Google Analytics, Ultimate Beginner’s Guide

running a business without a website nowadays is like trying to climb the Kilimanjaro with a pair of flip-flop but running a website without looking at statistics is as useful as being in a submarine where that is so now you have no idea where you are going and you are likely to sing ignore the numbers at your peril luckily there is Google Analytics to help you steer your business in the right direction if you haven't heard about Google Analytics it's time to wake up if you have and it scares you don't be Google Analytics is your true business Ally and it's free a couple of weeks ago I showed you how to install Google Analytics in today's video I'm going to show you how to use Google Analytics so you can make informed decision and grow your business online visibility in the process I'm leader and the founder of ranking Academy Dhaka UK where I help small business owners like you with their marketing efforts for better online visibility step by step and click by click if you are new to my channel why don't you subscribe today and click the bell button so you don't miss any of my future videos and if you like this tutorial please give me a thumbs up as it will be very helpful for me to grow my channel Google Analytics is a very powerful tool which every business owner should be using daily the downside is it can come across as being very complex and a very overwhelming experience for anyone using it for the first time but fear not after watching this video you will know how to navigate through the interface what key metrics you should be watching closely how to set up goals and campaign tracking and how to use the data to drive more traffic to your site watch the video till the end as I have a special bonus for you a downloadable fully customized analytics dashboard specifically designed for small business owners which you can import directly into your Google Analytics account in just one click I created this dashboard especially for those of you who are short on time and want to access all the key information in one place are you ready let's start head over to marketing platform dot google.com from the top navigation hover on the for small business option and choose analytics then log into your account using this sign into analytics option once you've signed in you will see an overview of the performance of your website most of you will only have access to the data of one website yours but if you have more than one Google Analytics account associated with a gmail address you have logged in with you will be able to toggle through each website set of data by using the drop down option on the top left corner of the screen I have for instance access to several analytics profiles for my clients websites so I can quickly check how well they are doing by switching from one profile to another on the fly I will be using my own website ranking Academy or UK to walk you through the interface starting with the menu let's first zoom in on the report section which is where you are likely to spend most of your time the report section is composed of five main categories starting with real time as its name indicates the real time report shows you what's happening on your site right now such as the number of visitors where they are located where they found you on the web what content they are currently visiting etc moving on to the audience report this is where you will find out about your visitors demographic their gender what kind of device they used to access your site and much more these reports will help you understand your visitors in more depth for instance almost 80% of people visiting my website are male aged between 25 and 34 and access my site mostly from a desktop this is extremely valuable information and helps me decide what type of content will work best with my audience let's now talk about the acquisition report the acquisition report is probably my favorite report as this is where you will find out the source of your web traffic for instance in my case I get most of my traffic from social media then from direct direct means people typing the address of my website directly into a browser then it's followed by organic horses which means search engines these results are based on a week's worth of data you can modify the time range by going to the top right hand side corner of your screen and selecting a longer period which should give you a better data sample and slightly different results clicking on the source /medium option will give you an exact breakdown of where your traffic is coming from in my case a lot of people seem to be visiting my site after finding me on youtube or directly from Google once again this is very valuable as I know which channel works best for me and what I need to work on moving on to the behavior report this is where you will learn how visitors behave on your site what pages are most visited how long people stay on your site and very importantly if people stick around while they're visiting a page this really helps you understand if your content appeals to your audience or not the last report is for conversions this report will allow you to track specific actions that your visitors are taking on your website such as filling in a form making a phone call etc this is very useful as ultimately you want people to not just visit your site but also to get in touch with you and this is where you will see the results for this to work you need to set up some goals which I will cover later on in the course other elements of the interface are the search option which helps you find helpful documentation when you are stuck the whole option which takes you back to the main overview of your site's performance the customization option where you can create your own reports and dashboards the discover option where you can find out about the latest information on Google Analytics and the admin option where you can modify the settings of your Analytics account i'm only whizzing through these because you are less likely to spend time on these than the report as you can see Google Analytics offers a huge amount of data which can be overwhelming so you don't feel like you are drowning I'm going to show you which top metrics you should be watching as a small business in the next chapter let's