Introduction to Google Analytics - Bryan Phelps

Summary

In this Stukent Expert Session, Brian Phelps, CEO of Big Leap Marketing, shares insights on leveraging Google Analytics for effective digital marketing. He emphasizes the tool's core role in tracking website traffic, user demographics, and marketing campaign performance. Phelps outlines steps for setting up Google Analytics, exploring standard reports, and customizing the platform for specific business needs. He highlights the importance of tracking conversions, using site search features, creating custom segments, and setting up alerts for proactive data monitoring. The session aims to equip viewers with the knowledge to make data-driven decisions for enhancing their digital marketing strategies.

Takeaways

• 😀 Brian Phelps, CEO and founder of Big Leap, shares his expertise on Google Analytics, emphasizing its importance in digital marketing.
• 🔍 Google Analytics is a core tool for understanding website traffic, user demographics, and marketing effectiveness.
• 📈 The tool provides insights into user behavior, including popular times of website visits, geographical data, and device usage statistics.
• 📊 Real-time reports in Google Analytics offer immediate visibility into current website activity, which is valuable for live events or urgent marketing campaigns.
• 👥 Demographics reports help in understanding the age and gender distribution of website visitors, aiding in targeted marketing strategies.
• 💬 Acquisition reports reveal the sources of website traffic, indicating which channels are most effective in driving visitors.
• 📊 Behavior reports, like All Pages, show which content is most popular and how users interact with different pages on the site.
• 🚀 Site Speed reports are crucial for identifying loading times and their impact on user retention and conversion rates.
• 🛒 E-commerce integration allows tracking of transactions and revenue, providing a clear view of sales performance by traffic source.
• 🎯 Customizing Google Analytics through goals, site search, and segments enables more tailored analysis to meet specific business objectives.
• 📊 Dashboards and alerts in Google Analytics streamline the reporting process, making it easier to monitor key metrics and respond to changes quickly.

Q & A

Who is Brian Phelps and what is his role at Big Leap Marketing?

Brian Phelps is the founder and CEO of Big Leap Marketing, a digital marketing agency that focuses on organic digital marketing strategies such as SEO, online PR, and content marketing.

What is the significance of Google Analytics in digital marketing according to Brian Phelps?

Google Analytics is considered at the core of all digital marketing. It provides a wealth of data and insights that help measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts, understand user behavior on a website, and inform strategies for improvement.

What are the main areas Brian Phelps suggests focusing on when learning Google Analytics?

Brian Phelps suggests focusing on three main areas: setting up and configuring Google Analytics correctly, understanding the standard reports it offers, and learning how to customize Google Analytics for specific business needs.

How does Google Analytics help in measuring the performance of traditional advertising?

Google Analytics can help measure the performance of traditional advertising by tracking the traffic that comes back to the website from various advertising channels, such as billboards, TV, and radio, providing insights into how effective these campaigns are in driving digital presence.

What is the structure of a Google Analytics account according to the transcript?

The structure of a Google Analytics account consists of an account, which contains properties (representing websites or apps), and views (which are customized perspectives of the data within a property).

Why is it important to keep the 'All Website Data View' unfiltered in Google Analytics?

The 'All Website Data View' should remain unfiltered to maintain a raw, unaltered dataset for historical comparison. Filtering this view could result in irreversible changes to the historical data, which could skew analyses over time.

What is the purpose of creating multiple views within a Google Analytics property?

Multiple views within a Google Analytics property allow for customized perspectives of the data. This enables different stakeholders within an organization or external agencies to see the data that is most relevant to their specific needs or to filter out internal traffic for more accurate analytics.

What role does the GA tracking code play in Google Analytics?

The GA tracking code is essential as it is the code that needs to be installed on a website to enable Google Analytics to start tracking and collecting data on website visitors.

How can Google Tag Manager be an alternative to the GA tracking code?

Google Tag Manager can serve as an alternative method for implementing the Google Analytics code on a website, as well as managing other marketing-related tags, providing a more streamlined approach to tracking and analytics.

What are some of the standard reports available in Google Analytics that Brian Phelps finds useful?

