Hey everyone!
Jason here, digital marketing consultant.
And this google analytics guide, you're going to learn about the 10 most important rapports
when it comes to understanding how to turn all those website visitors into happy paying
customers.
Time stamps below along with some other helpful videos to getting google analytics installed
and running some paid traffic campaigns.
So if you don't already have google analytics installed, that's okay.
This is going to help you a lot and then I’ll link up in the cards in the description to
a video that walks you through how to install it on your site.
So when it comes to google analytics, there's only three questions you really have to be
asking yourself for these 10 reports to answer.
The first one of course is, Where is your traffic coming from?
The second one is who are they?
And number three is what are they doing once they get to your site?
So those are the three questions we're going to answer using our 10 reports.
And of course the first thing we want to do is look at where is our traffic coming from.
This is arguably the most important and the most powerful feature of google analytics.
And to answer this question we're going to be using the source medium report.
Then we're also going to be using campaigns.
Now, campaigns do require something called UTM.
Don't worry, I’ll show you how to set that up, because it's one of the first things you
should do once you have google analytics installed on your site, but for this we're going to
be using our acquisition report to look at all traffic by source medium and then of course
by campaign.
So let's go ahead jump right into google analytics here.
The first thing you're going to do once you get to your home page here is go to acquisition
and then click on all traffic source medium.
So this is going to be our first stop.
So what we're looking at here is a breakdown of where all of our traffic from across the
world has come from.
So if we take a little look here, you'll see source is where the traffic came from.
The specific website or social media platform.
Whereas medium is the type of traffic.
So medium could be something like organic or referral, so let's go ahead and take a
little bit of a deeper dive on medium.
So medium tells you information about how someone got to your site.
So for example, if you're running Facebook ads, you want to know the difference between
someone clicking on our-- an organic Facebook post versus someone clicking on an ad.
And so that's what medium does, because they both come from Facebook or they both come
from google, but we want to know was it paid for, was it did affiliate do it, was it some
sort of campaign or promotion.
And so that's what medium tells us.
And this is really, really important, because we can start to compare how our posts and
content does organically versus our paid advertising or our affiliate promotions do.
And so that's all there is to it to medium and source.
So going back to medium and source here, you can actually take this a step further and
go over to all campaigns and then we're going to go ahead and scroll down here.
And you'll be able to see all of your campaigns by name.
Now, we'll go through how to set this up in a moment, I just want to show you the power
of setting up UTM parameters and creating your own campaigns.
So what we're looking at right here with these campaigns is, everything that's being promoted
under the sun in one easy to read dashboard.
So whether we're doing YouTube ads, Facebook ads, Pinterest ads, twitter ads, LinkedIn
ads, all of that information can be put right here, so you can see how-- whatever product
or service you're promoting is doing across all of your platforms.
So to do that, we'd come up here to secondary dimension and then we would click on acquisition
and then we'd be able to sort by source and medium.
Now if you're a little confused here, that's okay.
Give it another 90 seconds, it’s gonna make perfect sense.
So then what we can also do is click on advertising and we can see how our campaigns are doing
by the keywords that we're bidding on or by the exact ad or blog post that's being promoted.
Now, what's really cool is if we went ahead and clicked on campaign content, all of a
sudden, we're going to be able to see the exact ad blog post video, that's driving traffic
to our site and which product or service it's promoting.
Now, this is only possible if you use something called UTM parameters, which is how you set
all of this up.
So we're going to transition into how to set up UTM parameters and then we'll come back
to this report.
I just want to show you this first, because this is arguably the most powerful part of
google analytics.
So chances are you've been browsing the web and you've seen some URL like this.
Where there's a bunch of random text after it.
You know, how is a URL that long?
Like what is going on here?
Well, they're using something called UTM parameters, which is what allows us to create the report
that you were just looking at.
So if we broke this down a little more, you could see that there are actually different
sections UTM source medium campaign content.
So I hope it's starting to come together.
That's exactly what we're looking at in the analytics report.
So if we take a deeper dive here, you can see that we can tell it what the source of
the traffic is, what medium it is or are we paying for, it is it organic ,is it someone
else promoting us, what the campaign name is.