start with a very basic your visitors I've already covered some of it in interface chapter but looking at your visitors data is a must understanding how many people have visited your site how long they have spent on each page before they complete a form or call you or simply decided to leave how many more visitors you're getting from the previous month or the previous year etc will give you invaluable insights on your overall website performance to access the visitors data go to the audience report and select overview select the date range from the top right corner you wish to apply to get a big enough sample of data you can customize the graph view by hours days week or month and you can start looking at your data in more details by using the breakdown under the main graph which will include number of users which is the total number of users who have visited your site during your selected period new users which is the number of visitors who had never visited your site before from the total of users in this example out of four thousand seven hundred and seventy two users four thousand seven hundred and fifty of them were new users you can see the clear split in the pie chart on the right-hand side number of sessions whenever someone visits your website it will be added as a new session if the visitor leaves or is inactive for 30 minutes the session expires if the visitor comes back after 30 minutes a new session will be added to the total this means one visitor can create multiple sessions which is the number you will see in the number of sessions per users the next indicator is pageviews which is self-explanatory your pageviews are the number of pages viewed on your site during the date range you have selected pageviews is a good indicator of user engagement the lower the number the less engaged the next indicator is the average number of pages visited for each session more pages per session means that visitors are exploring more of your site the average session duration is the length of time visitors tend to spend on your site the low number means visitors don't spend a huge amount of time on your site which means they are not finding it very interesting this number tends to correlate tightly with the bounce rate which is the next indicator on our list bounce rate is the percentage of people who visited your site but navigated away from the site after only viewing one page a high bounce rate is generally a sign that your visitors are not finding what they want and that's why they leave straightaway the next thing I'm going to show you is what makes Google Analytics so powerful comparing sets of data over time go to the range selection and tick the compare option then select the two date ranges you want to compare let's say I want to compare my visitors performance in October this year with October last year you can select the entire month by clicking on the top of the calendar box and you can choose the previous year from the drop-down and then click on apply Google Analytics automatically compares both months and maps out the results in the graph below you can also find a detailed breakdown of your performance for each indicator we have just covered for instance in my case the number of users coming to my site has jumped by 303 percent year-on-year and the number of pageviews have gone up by 486 percent and my bounce rates has reduced by 20 7% which overall means engagement has gone up the last important indicator I want to cover in the audience report is the devices people used to access your site to see this go to the mobile option in the menu under the audience and click on overview this report will show you if visitors access your site mostly by desktop tablet or mobiles select a wide date range and click on apply let's remove the compareto option and increase the date range you may need to choose the month option to make the graph easier to read in my case most of my visitors come from desktop actually 74% of them why is this important because it will help you build content that is most adapted to the device your visitors use the last advice it can give you about tracking your visitors is to pay attention to peaks and dips in the number of users and a number of sessions if you notice anything unusual you must understand why it is happening so you can learn from it now we've explored how our visitors interact with our website let's look at how they are finding us understanding the source of your traffic is another crucial metric you need to keep an eye on why because all the time you can figure out what channel works best for you and where you should concentrate most of your time I have already touched on the most important aspect of this in the interface overview but since this is so important let me cover this in a little bit more depth to demonstrate this I'm gonna use one of my clients accounts do you find out where most of your traffic comes from in the left-hand side menu click on acquisition and then select the overview option this report not only gives me the breakdown of where all my visitors are coming from for each channel which is known as acquisition but is also split into behavior and goal conversions for each channel separately don't worry if you can't see any conversions on your profile yet as I will show you how to set this up later so for instance in this example 60% of visitors came from an organic source 68% of them only visited one page and bounced out of the site and 10.3% of them converted to my goal however paid search seems to be converting at a higher rate so if you want more conversions which channel should you invest more into you can see how useful this is when it comes to making marketing decisions you can gather more information by clicking on the various tabs and the data will update and if you want to compare two different periods just use the compare option in the calendar and the data will also update accordingly other key metrics you need to pay close attention to are your website pages more specifically your landing pages a landing page is the page that a user arrives at after clicking on the link that leads to your website it can come from social media a Google result an email campaign etc why is this important because it helps you understand if the content of your landing pages is good enough and