Google Analytics

Google Analytics’ Universal Analytics is one of the most popular analytics tools for business owners and marketers. It’s free, easy to use, and widely available. But this tool was made when websites were brochures with text—simple places without any depth or sophistication. Google Analytics was built to measure page views and website visits. We cannot process PII data with GA because it can’t do so; thus, we cannot determine how much value a specific user has for our company’s goals or product offerings.

The current state of web analytics

Analytics tools nowadays are much more nuanced and sophisticated. When websites were simple brochures, Google Analytics was a functional tool for data collection. However, it is now outdated in the modern advertising world of eCommerce marketing, where customer journeys can be measured with precision across platforms and every user event.

Many web analytics from the early 2000s were built to analyze marketing spend and were never meant for the depth of a customer journey. Likewise, GA was never meant to accommodate the sophistication of a modern customer journey.

Most modern analytics tools track raw user events, whereas google analytics is limited to monitoring user sessions and page views, all based on hits.

It is also important to understand that many companies care about the ownership of data. Also, the platform’s integration with the data warehouse is important. 

Many legacy web analytics tools weren’t designed to integrate the data with another database. Most modern web analytics tools are designed to be integrated with data warehouses so marketers can use BI tools like Tableau to visualize and dig deep into data for insights.

Disadvantages and problems with the current state of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is limited in what it can do, and events must be specifically defined ahead of time. Even then, GA cannot process PII data (personally identifiable information), which means that users cannot determine their value by Google Analytics. However, there are alternatives- for example, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap, etc.

Constraints around the number of custom dimensions you can define on Google Analytics’ Universal Analytics are limitations for any user trying to track more than basic data.

The limitations around the reporting features are a limitation for marketers and all users of the tool. Most modern analytics tools provide marketers with advanced query features, deep diving in the data to find insights.

Modern analytics tools work well for marketers and product managers or anyone looking to track and analyze the customer journey across platforms. In contrast, google analytics can only measure simple page metrics and defined user paths.

Most of these issues are with Universal Analytics. Recently, Google Analytics 4 was launched, but its adoption is still in the early phase. A lot of the Google Analytics 4 was designed by mimicking many of the modern product analytics tools.

I believe the current issue with Google Analytics is getting many marketers to adjust to the new ways of looking at web analytics. It might be common for product managers who have been using tools like Heap, Mixpanel, and Amplitude.

The new normal for web analytics has started. Users who don’t like Google Analytics 4 can quickly try a Heap, Mixpanel, or Amplitude platform.

Why should marketers care about this issue?

If Google Analytics is the only tool a company uses for web analytics, they are missing out on important information. There’s no other way to track and analyze data in real-time on one platform, as google analytics can’t process PII data. Marketers need all of the available tools at their disposal to market their brand, products, or services.

In many cases, marketers are using Google Analytics as the hub for tracking a lot of data. However, there has been an increase in the trend to have CDP where both user behavior and customer profile data are integrated and used as the hub of the marketing analytics stack.

One example is that it will be possible to create customized promotions based on customers’ interests or needs at different stages in their journey with your company. 

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About Google Analytics 4

Universal Analytics is widely considered one of the most powerful free analytics software platforms on the market, but Google launched Google Analytics 4 on October 2020 with new features that make it even better. Google has made Google Analytics 4 a seamless integration between Google’s suite of products, making Google Analytics 4 the analytics platform of choice for Google users.

Google Analytics 4 is not just an upgraded version, but an entirely different Google product. Google gave Google Analytics 4 the ability to track information on every events that generated from users instead of page views.

One of the most exciting features of Google Analytics 4 is that it includes a robust set of new templates designed to help marketers analyze user behavior in ways never before possible.

Google has built Google Analytics 4 to make it easy for marketers to identify the most relevant metrics and track them over time. Google Analytics 4 also increases Google’s ability to help advertisers get started by providing templates.