Some of the standard reports Brian Phelps finds useful include the Home report for quick insights, Real-Time report for immediate traffic data, Audience report for demographic information, Acquisition report for traffic sources, Behavior report for content consumption, and Site Speed report for performance metrics.

How can custom segments in Google Analytics help in analyzing website traffic?

Custom segments in Google Analytics allow users to filter and analyze traffic data based on specific criteria, such as behavior or source, providing more targeted insights and helping to make more informed decisions about website optimization and marketing strategies.

Outlines

00:00

📈 Introduction to Google Analytics by Big Leap Marketing

Josh introduces Brian Phelps, CEO and founder of Big Leap Marketing, who is an experienced figure in the SEO industry. Brian shares his journey from self-taught web development and SEO to managing accounts in top agencies, and eventually founding Big Leap in 2008. His agency focuses on organic digital marketing, emphasizing the pivotal role of Google Analytics in digital marketing strategies. Brian outlines the importance of Google Analytics for understanding website traffic, user demographics, and marketing effectiveness, setting the stage for an in-depth discussion on leveraging this tool.

05:00

🛠 Setting Up and Configuring Google Analytics

Brian delves into the setup and configuration of Google Analytics, explaining the account hierarchy and the significance of the tracking code. He advises keeping the 'All Website Data View' unfiltered for accurate historical data and introduces the concept of views for customized data analysis. He demonstrates how to navigate Google Analytics settings, locate the tracking code, and mentions Google Tag Manager as an alternative tool for implementing tracking codes. Brian emphasizes the importance of this setup for capturing website visitor data effectively.

10:01

📊 Exploring Google Analytics Standard Reports

The presentation shifts to exploring standard reports in Google Analytics, starting with the Home report that surfaces key data points like visitor activity times, geographic distribution, and device usage. Brian highlights the utility of these insights for business operations and marketing strategies. He then discusses the Real-Time report, which provides live data on website visitors, their sources, and activities, offering immediate insights into the impact of marketing efforts or live events.

15:03

👥 Analyzing Demographics and Traffic Sources

Brian explores the Demographics report, revealing visitor profiles in terms of age and gender, and how these can inform marketing strategies. He then transitions to the Acquisition report, detailing how different traffic sources contribute to website visits, bounce rates, and conversions. This analysis underscores the value of understanding where traffic comes from and how it behaves on the website, which is crucial for optimizing marketing investments.

20:05

🔍 Enhancing Google Analytics with Customizations

The session continues with Brian discussing advanced Google Analytics features, such as tracking conversions through goals and e-commerce, which provide specific metrics on user actions and revenue generation. He also covers site search tracking, which reveals what users search for on the website, and custom segments, which allow for tailored traffic analysis. Brian introduces the concept of dashboards for streamlined reporting and alerts for monitoring significant data changes, emphasizing the transformative impact of these customizations on data-driven decision-making.

25:05

🏁 Wrapping Up and Encouraging Further Engagement

In conclusion, Brian summarizes the key steps for getting started with Google Analytics: setting up the account, familiarizing oneself with standard reports, and utilizing customizations for deeper insights. He highlights the transformative effect of Google Analytics on marketing strategies and website optimization. Brian wraps up by inviting questions and providing contact information for Big Leap Marketing, encouraging further engagement and interaction.

Keywords

💡Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, providing valuable insights into how users interact with a website. In the video, it is the central topic, as Brian Phelps discusses its importance in digital marketing and how it can provide data to help measure the effectiveness of marketing strategies and website development.

💡Digital Marketing

Digital marketing refers to the use of digital channels, such as search engines, social media, and email, to promote products or services. In the script, digital marketing is the industry in which Brian Phelps has experience and where Google Analytics plays a crucial role in tracking and analyzing the performance of marketing efforts.

💡SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank higher in search engine results, thereby increasing its visibility and traffic. The script mentions that Brian Phelps managed accounts for major SEO agencies before founding Big Leap, indicating the relevance of SEO in the context of digital marketing and the use of Google Analytics to measure SEO success.

💡Tracking Code

A tracking code is a snippet of code added to a website to enable tracking of user interactions with the site. In the video, the Google Analytics tracking code is highlighted as essential for collecting data about website visitors, which is then used to generate analytics reports.

