- Overall Google's goal has been
to make Google Analytics both easy to use,
but still incredibly powerful,
which can be a difficult balancing act.
Before we dive into the reports
and the analysis tools available,
let's discuss a few things about the Ecosystem
of Google Analytics itself.
The first thing to talk about is
how the levels of Google Analytics are nested,
at the top of the hierarchy is the Google Analytics account.
This is your login, your password to all
the Google services, Gmail, Hangouts, analytics ,ad-words
and so on.
As we've touched on before,
you create your Google Analytics account
with your overall Google user login,
and the difference between those two
can be a little bit confusing,
but it is important to know
that your account for Google Analytics is different
than your Google account.
Now, while you start with one Google Analytics account,
when you first begin using Google Analytics,
you can actually create numerous accounts,
all nested under that one Google account,
according to your business needs.
This account level usually serves as the entity
for an entire businesses analytics reporting.
So as long as you just have one single business,
you loan a report on,
we suggest you just stick
to that one account for the business,
but you may consider having access to several accounts.
If, for example,
your position requires analyzing multiple clients websites,
or like you see in this slide,
maybe you have one for your personal website
and maybe one for your company
and they're both tied back to your one account.
Or if your company has multiple brands
and you have multiple different sites
that are completely unique entities,
you could have different accounts for those as well.
Now, within an account is at least one property.
We generally recommend a business to have a property
for each website or platform
and by platform I mean, for example,
if you have both a website
and an application for your business,
like a mobile application,
you may have two properties
in that will report on each individual platform,
so, one for web, one for the mobile apps.
Now within each of those properties
there're something we call views,
views are really powerful
and advanced users are going to find all kinds
of ways to tweak them,
but they can be a little bit confusing at first,
think of each view, like a lens into that database
that can be configured completely independently
of the others.
For example, one view you may want to have data
from just California,
or maybe you have multiple country domains
that feed into this one account,
but you can create these views
that are going to separate out
just to your French site for example.
In some ways it's like you have a duplicate data set,
tracks that same site and all coming
from that one tracking code you put on,
but they can be configured completely differently.
And that goes for both the data
and for the permissions that
you're going to give users,
we'll see that in just a minute.
Now you can create up to 50 these views,
every web property should have at least three views.
If you're going to experiment and go down that row,
everyone should create at least these three.
So first, it's often useful to have a main reporting view
where you can do the majority of your analysis.
This can be the current one that creates for you.
Second, you should have a test view
where you can make some mistakes.
You can try new filters,
you can generally mess with things
and see what happens with no fear of hurting
your actual data.
So create that view that's just for testing.
Lastly, you're going to have a raw unfiltered view.
That's just a pristine data,
no filters on it whatsoever.
You captures all the data
and that way you can make sure
at least then you have all the data.
If you ever need to go back
and take a look at it,
because remember the data that comes through this view,
if you filter it, it's going to be processed
through that filter, way before it
even reaches your reporting interface.
And what that means is you can't go back
and revert the data back to its raw form
once you filtered it,
because of that, it's really the best practice
to have this unfiltered view
that acts as a bit of insurance policy
against any mistakes you might make in your main reporting
or particularly testing one,
you can always go back
and check that raw unfettered data.
Now let's move into the tool
and take a quick look at how we move across
these accounts, properties and views.
Have a go pure and click on here.
We have our accounts, we have our properties
and we have our views across here.
Now on the top, we can star a view.
We can go up here and click
and it'll show us our starred views.
Now, of course I only have one here
as well as our recent.
And it's a way we can organize
if you start getting lots of these inside of here,
if you want to create new properties and views,
we'll look at the admin section of it later,
but you can come over here
and create property three views.
So we talked about creating those three views
you could do so right here.
And lastly, we will talk about the search navigation here.
If you get quite a few these in here,
you can search through them
and filter that way as well.
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