I am personally excited about the follow 3 key features on Google Analytics 4 —

Google Analytics 4 is less of a reporting tool and more of an analysis engine

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is different from Universal Analytics in that it’s not a reporting tool, but an analysis engine. Forecasting and analyzing your data will take time to learn if you are used to using UA. Even the most advanced UAs will still have questions about GA4 when they start switching over their accounts, so there may be some digging around before feeling comfortable with this system.

Google Analytics 4 integration with Google BigQuery

Google Analytics 4 has Google BigQuery integration for Google Cloud Platform users. Google BigQuery is an enterprise-grade data warehouse that enables super low latency for querying massive datasets

The Google Analytics 4 data you generate and all your raw event history can be exported to BigQuery for deeper analysis. You get complete ownership of the data, but must decide how permissions will work on projects and datasets with SQL-like syntax queries.

Google Analytics data in BigQuery means, marketers can now do a lot more with deep dive analysis and building custom dashboards when it is integrated with BI tools like the Google Data Studio, Tableau, etc. Google Analytics 4 users can now get easy access to Google Analytics data in Google BigQuery without owning Google Analytics 360.

Google Analytics 4 treats everything as an event

Google Analytics 4 promises to offer a more accurate tracking experience with improved analytics and an event-driven approach. The new Google tool makes it possible for users to break the limits of reporting tools available in Universal Analytics, giving them deeper insights into user behavior on web pages.

In Universal Analytics, every event already has a predefined category. As a result it limits the amount of data that is available for an analytics report. The user must name the event category, action and attributes associated with the event when creating their report to receive any results at all!

Google Analytics 4 is a new way to analyze your website’s data. Rather than treating everything on the page as one single hit, it makes analyzing your web page into multiple sets of data. Customizable event tracking features in Google Analytics 4 allows you to specify the details of events that are most important and track them.

Here are examples of events that Google Analytics 4 allows you to track:

• user behavior and interactions with content
• actions taken by users when visiting the site (clicks)
• downloads from pages
• contact form submissions

In Summary

If you’re looking to do some deeper analysis on your marketing data, the new Google Analytics 4 integration with Google BigQuery may be what you need. The two programs work together to provide a powerful way of understanding how people are interacting with your website and why they make certain decisions about it.

By treating all user actions as events, this update in analytics promises to help marketers understand their audience better than ever before! Have you tried out any of these features?

Let me know if we can help find ways for you to leverage these updates so that your marketing is more effective.

Here three reports that are very interesting within Google Analytics which gives great visibility around multi-channel funnels reflecting various path website visitors take.

• Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths
• Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions
• Attribution

In my view, Top Conversion Paths and Assisted Conversions under multi-channel funnels reports are interesting.

I will focus the on the multi-channel report for this post. It is pretty revolutionary as many data analysts always wanted this type of data to understand how much marketing channels or traffic sources actually contribute to sales.

A lot of these type of digital channels may not directly close sales, but could assist sales. So getting that data visibility is really awesome!

The multi-channel funnel report allows marketers to understand the popular combinations of paths users took within digital channels to arrive at your tracked website. It is pretty cool because you can filter the channels by medium, keywords, custom group sets, etc.

Are the ads driving top of the funnel traffic or attributing to last touch conversion

This report shows you that certain channel like Referral and Display Ads are more likely to assist another channel in sealing the deal.  In other words, if you’re tracking last touch attribution only channel like Display Ad where you are spending money may not be getting the credit it deserves.

This is a great report that tells you if you have any reporting attribution issues.

Deep analysis around conversion segments.

As you may now, your site may be all about to drive sales, and it could have email registration or some kind of feature to drive leads. How does the user’s channel paths differ when the first interaction is Email or when Email is the last interaction?

If you know the leads you bring into promotional programs are likely to convert more and buy repeatedly, then it is worth exploring to see if there are any marketing opportunities to help consumers go down the marketing funnel.

Top Conversion Path Report

This is another powerful report to check.  In this example, I searched for any path that includes ‘Display’ Ads as their path to conversion.

What is interesting is that the top path that includes Display in their touch points show Display channel are likely to be either in the first touch or within the middle prior to the last touch channel that is not a Display Ad.

This is a great data that all paid media manager should be checking out.