And then of course the keyword, which I generally don't recommend using.
And then the content code itself what specific ad blog post or video.
So essentially what you would do is every time you want to post an ad, or you want to
promote a page on your website, you would use a free tool to create this URL.
And then when someone clicks on that URL, instead of google analytics you're saying
“oh!
It came from Facebook”, all of a sudden, you're telling google analytics all this extra
information so that inside of your dashboard you can see information on your specific post
or video.
So to do this, all you need to do is head over to google just search UTM builder or
duckduckgo or whatever else you like to use, right?
And then click on the first result campaign builder.
So if you come over here to the campaign builder, I’m going to go through this a little briefly.
I'll link up in the cards in the description there's a full 20 minute video that goes through
super deep dive on how to set all this up, right?
So all you do is come into this and you'd start by typing in your original website URL.
So this is the URL that you would have shared, right?
So let's say we're promoting one of our products, right?
And we're linking people over to our product page.
Well, instead of taking that raw product page link and just pasting it everywhere under
the sun, we would come to this tool.
So let's say we're selling our UTM builder, right?
So actmarketing.io/utmbuilder and that's the sales page.
Actually don't go to that, because it's made up, right?
But let's just say that's the product that we're selling.
Well, let's say we're promoting it on YouTube.
So we go ahead and type in campaign source YouTube, what kind of campaign-- what's the
campaign medium.
Let's say we're just doing it in a normal video like this.
We're not paying to promote the video, so we just type in organic.
Well, what's the campaign name?
I highly recommend just using the campaign name to represent whatever product or service
that you are promoting.
That way it's standard across all of your different platforms.
And then campaign term, let's say it's google analytics.
And what's the campaign content?
Let's just say the video is internally coded m150, right?
And then we can copy this URL and paste it in the description box of our YouTube video.
So now, every time someone clicks on that link, it tells google analytics it is from
YouTube, it was organic we didn't pay for it, it is for the UTM campaign it's selling
the UTM product.
And the campaign term is google analytics which is what the video was about.
And then this specific video was m150.
And we get all of that information instantaneously, just because we took this little extra step.
So if we go back over to our report here, let's say we're going to go ahead and take
a look at the first campaign.
So I want to show you how powerful this is.
Let's click through and see what ads or what videos or blog posts are doing the best promoting
one of our offers here, the sales funnel template.
So if I click on the sales funnel template, it'll take me back to source medium, which
isn't going to help very much, because we're only promoting on YouTube.
But if we were doing this on YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, google ads, all of those
would be listed here and we would be able to see side-by-side comparisons exactly how
these different traffic sources are performing.
Here, I’m going to go into ads because I actually have some data to show you.
So we'll go ahead and click on secondary dimension.
I went to advertising ad content.
And now I can see all of the individual videos and how many times the link in the description
box was clicked.
So if your fellow nerd like me, hopefully this is just crazy cool, right?
Because now, we can actually start to analyze what types of videos or blog posts or ads
are getting more clicks, are getting more opt-ins, if you set up conversion tracking,
which is a little bit advanced.
So I’ll link to a video later on that will go through how to do that.
And when you're analyzing we can go in and see okay, what is different about video m15
that got us so many clicks versus all the other ones, right?
And what's really cool is that this doesn't care what platform it came from, right?
So let's say for example-- just for example purposes m115 was on YouTube, and then m12
was Facebook, and b41 was LinkedIn.
Well, we can easily see in one dashboard that m15 on YouTube did the best, right?
So then we can go create more content like m15 for the other platforms where our other
posts didn't do as well, or vice versa.
So if this is still a little confusing, go ahead and comment in the comment section below,
because I still read and reply to every single one.
I'm starting off with this I know it sounds complex, but once you get the hang of this,
this is the arguably the most-- I have to say arguably, because I know some other people
disagree.
But for me, I think this is the most powerful tool you have at your disposal, when it comes
to google analytics, because you can literally see exactly how your content and ads and different
traffic sources are performing in one easy to read report.
So that does it for acquisition.
The next step of course is once they're on your website is learning about who has actually
clicked all of those links, right?
So this is going to be who is your ideal customer.
And for this we're going to look at age and gender reports, and then we're going to look
at interests and locations.