💡Segments

Segments in Google Analytics refer to the ability to divide the website's audience into different groups based on specific criteria, such as demographic information or user behavior. The script explains how segments can be used to analyze different user groups, like organic traffic or paid traffic, to gain more targeted insights.

💡Real-Time Reporting

Real-time reporting in Google Analytics provides immediate data on website traffic and user interactions, allowing for instant monitoring of website performance. The script describes how this feature can be particularly useful for businesses to understand the impact of live events or promotions as they happen.

💡Conversion Rate

Conversion rate measures the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. In the video, Brian Phelps emphasizes the importance of tracking conversion rates by different traffic sources to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing channels.

💡E-commerce

E-commerce involves buying and selling products or services online. The script discusses how Google Analytics can be customized for e-commerce websites to track transactions and revenue, providing data on sales performance and customer purchasing behavior.

💡Customization

Customization in the context of Google Analytics refers to the ability to tailor the analytics platform to specific business needs, such as setting up goals, creating custom reports, or using custom segments. The video explains how customization allows for more relevant and actionable data to improve marketing strategies and website experiences.

💡Dashboards

Dashboards in Google Analytics are customizable interfaces that display selected data visualizations and metrics in a single view. The script mentions the creation of dashboards as a way to simplify and streamline the reporting process, making it easier for businesses to monitor key performance indicators.

💡Alerts

Alerts in Google Analytics are notifications that inform users of significant changes or predefined conditions in their website data. The video script describes setting up alerts as a proactive way to monitor website performance and quickly address any issues that may arise.

Highlights

Introduction to Brian Phelps, founder and CEO of Big Leap Marketing, with a background in SEO and digital marketing.

Big Leap Marketing focuses on organic digital marketing strategies including SEO, online PR, and content marketing.

Google Analytics is identified as a core tool in digital marketing, offering extensive data and insights.

Google Analytics can measure the effectiveness of both digital and traditional advertising.

The importance of understanding Google Analytics for web development and marketing professionals.

Explanation of Google Analytics account structure, including accounts, properties, and views.

The necessity of installing the Google Analytics tracking code on a website for data collection.

Google Tag Manager as an alternative method for implementing Google Analytics and other marketing tools.

Overview of standard Google Analytics reports, including real-time data, audience demographics, and traffic sources.

Utilizing segments in Google Analytics to analyze specific types of users or traffic.

How to use Google Analytics to understand user behavior on a website, such as bounce rates and page views.

Customizing Google Analytics through goals and e-commerce tracking for more tailored data.

Site search feature in Google Analytics to understand what users are searching for on a website.

Creating custom segments to analyze specific user groups, such as existing customers.

Building dashboards in Google Analytics for streamlined reporting and data visualization.

Setting up alerts in Google Analytics to monitor key metrics and receive notifications for significant changes.

The three steps to effectively using Google Analytics: setup, familiarization with standard reports, and customization.

Transcripts

Hi, everybody. My name is Josh, and welcome to another Stukent Expert Session.

Today, we'll be hearing from Brian Phelps, founder and CEO of Big

Leap Marketing.

Before founding Big Leap, Brian managed accounts for some of the biggest SEO

agencies in the country.

He founded Big Leap ten years ago and has grown it into one of the premier

digital marketing agencies in the U.S.

Today, he will be teaching us about Google Analytics, one of the best and most

popular web analytics tools.

Now, without further ado, Brian.

The time is yours.

Hey, everyone. Yeah, thank you for the introduction.

My name is Brian Phelps.

I'm the CEO and founder of Big Leap.

I got started in the digital marketing industry back in 2006.

I started teaching myself, you know, web development and SEO in my spare time.

And was just really in love with the industry.

And I was really excited about it.

So, I wanted to get more involved with it.

So I joined a few different agencies.

Some of the biggest agencies, SEO agencies, in the country.

And ultimately just, you know, kind of that typical story sometimes.

I wanted to do it maybe my way or try to fix some of the things that I thought, you know,

could be done better. So I started Big Leap in 2008, and we've continued

to grow from there.

About Big Leap a little bit, we're a digital marketing agency that really focuses on

organic digital marketing.

So SEO, online PR, content marketing, and things like that.

