Connection -> All services and configure the connection between all services you use.
You can split your Google Analytics account into several views. Each view can aggregate different movements, so you can easily analyze a specific data clipping without having to filter them every time you use any report. The most basic setting is to create 3 data views:
- Main View – the view you use every day and this is your first data view you start to configure after creating an account.
- Security View – copy of the main view. It is created so that when any potential errors occur in the data in the main view, you can verify them in the security view, being sure that the data in this view is 100% correct.
- Clear View – a view that contains no settings. It's a sight you can create right away, but you don't have to. If you need to configure a new view, it takes no more than a few dozen seconds to create such a view.
You have the main view ready immediately and you use it as soon as you have created an account. You can create a security view using the “copy data view” option. This option can be found in the Administration -> View Settings -> Copy the screen view. In turn, you can create a clean view in the Administration section by clicking the blue button “Create a Data View”, above the View Settings (screen).
Data filters
Data filters are used to modify and restrict data in data views. This allows you to see only a moving section of interest in a specified data view, without the need to filter the specified data every time. What filters you can create is very clear about Google Support:
- Exclude/only take into account traffic from the domain of an Internet service provider: this filter is used to exclude/include only visits from a given domain, e.g. from the domain of a particular Internet service provider or a corporate network.
- Exclude/include only traffic from IP addresses: this filter is used to exclude/include only clicks from a specified source IP address.
- Exclude/consider only movement to subdirectories: this filter is used to exclude/include only movement to a specific subdirectories (e.g. /motorcycles or /help/questions).
- Exclude/include only the move to host name: this filter is used to exclude/include only the move to a specific host name (e.g. sales.example.com or help.example.com).
For more information on filter actions, please refer to Here.
During the basic configuration of the new Google Analytics account, it is recommended to configure at least two filters:
- Internal IP Filter – thanks to it you will only see movement coming from “outside”. When setting up such a filter, enter the IP address of the company network, employee network or private home network. The following example:
- Host Filter – very often Google Analytics receives spam traffic, coming from robot activities. To make sure that these actions do not affect the conclusions you draw – create a host filter that will only include movement from your domain.
All filters are set in the Administration -> Filters section. But remember the two principles:
- Filters can't be undone. If you set the filter once – your data will be modified by it forever.
- The filter can start to work up to 24 hours after its setting, therefore, if the data does not filter immediately. Wait a minute. 1 day.
Exclusions of return sites
This is a very important section and unfortunately forgotten by many Google Analytics users. Sending sites are nothing but the sources of visits you see in the Google Analytics Acquisition section. If, for example, a link to your website appears on the website.a.com, in this section the source of traffic will be web.a.com.
However, it often happens that the company owns its subdomain or is an online store. In such situations, when a user moves from one site to another, Google Analytics treats each site as a separate session and assigns the source to the page from which the user came. Imagine the situation that you have an online store and the purchase path looks like this:
In this case, when you return to the website (step 3) the source will be the bank's website, and the session will be counted as new. In this way you will not know, for example, the movement from which the original source (e.g. Google Ads, direct, organic, etc.) generates a valuable move, because before the conversion, the session is “cut off”.
The exclusions of return sites come with help. In the Administration – Tracking Information section -> List of exclusions of return sites you can enter all of the return sites that Google Analytics will ignore. Most often these are the URLs of bank sites, payment gateways, email and company subdomains.
Non-standard alerts
Google Analytics is a database of knowledge about your website. With regular analysis of even basic reports in the tool, you can not only come to conclusions of optimization website or marketing activities, but also quickly diagnose errors. If you do not enter your website every day – it may turn out that due to, for example, some server error or hosting, your website is not visible to users. In case of paid actions launched, for example. Google Ads or Facebook Ads can cause the advertising budget to be spent on “empty clicks” because ads redirect the user to a website that does not work.
In order to avoid such a situation, it is recommended to create custom alerts, i.e. automatic rules, which will check certain parameters on the website and inform you by email in case of disturbing information. With the first configuration of a new Google Analytics account, it is worth creating custom alerts such as:
1. Number of sessions less than 1
2. Average time spent on page less than 5 seconds
3. Rejection rate greater than 99%
This way you will make sure that even if you do not look at the website regularly – you are sure that everything works correctly. Of course, you can create more alerts depending on your needs. All custom alerts create in the Administration section -> Custom alerts.
If you are configuring your new Google Analytics account for the first time, let me know in your comment on how it went!