matches with what your audience is looking for to access your landing pages report go to the menu on the left-hand side and select behavior then choose site content and choose landing pages you should now see the landing pages report the most popular landing page on my site is unsurprisingly my home page with two thousand four hundred and eighty-one visits over the period I have selected but the third most popular pages is my dog walking business guide page with a bounce rate of almost 90 percent which is massive clearly some improvement is needed there and I've better make some changes let's have a look at another example from another account this time which runs an AdWords campaign still in the landing page report but this time I want to find out from which source people are landing on which page to do this X the drop-down called secondary dimension and start typing source then select the source medium option this will show you the exact source from where visitors lend on which page for instance most people land on their home page via organic results followed by PPC and then direct if I look at the data from the PPC source the Baths rate is high but still reasonable and it's converting at fourteen point 89 percent which is very good let's expand the list a little bit so it displays 25 rows there is a page called rates looking at the ad word traffic that drives visitors to this page shows a bounce rate of almost eighty one percent and only two conversions since I am paying Google for this traffic I think it's a good idea to stop this campaign and save myself some money as it is not converting visitors into customers once again without looking into the analytics report it would be difficult to figure this out the very last metric I want to talk about which I have mentioned many times already is conversion getting visitors to your site is one thing but ultimately you want them to complete an action such as filling in a booking form asking for quotes or downloading a coupon for example to check your conversion performance select the conversion option from the left hand side menu click on goals and select overview you should see a message telling you you need to set up a goal and that's what we are going to do in our next chapter [Music] so you really understand how powerful this is I have set up a specific page on my website that requires visitors to download a 10% discount voucher in order to get a discount on one of my services my goal is to drive as many people to the page as possible so they can download the voucher by clicking on the star download button and this is what I want to track in Google Analytics the number of people who have downloaded the voucher this is my goal to set this up go to the admin option in the left-hand side menu in the view column select the goal option and then click on the red button that says new goal goals are set up in three steps in step one you can use a predefined goal but in our case we're gonna choose the custom option and click on continue give your goal a name I'm going to give mine a meaningful name and I'm gonna call it voucher Bandol so it is easily identifiable once you have chosen the name of your goal you need to choose how you want your goal to be track there are four ways of tracking your goals destination duration pages per session and event the destination type will help you track a specific webpage each time someone goes to that page it will trigger the goal they stopped is perfect if you want to track a thank you page or a confirmation page visit duration is self-explanatory you can use this one to measure how many visitors will stay on your site for a time length you would specify the number of pages per session is also easily understood you can set a goal to track the number of pages visitors see before they leave your site events goal tracking is slightly more complex as you need to set up the event beforehand since this is a guide for beginners I won't cover this topic in this video the destination tracking type is the best fit for my goal setting as it will require visitors to access a confirmation page select destination then click continue we are now in the last set of phase goal detail in a destination section leave the option as equal to and in the blank field and to the webpage address that will trigger the goal to show as complete since I want to track the number of downloaded vouchers the URL I need to track is the URL where the voucher appears and the URL is right there so I'm just gonna copy the URL and paste it in the URL field and my goal there's something really important you need to remember here you need to copy only the part of the URL that comes after your domain name so in this instance I'm gonna remove the domain name from the URL which is ranking Academy co uk if the address of your page is case-sensitive tick the box next to the field ignore the value and the funnel options to keep things simple for now then click Save all you now need to do is wait until Google Analytics start collecting data which you can check in your report so I've let Google Analytics collect some data over the past 24 hours it is now time to verify whether or not my goals are working all you need to do is go into the left hand side menu and go to the conversion option then click on goals and then click on overview you should now see the results of your goal settings from there I can see that I had eight goal completions which means eight people downloaded my voucher and the goal conversion rate is 1 point 99 percent or 2 percent that means for every hundred visitors two of them will download my voucher although these doesn't seem like a great number a 2% conversion rate is generally quite a good result your goal results will be added across all the Google Analytics reports which will help you understand how well your marketing is working for you to see how powerful this is simply go to the acquisition report on the left hand side and then click on overview and straightaway you can instantly see which channel is bringing you more of your conversions which is yet another highly valuable piece of information that will help you make better decision moving forward you can toggle through the conversion tabs and switch from conversion rates to conversion volume and also conversion value we haven't set