We've grown quick over the last few years, and so we've had a lot of, you know, things

we've learned over the years.

But one of the main things that we really always come back to as we work with our

clients is Google Analytics, and that's what we want to talk about today.

Google Analytics is really at the core of all digital marketing.

Of course, Google provides their free tool, Google Analytics, to use.

There's other options out there.

But by far you'll see Google Analytics pretty much everywhere you go in the digital

marketing world. So why, why does it matter?

Why analytics or Google Analytics?

And ultimately it provides you so much data and a lot of answers to the,

the things that you're going to be looking at as you are involved with, with

marketing or website development, things like that.

So if we want to know, you know, how many people are coming to my website?

Who are they? You know, how are they interacting with my website?

Those are the kinds of answers we can get from a tool like Google Analytics that

ultimately helps us measure what we're doing or what you're doing as you're marketing,

you know, a website.

And even if you're doing traditional advertising, it can really help you

understand how that's performing.

You know, the line between digital and not digital is really

disappearing in a lot of ways.

So people running billboards and TV and radio, a lot of that traffic ends

up coming back to the website.

So they're looking for ways that, how do I measure that?

And see if the advertising that we're running is helping drive

our digital presence as well.

So, once you, getting into the marketing and advertising world, or

even if you're in web development, things like that, it's good to get familiar with the

basics of Google Analytics and getting familiar with their platform.

So I'm going to walk through three different areas.

There is, of course, you know, getting started, getting the setup and configuration

done right. Once you're in there, of course, you can start to look at some of the standard

reports that they offer, which are really impressive.

And then to really take it to the next level and to get the most you can out of Google

Analytics, you need to understand how you can customize it for you and your

business or, you know, the company you work for to get the most out of it.

So when we start talking about, you know, the setup and configuration of Google

Analytics, I'll, I'll talk about two main things.

But one thing that's really good to understand is how Google Analytics

structures their, their accounts.

So, if you look at this, this image to the right, it kind of shows the structure

or hierarchy of their accounts.

So when you go in, if you go to analytics .Google.com, you...

and login with a Google account, you create your Google Analytics account.

And so you can do that.

And within there, then you can create a property, which is essentially a website or

an app. Or people can add you to an existing Google Analytics

property for their website or app.

And so the property is really where a lot of the information is flowing into

from your website and their tracking codes.

And then the next layer below that are the views, which you can have multiple views

associated with a property.

And so we'll talk about these a little bit more in depth later.

But the views really let you kind of customize how people are looking at that.

So different people in an organization.

Or if you work with other companies or agencies, may need a slightly different

view of Google Analytics.

And this screenshot here, it kind of shows an example of that hierarchy and

why you may have multiple views.

So starting at the left, you'll see the main account is,

is there is the MF.

That's the analytics account.

This account only has one property, which is MF main website.

And you'll see right below those, that text, there's your GA or tracking code.

Your GA tracking code.

Which you should be aware of.

It usually starts with that UA, and you'll often use that across

different services. So, if you're ever asked, you know, what's our Google tracking

code ID or our Google Analytics ID, that's the number that people are referring

to. And then within that, this example has two views.

By default, Google will start with the All Website Data View.

And that's exactly what it sounds like.

That's all your data is unfiltered as they will provide it

to you. And we always recommend, and Google recommends, keeping that pretty

as is. Not making a lot of changes there.

Because if you do and start filtering traffic that's coming in

there, you can't go back and undo that historically.

So it's good to have one kind of raw, unfiltered view of your data.

And then as you get more familiar with Google Analytics, you'll, you'll see some different

reasons for creating, you know, new views and doing filters.

The example that's shown here is a filter that was built to

exclude IP addresses from people at that company.

So, we use that, and that's a very common example.

So we can get more accurate data and exclude all the, you know, internal traffic

that's happening that can sometimes mess up your numbers, if you're looking at, you know,

how much traffic's coming in and where are they coming from?

And is it converting into, you know, leads or customers?

Excluding your internal traffic will help you get a better idea of what's

actually happening there.

And it's pretty common.

Most companies will have quite a few views, but this is a good

example of one to get started with by filtering out your IP address.