Time lag report

One of the reports has the capability to understand the time difference (in days) between the channel path. If there are any opportunities you can intercept with an ad to close the sales, then I’m sure this report can give you that hint about the best timing to shoot and ad to make those days shorter.

Same goes with the path, if any channel segments are closing the sales in shorter path length, then it is probably worth diving into the data to see what is actually closing it.

Sample Time Lag report with segments applied.

Google Analytics has a variety of reports to analyze different kinds of metrics to measure your website’s performance. The great Google Analytics reporting features that are super helpful to me, allows me to track exactly what is working or not in the marketing funnel.

If you don’t have a marketing funnel, then you definitely want to start designing one.

For website that sells stuff

Google Analytics support e-commerce site and the reports from e-commerce is really helpful in a sense that it can tie the metrics in terms of dollar value. It provides an insight into the e-commerce activity on your website, and better understands the success of your e-commerce site.

Key metrics that are important coming out of e-commerce reports are transactions, conversion rate, average order value, revenue, and traffic are some of the main reports that are necessary.

There are reports in various sections which include traffic (visitors), traffic sources, content, goal conversion, and e-commerce. The reports under these sections could be added to your dashboard to get an overall look, in one screen, at the metrics that matter most to you.

Google Analytics Custom Reports

Google analytics has recently introduced the customs reports. They are those reports, which you create, save and edit to give you a specific view of the data.

With the help of these, you can determine which information and metrics you want to see. You can organize them in the way you want to highlight the relevant data by using drag and drop interface.

You also have the option to create a tab if you want to see related data in another dimension of metrics. In addition, when you create the custom report, you’ll have the option of creating a drill-down or multiple levels of sub-reports, by selecting the sub-dimension.

Certain Google Analytics reporting features and functions that are very useful that I recommend you to take full advantage of:

Export: Google Analytics has an export feature that allows you to download the reports in PDF, XML, CSV, and TSV. Certain reports may only allow PDF or XML.

These downloads will give you the flexibility to cater the reports to your users in different ways.

You can pass along the PDF file without altering it, or pass XML into other reporting tools in a form of data-feed, or manipulate CSV file and enhance the reports/charts as you wish.

Time frame: Setting the time frame is one of the most important features when reporting out of Google Analytics because of you able to select your reporting period grouping the data by day, weeks, or months.

It is easy to select the day, date or month you desire by the calendar interface. You can also compare a date, date range to another date, or date range by choosing the “compare to past” option.

This helps you to know the performance trends on your site before and after a change made on your site or landing pages.

The interface also provides you with a timeline feature, which shows you a bar graph of visits over time. A particular range can be selected which gives you a graphic representation of the fluctuations in your report.

Email: This is a great feature when you want to share your data, reports, or dashboards to certain people by email.

You can send a report instantly or schedule the report run and email it on a daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly basis.

If you are sending out to a group of users, you may want to consider creating a group account email address so your IT admin can control the email list when a member leaves the company or what not.

View/Chart options: There are several options to represent the data in various ways.  Some options are ordinary table view, pie chart, bar graph, etc. Most reports contain a pie chart, basic table views and bar graphs.

Trend graph that is in default mode in most of the reports. It gives you a snapshot view of your site’s performance for various data points like conversion rate, bounce rate, visits etc.

Dashboards: a dashboard is a collection of various reports. You can add a favorite report on your dashboard for a quick look into the site performance.

It shows you a snapshot view of the reports that is customizable. Handy and quick access to your entire data of your favorite reports is the greatest advantage of dashboards.

Advanced segmentation:  This is my most favorite.  I recommend setting up advanced segmentations and utilize the segmentations against the custom reporting to take advantage or your useful reports with meaningful metrics to you.

Some advanced segmentation I’ve set up when the feature was first enabled were, Engaged Audience and Not-Engaged Audience segmentations. This is simply to show the difference in performance from those two segments against the reporting metrics you choose to run.

Engaged Audience will defer for all of you, but you can say, visitors who did not bounce and spent on your site more than the one minute, and had 4 page views per visit.

