Google Analytics Automation: 9 Things You Can Automate Today

hey there i'm benjamin from love starter and in this video I'm going to share nine things he can do to automate Google Analytics you can use automation with Google Analytics to streamline a whole range of different tasks from finding insights in your data to creating reports and getting data in and out of Google Analytics we're going to look at some of the inbuilt automation options that you can find right inside your Google Alyx account and we'll also look at some third-party tools like super metrics and zapier to help you guide your decisions around automation I do recommend listing out all the tasks that you perform on a regular basis these are perfect candidates for automation it's now time to cover the nine things who can automate in Google Analytics let's get started the first way you can use automation in Google Analytics is to make use of machine learning Google Analytics comes with built in machine learning that can provide automated insights and streamline your advertising this includes analytics intelligence which will highlight anomalies in your data or in other words weird things that you should investigate the quality of sessions and other changes in your metrics you'll find analytics intelligence on the top right corner of your reports just click the icon to see new insights that you can review selecting an individual insight will provide additional details and you also have the option of clicking through to view the standard report apart from automated insights you can also make use of Google's machine learning by using smart goals smart lists for remarketing session quality and conversion probability number two is to use quill engage to automate reporting I've seen people get stuck in reporting health spending hours and hours creating reports which are read in a couple of minutes and then forgotten no time is spent exploring the data and focus becomes creating the report instead of finding insights and developing ideas quill engage can help you cut at hours of repetitive work by automating your regular reports by freeing up your or your team's valuable time you can then focus on what really matters finding insights and making a positive change to your digital channels quill engage provides a free plan for one report and paid plans for reports and features number three is to schedule and email your reports it's not a sexiest Quillen gauge but automated emailing of your reports is a robust feature that's built into Google Analytics once you've found and customized your report click Share on the top right corner to schedule your report to be emailed to anybody you like automatically you can even combine multiple reports into a single email by clicking share and then selecting add to an existing email number four is to focus on important changes with custom alerts while analytics intelligence can provide useful insights you can't control when or what changes are flagged based on your data using custom alerts you can define your criteria for your notifications for example you can create a custom alert to notify you when there's a sudden increase or even a decrease in your conversion rate you'll find custom alerts under customization then it's just a matter of creating a new alert setting the period you want to check which is daily weekly or monthly and then defining the conditions for the alert this alert will notify us when there's a lift in the number of sessions on the website number five is to combine data with super metrics I've already touched on how you can streamline repetitive reporting but in terms of creating ad-hoc and custom reports it's hard to go past super metrics it allows to pull data from Google Analytics and other sources into Google sheets and Google Data studio for example you can use super metrics to extract data from Google Analytics and your social networks to create a dashboard that combines your most important data sources for more ways to speed up your reporting and analysis using super metrics check out my social dashboard tutorial and my post on uploading cost data to Google Analytics you can find links in the description below this video number six is to automate your tracking with Google tag manager Google tag manager can automate a whole range of tracking requirements on your website for example you can configure Google Analytics tags to fire when someone Scrolls your content watch as an embedded YouTube video downloads a file or clicks on a featured promotion this means that all of the actions that match your criteria will automatically be tracked into Google Analytics using the help of Google tag manager you can watch my tutorials covering automatically tracking events scroll depth and embedded YouTube videos you can find links to these videos in the description below number seven is to send out in and get it out with the help of zapier zapier has saved me countless hours by automatically connecting all of the different platforms we use at loves data I like to think of zapier as my digital glue and yes it even works with Google Analytics for example you can use zapier to send transaction data from PayPal into Google Analytics apart from sending data into Google Analytics you can also get data out for example you could use that you to tweet the number of users who viewed your blog each week number eight is to use templates to speed up reporting and analysis I wanted to mention the Google Analytics Solutions gallery it's not strictly automation but accessing the range of pre-configured reports of segments and more will save you time from reports and segments you'll also find dashboards attribution models channel groupings goals and audience definitions that you can use and customize and finally number nine is using Google Analytics add-ons for even more third-party add-ons that you can use to enhance your reports and analysis check out the Google Analytics technology partners Google provides a listing of different solutions from call tracking to data connectors that can be used with Google Analytics since these aren't specifically endorsed by Google I highly recommend spending time researching the provider before jumping onboard this is especially the case for any solution that will be able to access your data I always research who is providing the solution and read through their Terms of Service before getting started so then nine things you can automate in Google Analytics today by applying just one of these Google Analytics automation techniques you'll be saving time which you can then reinvest in your analysis data exploration and collecting actionable insights automation is all about working smarter not harder as I've shown you these are steps you can actually take right now to streamline and improve the way you're using and collecting data what are you going to automate in Google Analytics let me know in the comments below and if you have any extra automation tips you'd like to share I'd love to know from more Google X tips and techniques sign up to receive my email updates you can find a link in the description below and if you found this video helpful then please take a moment to like it so I know to make more videos like this one see you next time

Channel: Loves Data

Views: 3,482

Keywords: Google Analytics Automation, Google Analytics

Id: DLp9lwgrWGU

Length: 7min 24sec (444 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 20 2018