Once you have your account set up, you've gone to Google Analytics, you've logged

in, and you've set up, you know, your first property, you'll

end up in a screen like this.

And if you look in the very bottom left, there's a red square around the settings

icon. That's how you, you get to this menu in the first place.

You click on that, and then you'll look at the property settings, which is that top red

box. And that's showing kind of we're in that, that MF main property

right now.

And then if you go down, there's some different property settings, user management.

And then the tracking info is where your tracking code lives, which is

what you see in that big box in the middle of the screen.

So, that's your main tracking code.

That's what you're going to end up putting in the code of your website.

And this is ultimately the, the code that Google Analytics uses to start

tracking all your website visitors.

And so this is required to really start getting all that data from

your website into Google Analytics.

Down below, I also put a blue square around Google Tag manager, which is kind of a

totally different topic.

But it's a new tool that Google's been using and people have been using a

lot more lately.

And it's, it's something you'll definitely want to look into, and it's kind of an

alternative way of getting the Google Analytics code on your website,

as well as any other codes, you know, that you may use.

If you use other marketing tools, you'll definitely want to look into using Google Tag

Manager. But again, this tracking code is, is what you'll use and

is required to use to start getting your data.

You'll notice in there on the second line and the second-to-last line, there's that

UA code that I mentioned earlier.

And that's, again, your kind of your unique identifier.

So Google knows which account it's related to.

So from that point, once you get that code installed, you're, you're ready to go.

You're going to start seeing data coming into your account.

There's usually a couple-hour delay, in most cases, before your data starts showing

up. But within a day, you'll start seeing some different information in your Google

Analytics account.

So, going on from there, I want to just jump into some of the, the default standard

reports that you can look at in Google Analytics and show you six of our, our

favorite accounts.

Before you really dive into those reports, though, it's good to understand what segments

are in Google Analytics.

I've, I've highlighted them here with this red square, and they're at the top of almost

every screen in Google Analytics.

And by default, it will show you all of your users, which is that, you know, blue circle

that says 100% of sessions.

And that's great if you just want to see, hey, everybody that's coming in my website,

you know, what's happening there?

But you can also break it down by different segments.

Like, I only want to see organic traffic.

Which in this example is 37% of the traffic or paid

traffic. Or you can start breaking it down into other custom

segments, which I'll show you a little later on.

I want to see what, you know, new people are doing on my website as opposed

to my current customers.

Obviously, those people are going to utilize the website a little differently, so it's

nice to be able to break that down.

And all these reports, I'll show you down by that segment.

Because, of course, it will vary quite a bit.

So the first report that we, we like to look at and is convenient, because as soon as you

log in, it's kind of a new report that Google Analytics has come out with probably

in the last year or so, is this home report.

And it's Google's attempt to just, surfacing the most important data for

you. So there's more information than what's shown here, but these are a

few that we really like to see is on this home

report of, when do your users visit?

So this chart is kind of showing you, what are the most popular times for your

website? And that can be, you know, useful or interesting depending on your business.

If you're, you know, might want to make sure your hosting is sufficient so your website

doesn't crash during busy times.

Or if people are accessing your website for customer service, it

can help you even know when to staff your customer service center, for

example.

The other charts are showing, hey, where are people coming from?

You can look at this at a country level like it's shown here.

You could really dive down even into a city or state

level to really understand, you know, where people are coming from.

And then the last one there on the right are, what are the devices that people use?

And this is really helpful, because it's often is common

that your mobile website is different than your desktop website.

So when you're thinking about, what is the, what's the mobile experience people are

having or the desktop experience?

You really want to factor in, well, how much of my traffic is actually seeing those sites?

And the trend is really growing on the mobile side.

This example, you can see, is even higher than desktop, which is becoming pretty

common and normal.

But there are some websites that we see where desktop is still much more popular.

So when you're looking at the design of your website, you want to try to get a good

reflection of the traffic coming into your website and what they're looking at.

A lot of companies, you know, they're sitting at their desks, and they're looking

at their desktop site, because that's what's convenient for them right then.

But they don't always know or look to see, hey, half of my traffic is looking

at our website on a mobile device.

So we need to make sure, of course, that the mobile experience is good as well.