the conversion value in this example but feel free to do so when you set up your goal sadly Google Analytics has its limitations and can send you off track because the way it tracks your visitors can somehow be inaccurate for instance if you publish a post on Facebook Twitter or Instagram not only Google may not be able to recognize the traffic as coming from a social channel but additionally you wouldn't be able to see any report which exact posts is generating visitors or conversions in this example I have generated for batch download from a source called author the reason it's called other is because Google Analytics is unable to identify precisely where the traffic is coming from this is problematic since you really want to understand what works best thankfully there is a solution and this is what we are going to look at in the next chapter [Music] tracking your campaigns is vital if you want to truly understand if your marketing efforts are paying off if you post regularly on Facebook Instagram Twitter or any other platforms in the hope that people will visit your website by clicking on the link you need to add a special tracking code to the links so it is easily identified in Google Analytics this will for example enable you to really see what type of post brings the most traffic or the most conversions etc so you can do more of the same you can apply this method to any link that sends traffic to your site such as emails your Google my business profile and anywhere you wish to promote your business the good news is you don't do anything fancy to add this tracking code to your links since Google has developed a tool called URL builder specifically designed for this purpose go to Google and search for campaign URL builder and click on the first result alternatively go to you the URL displayed on the screen once on the page you should see multiple fields you need to fill in to start creating your code so you understand exactly how this works let's use a specific scenario and imagine I want to promote my 10% downloadable voucher via a post on Facebook a post on Google my business profile and through a newsletter to my existing customers in the website URL field enter the address where you want people to land in this case it will be the page I have called voucher download so just grab the URL copy and paste it in the website URL field the next field is the campaign source this is where you specify where the click is coming from I'll start with a Facebook instance and simply gonna enter Facebook in the field the next field is the campaign medium this is the type of link that was clicked so here I'm gonna use social since Facebook is a social network the next field my name speaks for itself define a name for your campaign I am going to call mine 10% voucher there are another two fields you can use this is if you decide to do pay-per-click campaign the first one called term is when you would enter the keyword you are targeting the second one is campaign content which would be for the version of the ad that was clicked on we don't need these in our example so we can leave them blank once you've filled all the fields scroll down where you will see a white box which has created a specific URL which includes all the parameters that you've specified this will allow you to track precisely in your Google Analytics account where the traffic is coming from all you need to do now is copy the URL and paste it in the appropriate campaign so let's have a look and do it in the Facebook campaign we're gonna create I'm just gonna go to my facebook business page and create a post which will promote my 10% voucher discount just create a post as you normally would and add the link that we've copied from the URL campaign builder into the post as a call to action all you now need to do is publish your post and verify that the link works properly repeat the same process to create specific links for each platform where you will be posting your promotion I have created a specific one for the Google my business post as well as my newsletter like the goals you will have to wait for about 24 hours before Google can start collecting data and reporting to your Google Analytics profile to see the results so it's been a couple of days since I published my promotion on my various platform let's now look at the results to check your campaign performance go to the acquisition report then select the campaign option and click on all campaigns this is where you'll see the performance of all your campaigns remember I call my campaign 10% voucher which you can see listed right there at a glance I can see that 13 people visited my voucher download page which is the page we used as a target and 6 of these users have downloaded the voucher which is a 46 point 15 percent conversion rate although the numbers are very at all since this is just a test for the sake of the video I would say it is a successful campaign purely based on the conversion rate results but here is where the magic happens if you click on the campaign itself you will see the result broken down for each Channel now I can see exactly where the traffic really came from and although Facebook seems to have driven more visitors most people who downloaded the voucher came from the Google my business post why is this useful because I know now that visitors seem to respond a lot better to a Google my business post rather than any other channel and I would think twice about investing money in a paid campaign on Facebook for example this is obviously an hypothetical scenario and you will have to figure out for yourself what works best for your own business you are now able to clearly identify where your visitors are coming from from what type of campaign and what triggers conversions which gives you deep inside and where it's best to invest your time and money understanding what makes a successful or unsuccessful campaign will help you optimize your strategy moving forward but Google Analytics is also a very useful tool to help you drive more traffic to your website and this is what I'm going to talk about in our very last chapter [Music] I've already covered some of this in our previous chapter but looking at your campaign results will help you immensely to target the right channel and drive more traffic to your site but here