ANDY GRANOWITZ: Hi.
Andy Granowitz here, developer advocate for Google Analytics.
Today I'm going to talk a little about setting up Google
Analytics for the first time.
Google Analytics is known for being straightforward to deploy
on your website or app.
And although this is true, there are a few important things
to consider when you install Google
Analytics for the first time to make
sure you get the most out of the powerful features
that Google Analytics offers.
The most basic measurement track--
measurement is going to be pageview or screen view
tracking on web and app, respectively.
For most websites, setting up pageview tracking
is straightforward.
Add the Google Analytics JavaScript snippet
on every page, and Google Analytics
will count each time the page is loaded.
This is a little bit more involved on mobile apps.
But once you set up screen view tracking
using iOS or Android SDK, the results are very similar.
Google Analytics will measure a lot by default, even
with this basic setup.
For example, with just page or screen view tracking,
Google Analytics will automatically
allow you to analyze the session duration, time
on specific pages or screens; geo-information, like city
and state; technology data, like mobile device or browser;
user flow between pages or screens;
and where users are coming from, like search engines,
social networks, referrals from other sites, and so on.
So there's a lot that's captured automatically.
But with some customization, Google Analytics
can capture user interactions that
are unique to your site or app and that are really
important to your business.
Google Analytics offers many different customizations
for many different use cases ranging
from measuring e-commerce to how long resources take to load,
but there are three that I'd like
to highlight when first getting set up--
events, custom dimensions, and campaign tagging.
Events are used to measure interactions within a given
page, in other words, anything that is not
a page load or a new screen.
But keep in mind that you don't need to measure everything.
Think about what are the most important user interactions
and plan to measure those.
This will prevent data overload when doing analysis.
Custom dimensions.
As we discussed, Google Analytics
captures a lot of data by default.
But often, the most important information
is very specific to your business,
making it difficult for Google Analytics
to measure without a little help from you.
With custom dimensions, you can send custom data
to Google Analytics, which will automatically
get correlated with all of the other data
that Google Analytics collects.
For example, when signing up for your newsletter,
if the user has the option to identify their industry,
you may want to pass this information as a custom
dimension.
Another example might be when a user signs up for your service,
whether they signed up for the 30-day trial,
a standard membership, or a premium membership.
The final customization that I'd like to talk about
is campaign tagging.
Google Analytics looks at the HTTP refer
and does its best to figure out where
your traffic is coming from.
But when you run custom campaigns, like through an ad
network, or if you're doing some email marketing,
or, really, any other medium, you
can use the Google Analytics URL Builder
to add query parameters to the URL you're
promoting to your users.
When users click on that link, the parameters you've added
are automatically recognized by Google Analytics.
So in your reports, you'll be able to find out exactly
which campaigns brought users to your site or app
and what they ultimately did.
One special case.
If you use AdWords, I strongly recommend
that you link Google Analytics and AdWords accounts.
By doing so, your AdWords campaigns will automatically
get tagged with campaign parameters,
and a lot of other valuable data will
be imported into your Google Analytics account.
In addition to this deep integration with AdWords,
Google Analytics can also integrate
with other Google products, such as AdSense, Webmaster Tools,
AdMob, and more.
Be sure to find out if there's an easy way
to connect Google Analytics and whatever
technologies you are using, whether they are Google or not.
For more information on these customizations and more,
check out the links below or go to
developers.google.com/analytics.