The second report, which you'll see in that left navigation over there, is the real-time

overview. And we love looking at this for different

sites, especially if you have a lot of traffic.

This is much more useful.

There's a few white spots there that we had to, to blur out for our clients'

behalf. But you can kind of see on this, you'll see here's how many people are on the

site right now.

How many are desktop versus mobile again.

In real time, not just, you know, over a course of, you know, several

weeks. And in this example, the desktop is 66%.

So it's much different than the last screenshot we looked at.

But you can also see, you know, where people coming from?

What referrals sources are they coming from?

Or are they coming from social?

What keywords brought them to our website?

Those are down the left side there.

On the right side, you can see, you know, what pages are they looking at right now?

And on the bottom, where are they coming from again?

So it's similar to what we showed before.

But instead of showing, hey, here's what all these stats look like for seven days, or

30 days, or a year at a time, you can see right in the second,

what are people doing?

And if you are involved with a website or a business that's doing

anything right on the spot.

You know, if you're doing a big live event, or webinars, or things like that, it can be

really interesting to see what impact that's having right away instead of having to

wait for all that data to show up.

The next report, and how I highlighted the path to those reports on that

left side. So this is under the Audience section and under Demographics

Overview, is a really interesting report, because you can dig into

this to see a good idea of,

what is the different demographics of the people coming to your website?

The two examples here are age and gender, which are somewhat basic, but start to give

you an idea of your demographics and help build, perhaps even help you

build out personas for your marketing efforts.

So in this case, we can see that, hey, a lot of the people coming to this website, it's

kind of a good spread on the age chart.

I mean, most people are between 25 and 64, so kind of helpful.

Maybe not super helpful.

And then the gender one is a little more unique, where, you know, 71% of the traffic

is male versus female.

And so, coming back to the segments at the top, this is all of the traffic.

This report can be really interesting when you start diving into those segments.

So, if we added a segment here to say, show me just

our customers based on, they log, they log into their portal or they reached

a kind of a thank you page, thank you for purchasing a product page, we can identify

them as a customer.

And we can see what these demographics look like.

Instead of looking at everybody that comes to the website, we can say, show me the

demographics for my customers.

And, of course, from that, you can see that could be a lot more useful and really affect

how you market your products and/or how what kind of content you create for

your blog to target the right demographics.

The next report on the left there is under the Acquisition section and the

Overview. So this, as you can see, kind of in the middle there, is showing

us, what are all the different traffic sources that are bringing people into our

website? And once you are working perhaps within a company or if you start a company

and you're spending, you know, thousands of dollars on digital marketing, you really want

to know, where is that money going, and what impact, what return is it having?

So in this example, you can see organic search is the number one traffic source for

this website. And followed by direct, and email, and referral, paid search,

and social traffic.

So in the first section you see the acquisition.

That's showing us how much traffic came in.

The next section is the behavior.

So, once that traffic comes in, what is, what's happening on our

website? So right here you can you can see the

bounce rate from, by channel.

So it's pretty consistent across most channels.

But you'll see on that fifth row, paid search, there's a 73% bounce rate.

Which is, you know, double pretty much, every other traffic source.

So that's something we may look at and say, hey, we need to look into that.

Maybe there's something funny happening there.

Maybe on the paid search side, we're not bringing in the right kind of traffic if it's

bouncing at such a high rate.

So you can use this kind of report to see who's coming in.

But also, how is that traffic performing?

And then on the right there, you can also look at, how is it performing

from a conversion perspective?

From an e-commerce site.

We can look and see, what's our conversion rate?

So one that stands out to me here is on, from email traffic has a

14% conversion rate, which is fantastic.

Versus that paid search line is only 1.68%.

So that's another indicator that maybe paid search isn't performing as well as it could

for this website.

And can kind of signal me if I'm managing, you know, marketing or those efforts to say,

we need to look into our paid search to make sure that we're really bidding on the right

keywords, and we're getting the right people coming into the website.

In the live version of Google Analytics, you can click around a little bit and even see

revenue by each of these channels too.

So it can help in just understanding, you know, where is our revenue coming from at

a channel level? The next standard report we're looking at here is under the Behavior

section on the left side.

And it's under the Site Content, All Pages.

