- In this video, we're gonna talk about the new
User Explorer report within Google Analytics,
and I'll show you how you can identify individual users,
see what they're doing on your website,
and give you tips on how you can leverage
the user ID feature to make better sense of your data.
All and more coming up, so let's dive in.
(upbeat music)
Hi there, and welcome to another video of
Measureschool.com, where we teach you
the data-driven way of digital marketing.
Alright, in this video, we're gonna talk about this new
report within Google Analytics, which you can find under
Audience, and it's called the
User Explorer report, which came out recently.
Now this User Explorer report really takes care of looking
at data and Google Analytics on an individual user basis.
Most of the data that you see within
Google Analytics is aggregate data.
You are not able to find a specific user, where he
came from, what he did on your website,
and if you converted, with this new User Explorer report,
we have that data available.
And for the first time, Google Analytics actually shows us
the client ID by default, so a dimension that was previously
already in Google Analytics but not shown to the user
is now available in this report.
So, here you can see the client ID, which represents one
individual user on your website, and if you click through
on one of these, you can actually see the
different interactions that he took on your website.
So, a view, an event, if you have these installed,
and also, let's go further back here, purchases or
goal completions that were achieved on your website.
Now, this is a great report because we can see
how many sessions the user generated, how long he stayed
on the website, and the revenue he made on our site.
We can also see the Acquisition Channel and what devices
he used to come to our website.
Now, all of this is possible because Google Analytics sets
a cookie when you enter a website, and gives out
a randomly generated client ID.
And this client ID identifies the user to Google Analytics.
If the user leaves the site and comes back with
the same cookie and the same client ID, Google Analytics
will recognize this and continue the user record,
and all the different page views, events, and sessions
will be attributed to this one user.
So, we now have a great view on an individual user basis.
Now, unfortunately, this client ID doesn't tell us much.
We could capture the client ID with Google Tag Manager
and I explain that in another video
on custom JavaScript variables, on how to pick up this
information, and later you could match up the client ID
with an email address that is in your system.
Please be aware that you are not allowed to send in any
personal identifiable information, such as the email address
into Google Analytics because that's against
the terms of service, and you would be endangered
that your account would be shut down.
Now, this is all well and good.
The client ID is visible now within Google Analytics,
but when you're looking at individual users,
the cookie-based method is actually not very reliable,
and Google Analytics has a second feature in order to
authenticate the user to the system in a different way,
which is called the user ID feature.
And I have this enabled on Measureschool,
so we can take a look at the data here,
where we only see people who are actually identified to the
system, and we also have the User Explorer report available.
Now, this shows my individual user ID that I give out by our
system, which means I have a number for every user who's
registered on Measureschool.
And once he authenticates through a login, I'll be able to
let Google Analytics know this is an individual user,
which makes the checking much more reliable on a user level.
So, right here, we can take a look at this individual user,
and see what he has done on our website.
All pretty anonymous data because at this point,
you don't know who this user actually is.
I would need to go into my CRM system and look up this user.
Then I could see individual steps that he took,
and how long he has been on our website.
You go back here again.
There is no real way in Google Analytics to see the
individual user by email address or the name, but you can
match the data up with your CRM or your email system.
You could do this offline, but there's actually
a great plugin by David Simpson, who has built a little
Chrome plugin, which is the PII Viewer for Google Analytics,
and you can download this
in the extension store of Google Chrome.
Now, with this plugin, we can simply connect our CRM,
for example, MailChimp, or import a CSV file.
I have something prepared here,
so I'll just go ahead and upload this.
And it's the simplest CSV where I have the user ID
and the email address in there and the
display name, and so on and so on.
So, the user ID will actually be used as a key to match up
to the data that we have in Google Analytics.
And if you go back here and reload our page,
every time a user ID is shown,
we'll have the name of the person inside it.
We also have a little bar down here where we can do the
real mapping, so for example, I'll go with the display name
here, and we see some personal identifiable information.
Obviously, this is not real data of the users on my website,
and obviously, this is also not stored within
Google Analytics itself but on my browser.
So, this is a great way to actually match up the data that
I have available in a CRM system or an offline source like
a CSV file to the actual record within Google Analytics.
So, if you have that data available somewhere offline,
you can build it into your system and see the data
right next to the record of the user.
This is especially useful when thinking about this
User Explorer report, because we now know who this person
actually is and can see what he has done on our website.
So, that's already it with this
week's video of Measureschool.com.
If you are interested in building in the user ID feature
for your website with Google Tag Manager, check out our
Advance course at measureschool.com/gaadvanced,
and if you liked this video, please subscribe so we can
bring you more videos every week.
My name is Julian.
'Til next time.