Not-Engaged Audience could be visitors who bounced and spend on your site less than 30 seconds (this is just an example). When you use these segmentations against your traffic sources or site sections, you’ll definitely gain some great insights.

Google Analytics don’t change the reporting features often but it is certain worth poking around find your favorite report that addresses your marketing needs.

I’m going to cover Google Analytics KPIs that most marketers may refer from the tool to make better business decisions.  

For those who don’t know what KPI means, KPI means key performance indicators. They are defined as business metrics (units of measure) that enables your organization to define, evaluate and analyze its progress towards organizational goals.

KPIs do possess a signifying place in web analytics. Each website is created with certain objectives to be attained within the given time span.

KPIs provide a detailed data of the nature of our progress towards achieving the objectives of the organization. It will help us to re-establish our goals according to the analytics report of the KPIs.

It depends upon the nature of your site to select the significant KPIs. The basic KPIs in Google Analytics are covered in detail here.

It is important to note that the KPIs that work for a particular website may not work for another website.

Number of visits
It studies the number of visits to a site over a specific time period. Most people analyses this KPI on a regular basis. The best practice is to set a target for this KPI, say, for over a period of one month. Try to improve your marketing strategy to achieve your aimed web traffic for the fixed period. This KPI is related to the web traffic and the majority of the web business is much concerned about its value. You should give your maximum talent to increase the value of this KPI to meet your targets. Give more attention to the trends in the visitor numbers in relation to your targets.

This KPI is related to the web traffic and the majority of the web business is much concerned about its value. You should give your maximum talent to increase the value of this KPI to meet your targets. Give more attention to the trends in the visitor numbers in relation to your targets.

Pageviews
Pageviews is the total number of pages viewed on your site and is a general measure of how much your site is used. It is more useful as a basic indicator of the traffic load on your site and server rather than as a marketing measure.  A website that sells ads based on impressions usually care a lot about page views more than anything else.

Absolute Unique Visitors
“Absolute Unique Visitors” is how many visitors (people) came to your site, counting each person only once for the entire time period. Google Analytics seem to use IP address + User-Agent + First Party Cookies to identify a visitor. A unique visitor is an ultimate measure to reflect the number of people that visited your site.

Bounce rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).

Bounce Rate is a measure of visit quality and a high Bounce Rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors.

Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy, or even address the needs of the visitors.  So that even if they leave they can re-visit to your website and ultimately convert.

High bounce rate means that the visitor was not attracted by the attributes of your site and visitors retracted their steps. The satisfaction of visitors is what matters here most. The main reason for this phenomenon is inappropriate content according to their taste on the landing page, unalluring design, and technical problems.

It is clear from the above description that lower bounce rate is the indication of the success of your online marketing strategies.

Your website is functioning in the best possible way according to your best efforts. Try to analyze the data of the bounce rate based on the trends in a given period of time rather than on daily basis, and by content or pages.

A point to be noted here is that higher bounce rate does not always show a poor website performance. For example, in the case of blogs, a visitor may be directed to your website to read only a particular article on a particular page, they get what they needed and leave.

Time on site
Time on Site is one way of measuring visit quality. If visitors spend a long time visiting your site, they may be interacting extensively with it. However, Time on Site can be misleading because visitors often leave browser windows open when they are not actually viewing or using your site.

Conversion rate
For a none e-commerce site, Conversion Rate is the primary metric for assessing how well marketing, site, and content work together to achieve business objectives.

Conversion Rate is the percentage of visits that result in the visitor taking an action that you have defined as important to your business.

Every website is created with a pre-defined goal. It may be of various natures such as to contact the organization, to fill in a registration form or to purchase a product.

Conversion rate is an effective KPI that help to monitor the goals of the website. It is the rate at which the visitors take your goals or positive measures. If you have a high conversion rate, then it indicates that you have made a considerable amount of customers act according to your wishes in your website. To manage a high conversion rate your site should have the perfect mix of quality web traffic, an excellently managed customer experience or the right product offerings as a business.

The conversion rate KPI extracts the best value of such good measures. Google Analytics provide you with enormous stats of all the factors that affect the conversion rate. If you make improvements to your customer experience, your conversion rate will really improve.