On this screenshot, it's given us more information about what content people are

consuming on our website.

So, again, this is looking at all your traffic.

You could break this down by social media, or by organic search, or by

new customers, or old, or existing customers to kind of see, you know, what

content are people enjoying and utilizing?

So down at the bottom, it shows all those different pages.

And again, this is, there's a box over that.

So we, we don't share specific URLs for some of our

clients. But you would see each of those URLs differently and see how many people came

in, how many unique people came in, how much time do they spend on the page?

And bounce rate, things like that.

So, it can really help if you're creating content, for example, understand, how is your

content performing? Are people spending a lot of time reading your content?

Are they not, which could be an indicator maybe it's the wrong kind of content.

So this is, again, really helpful to understand...

You know, now that we know people are coming into the website, what, what are they doing

on the website?

In this report, under Behavior and Site Speed Overview is

a really interesting report that not a lot of people look at in Google Analytics.

There's a lot of statistics that show, the longer your pages take to load, you're going

to lose a large percent of your traffic.

Which of course is going to cause you to lose customers.

So the quicker you can get your website to load, the higher, the bigger impact it can

even have on your revenue and your traffic.

So this chart will show you over time how long it's taking your pages to

load. So it, kind of in the middle of the page there, this is saying our average page

load time is 4.74 seconds, which is, is okay .

Anything under 5 seconds we generally consider pretty good.

But any time you can increase that from, say, 4 seconds to 2

seconds, you'll see an increase in your conversion rates and in your traffic.

I'm sure you've all, you know, been to a website that takes 10 seconds to load.

And while 10 seconds doesn't sound like a long time, when you're talking about digital,

that's an eternity. So, you know, people are going to fall, fall off, and they're going to

exit out of your website.

So, you really want to pay attention to the site speed.

And this is a great report to do that.

So beyond the basic reports, there's a lot, of course, we can do to customize Google

Analytics.

By customizing it, we get a lot better data and more useful data that

can help us improve our marketing and improve the experience people

have on our website.

So one thing you can do to customize your Google Analytics is start by tracking your

conversions. And there's kind of two main ways to do that.

One are goals and another one is e-commerce.

So we're going to start with the goal section, and this is pretty common for

everything outside of e-commerce.

So if you are trying to get people to fill out a contact form or get

them to subscribe to a newsletter, or even call you, we can track all of that in Google

Analytics as a goal.

And then, again, in this example, break it down by traffic source.

So that, number one, there is organic search has a

1.59% conversion rate.

And in this time period, we had 44 goal completions.

You can see right below that, direct traffic was actually quite a bit less but had more

goal completions. So, that's, and the conversion rate is much higher.

So again, you can kind of get a sense of, what impact these different channels having

on your business?

And knowing that, hey, it's great that a lot of traffic is coming in, but at the end of

the day, is it, is it completing a goal?

Which is of course, a really important factor for, you know, long-term success and

digital marketing. To set up those goals, back in the

Settings sections that I showed you earlier, at the view level, which is that top left

red box.

There's a section in there called Goals, and then you can click new goal.

And you can track quite a few goals within Google Analytics.

And there's some common ones that we usually recommend, which I mentioned a little bit

earlier. If you're using call tracking, you can track those.

Contact forms, newsletters, subscriptions.

But you can also track a variety of different things that aren't

always leads.

For example, it doesn't mean that somebody's contacting you, but a common goal we see

sometimes are people set a goal for three to four page

views per session.

So they want to see, are people engaged in the website?

Are they visiting at least three or four pages?

And if they do, that's a success.

So there's lots of different things you can track as goals.

And then e-commerce is a little, probably a little bit more self-explanatory.

But on the e-commerce side, once you have that set up and configured with your

website, you can pull in that transaction data

into Google Analytics to see how those different channels are performing.

How much revenue is coming from them.

So again, you can see in this example what the conversion rates are by channel, how

many transactions happen, and then ultimately how much revenue came from that.

And so to really get a lot out of Google Analytics, you really need that data.

And that, again, isn't in there by default, of course.

Because you need to communicate with Google all that transaction data.

So, if you're in the e-commerce space, it's definitely something you want to get set

up as soon as possible.