is another four tips for you to consider find your best pages and create more of the same to do that just go to the behavior report and select site content and all pages select a white date range from the top right hand side corner and click on apply this will show you your top pages by number of views however we want the pages that people find the most interesting click on the comparison option on the bottom right hand side and then from the drop down select a ver egde time on page the pages with the biggest green bar are the pages that users are spending the most time on or find the most interesting identify what these pages are about which topic and create more pages around the same theme this should yield more traffic and now for tip number 2 improve your organic traffic with page titles once again let's go into the behavior report select SCI content but this time we're gonna choose landing pages keep a broad date range right above the graph click on the add segment option and tick the all users box scroll down and select the organic traffic option and click on apply your report is now showing you all the pages visitors have landed on after finding your site in a search engine go to the secondary dimension option and type page title select the option once you report update you can see what keywords your pages are optimized for based on the page title this way you can identify pages that are poorly optimized or optimize existing ones further so you can get more traffic through search engines tip number three lower your bounce rate just in case you've already forgotten bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website when navigate away from the site after viewing only one page arising bounce rate is a pure sign that the page a user lands on is boring or off-putting and users don't want to explore any other pages according to a study conducted by the very reputable brand Eden from backlinko low bounce rate is associated with higher Google rankings however a low bounce rate alone is not going to give you better rankings but it will impact a lot of other signals that will give you better rankings and therefore more traffic that's why it's important to reduce your bounce rate to find out where it is go to the audience reports then overview where you'll see the average bounce rate since this is an average for your site it doesn't tell you very much what we want is to find out the bounce rate for specific pages go to the behavior reports again then choose a site content and then all pages this is where you will find pages that have received the most page views order the list by the highest bounce rate the ordering it will be based on the highest bounce rate regardless of the amount of visitors who have viewed the pages we want to ignore the pages with next to no traffic and really zoom in on the ones that have at least a minimum amount of traffic to do this select the advanced option and search for site usage then scroll down and click on page views select the greater than option and then choose the minimum amount of page views you want to filter let's say here we go for at least 50 page views then click apply this will give you the list of pages which have the highest bounce rate and have received at least 50 visitors within the date range you have selected this is now an opportunity for you to look at the content that needs to be improved so the bounce rate is not so high here is my fourth and final tip check that your pages are working for your business on mobile devices over the past couple of years website traffic on mobile devices has overtaken desktop traffic that's why it is very important to understand if your web pages are working for your business on mobile devices to do this go to the audience report then scroll down to the mobile option and click on overview this report will show you the traffic you are getting per device type as you can see there is very little difference between desktop and mobile traffic at the number of visitors using a tablet - the number of mobile users and then desktop is no longer the main driver of traffic in order to see if your pages are working on mobile check the bounce rate per device percentages if your bounce rate for mobile is higher it means your pages are less effective on mobile a higher bounce rate on mobile is generally expected but what you want to understand is which page exactly are not working well to do this go to the secondary dimension and start typing page then select landing page this will add the performance for each page per device separately although the report per landing page so you can pair pages side by side you can now compare the bounce rate per page for each device if you notice a big difference between devices it means you should reconsider the way your page is being presented to the users in that specific device improving it will increase engagement on your site and consequently your traffic and now the moment you've all been waiting for my customized Google Analytics dashboard specifically designed for small business owners on this dashboard you will find most of the metrics we discussed so it makes it easy for you to track what's happening on your site in less than a minute today each widget on the dashboard has been given a specific name so it is simple for you to understand what the data means click on the link in the description below to download the dashboard directly into your Google Analytics brought fire we're done for today thanks very much for watching if you found this tutorial useful please give me a thumbs up if you're new to my channel don't forget to subscribe and to hit the bell button for any comments or questions post them right below the video and I will respond to them hope to see you soon happy marketing you

Channel: Ranking Academy

Views: 591,787

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Keywords: google analytics, google analytics tutorial, google analytics tutorial for beginners, google analytics for beginners, google analytics explained, google analytics video, google analytics training, google analytics tutorial for beginners 2019, google analytics explained simply, google analytics training beginners, ranking academy

Id: gBeMELnxdIg

Length: 36min 18sec (2178 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 25 2018