Revenue and Traffic volume by sources
Google Analytics traffic sources report provides an overview of the different kinds of sources that send traffic to your site. The graph shows traffic trends; the pie-chart and tables show the traffic sources driving the trends. “Direct Traffic” visits from people who clicked a bookmark to come to your site or who typed your site URL directly into their browser. “Referring Sites” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from another site. “Search Engines” shows visits from people who clicked to your site from a search engine result page.

Now, search engines marketing is on the top list of online marketing. Most of the organizations try hard to move up the search engine rankings for a better web traffic. This KPI will analyze the nature of the sources from which your web traffic has arrived on your sites. Depending entirely on search engines is a risky thing. If we depend on search engines for 90% of web traffic, then think about the day, suppose, when Google modify their algorithm or may remove your company from their database. This will put a sudden stop to your major revenue share. Therefore, it is better to increase your traffic from all sources including the small traffic sources over time. It will help you to stand in the long run.

Make sure that your Google Analytics report of traffic sources should not show any source of traffic dominating for a long period unless it is part of your strategies. Keywords data shows the actual keywords used in the search that referred traffic to the site. Additionally, Google Analytics is capable of segmenting the keywords by paid, non-paid (organic), and overall. Carefully monitor how your added or changed content affects the keywords searched over a period of time.

E-commerce
Google Analytics is great for tracking e-commerce transactions. There are various KPIs under e-commerce report, and it will help you measure your site’s success to your revenue and sales over time.

Here are some KPIs under e-commerce are:
Total Revenue: Revenue is determined by the number of purchases and the average purchase value. Some important steps you can take to maximize revenue are:
– Purchase targeted advertising and write effective ads (see the Traffic Sources reports)
– Make sure your landing pages show the information, services, or products that you promise in your ads (review the Content reports to help minimize bounce rates)
– Simplify your conversion funnels so that fewer would-be customers abandon the checkout process (review the Goals reports)

Conversion Rate: This report shows the rate at which visits to your site result in purchases. Tracking conversion rates over time is an effective way of determining whether your marketing and website are becoming more or less efficient at turning visitors into customers. Note that conversion rates are most useful as company-specific benchmarks against which to assess marketing and site effectiveness because conversion rates vary considerably across businesses (even within the same industry).

Average Order Value: Tracking changes to the average order value over time is important to catalog sites that may change and shift which products and services they are actively marketing. Many e-commerce sites monitor this metric to see if cross promotions are working. This is an important metric that works its way into many higher-level executives and shareholder reports.

Product Overview (Product Performance): How much of each product do you sell? This report shows the number of items sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online. Click any SKU to drill down and view detail.

Product SKUs (Product Performance): This report shows the number of items for each SKU sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online.

Categories (Product Performance): How much of each product category, product, and SKU do you sell? For e-commerce sites, understanding which products are selling online is crucial for generating relevant content, promotions, and advertisements. This report shows the number of items sold, the total revenue, the average price, and the average order quantity for each product you sell online.

Transactions: This report is a list of all transactions on your site, useful for auditing your transactions.

Visits to Purchase: How many visits does it take for visitors to purchase? Understanding your sales cycle is important to the overall success of your site. This report helps you understand how many visits it takes to convert your visitors into customers and, by extension, the kind of content you need to create in order to reach your prospects.

Time to Purchase: How long does it take before visitors make a purchase? Understanding your sales cycle is important to the overall success of your site. This report helps you understand how long it takes to convert your visitors into customers and, by extension, the kind of content you need to create in order to reach your prospects.

KPIs are a revelation in the sense that they inform us about our success or failures in our path to achieve the objectives. KPIs are the main criteria for determining the website activity and help us to take the necessary steps for boosting up the online marketing initiatives.

I hope you acquired a better understanding of these KPIs from Google Analytics to make your site better and successful.
Reference: Google – http://www.google.com/support/analytics/

If you are looking for a general definition of KPIs supported by the Web Analytics Association, refer to Website’s KPI Examples and Definitions – Basics