Another thing we do to customize Google Analytics is their

site search feature.

So a lot of websites have a search box on them, where you can search for a

product or for content.

And a lot of website owners don't really know how often that's

being used or what people are searching for.

So within Google Analytics, you can actually connect that to your Google Analytics.

So you can get some, some of that data.

And it will actually show you, what are the search terms that people put

in? And that can be really helpful information, because it can give you an idea

of, what are people looking for that they can't find?

Or are they looking for something we don't even offer?

So if somebody came to our website and were searching for a service we don't

offer, that could be an indication that, hey, maybe there's an opportunity there.

There's something a new product or service we could offer.

And there's already interest for that.

In addition, you can see, you know, how many people, if they do search, how many pages are

they viewing? Or how many of those people leave the website?

And again, the whole goal around this is, how do we improve our websites and our

website experience, so people really enjoy the website, and they find what they're

looking for?

And I mentioned this a little bit earlier, but this is a section I talked about, about

custom segments.

So when you're going and creating segments, or in that segment section,

you can create a custom segment.

And so in this example, it's filtering users that visited a

page that contains /account/ or /site/account

in the URL. So, people that visit those pages are existing

customers. And so we can essentially kind of tag them and say, hey, these are

existing customers.

And that will allow us to filter traffic on all those different reports I've already

shown you by customers versus non-customers.

And, again, that can be helpful for a lot of different reasons.

Sometimes you'll want to exclude customers from your data so you can

see your conversion rates more accurately.

If you have a lot of customers coming to your website, it's going to make it look like your

conversion rate is really low.

But in reality, if you exclude them, it will probably be a lot higher.

Or, you may want to just see reports for just your customers.

You know, if they have a customer portal, what pages are they accessing most

often? Or are they having a hard time finding certain pages?

So again, it can come back to really improving, you know, how people are able to

interact with your website.

Another thing you can do is build dashboards, which can be really useful,

especially if you are reporting to someone.

So, if it's reporting up to your boss or if you're reporting to a client,

since Google Analytics can be a lot, sometimes there's a lot of reports, there's a

lot of data out there.

You can build, essentially, your custom dashboard to show people just the data that's

most interesting to them.

So this example is an SEO dashboard that tells us how all the different SEO

metrics are performing.

So this is an example that we could just send to a client and show, here's how, you

know, things are going in Google Analytics.

And that makes it so they don't have to go into Google Analytics and click six

different reports to get the data they want.

We can also make this so it automatically sends to them.

So, again, it can be a great way to keep track of your Google

Analytics data without having to log in all the time.

And the last customization is Alerts.

And it's kind of similar to dashboards in a way where you can set up an alert, and it

will send you a notification if it meets certain criteria.

So this example is saying, if our AdWords traffic drops

by more than 50% on the same day compared to the same day last week,

send me an email or a text.

And that can be really useful if you're not able to log in every day.

And it helps you be more aware of potential problems as they're

happening instead of finding out three days later when you have time to log back in

to Google Analytics.

So there are certain ones that can be really useful if it's, say, if my overall traffic is

dropped too low. Or if it's, if it's increased quite a bit, I also want to be

aware of that. There's different metrics like that, and you can set alerts around

those to be aware of what's happening.

So, to summarize a little bit with Google Analytics, these are, I think, the three

steps to getting started.

One, of course, is making sure your account is set up and your Google Analytics is

configured and installed on your website.

Second, is get familiar with the standard reports.

There's quite a bit of information in there and a lot you can learn about your website

traffic. But the real power in Google Analytics comes with a few of those

customizations.

As you customize and bring your own data, like your e-commerce data into the

platform, it becomes a really powerful tool to improve

your marketing efforts, improve your website experience, and ultimately, be

a better, a better marketer or a better website owner.

And what we've seen, as we've done this with our clients, is that ultimately, at the

end of the day, it provides them a lot of interesting data that helps them make better

decisions about their marketing and their, the dollars they're putting into

that. Thank you so much.

We appreciate the opportunity to connect.

And if there are any questions, please reach out to us at Big Leap.

Our website's here.

You can also catch us on Twitter as well.

It's @BigLeapMKTG.

Big Leap Marketing.

Thank you.