So let's go ahead and jump back into google analytics and we'll start with age and gender.
So we'll go ahead and click on audience this time and then we'll click on demographics
and we just need to click overview.
Now, when you click to overview, if you haven't already enabled it, you're going to see something
like this.
So right after you're done watching this video, this is the first thing to do, before you
set up UTM parameters.
So do this and then UTM.
I know it kind of was wasn't in order, but UTM was important.
That's okay.
So go ahead, make sure you enable this, because by default it is not enabled.
By the way, every time you create a new view, which is an advanced thing you can do, you
also need to make sure that you enable this.
This is not turned on automatically and no google analytics is not retroactive.
So if you haven't turned this on, it's not collecting any data, right?
Luckily we have for this, so I’m going to switch over to what it would look like if
you had already enabled it.
And the first thing I need to note is the percentage of users.
Google's doing their creepy tracking thing, they're watching every what most people are
doing on the internet, but they're only at about 40 to 50 most of the time.
So this data is going to be 40 to 50 of all of your users.
So this isn't 100%, right?
So use this data as a suggestion as opposed to set in stone, right?
And so you can use this information to better understand who's clicking on your links and
of course with your advertising as well.
That's about as complex and all the insight you're going to get out of these two reports,
right?
So if we go on down to interest and overview, this is going to be helpful if you're running
things on the google ads network.
So this is going to be search, this is going to be Gmail, this is going to be display,
and this is going to be YouTube.
And I’m sure there's one I’m forgetting, right?
So anything google ads related, these audiences you can actually target inside of google ads.
If you're not using google ads or you don't plan on using google ads, then go ahead and
skip this, because it's not going to be helpful.
And just remember to keep in mind that, this is not all of your users, right?
You can see here it's still only 40% 46% of the total website users.
So don't take this as set in stone if you're using google ads.
So just because you use one of these doesn't mean your google ads is going to knock it
out of the park, right?
So the final one here with understanding who your website visitors are, we can go ahead
and go to geo and location.
And this is where it gets a little creepy, but the good news is it is anonymous, so don't
freak out too much.
I've had some weird comments in the past about it like, “oh my gosh!
They know where I am”.
No not really, not you specifically, but in general, right?
So we can go ahead and scroll down here and see how our website traffic is dispersed across
the globe.
And then what we can also do is actually take a deeper dive on specific countries states
or provinces.
So if we go back over to the top here, let's say we want to learn more about the united
states.
So we can click on the US and then you can mouse around and start to see your traffic
numbers by state.
And then let's say you've gone through all the states and go, “hey, I want to know
more about California for some reason”, right?
So we can go ahead and click on California and all of a sudden we can start seeing down
to the actual cities and areas where we're getting the most amount of clicks and traffic.
Now, for local based businesses, this is really, really important, because it's going to help
you better understand where locally your customers are.
Now, you can't go down to zip codes and neighborhoods, because well that'll probably be a little
too much information, but don't worry because even though google analytics is tracking everything
we do, it is all anonymous so it's not like someone who has a website will be able to
figure out that you exactly where you live or you and just like you won't be able to
figure out where people who are visiting your site live.
So hopefully that doesn't creep you out too much and that information is actually helpful.
So that does it for the reports you can use to figure out who your website visitors are.
So finally we have what are they doing.
And so this is going to be where we're going to be looking at behavior flow, page engagement
and bounces, so we just want to understand what are people doing once they come to our
site?
What pages are working?
What pages aren't working?
So we'll go back over to google analytics here click on behavior and then click on behavior
flow.
Now this is really sweet, because you can actually see how people progress through your
site.
So you can see what pages most people normally land on, when they first start when they first
start your site, when they first come to your site.
And then you can see the sequential pages.
So you can start to better understand how your site's user experience is good and where
it might be falling short.
So for example, if someone comes to your site and they immediately are going to the search
function, well that probably means that your site links aren't really helping them find
what they actually want, right?
So you can actually click on all of these different green squares to see detailed information
about the individual pages, but what I want to call your attention to is the very first
start.
So this you can change based upon the landing page, so the first page they hit or the source
or even the campaign.
So if we come up to the settings here, you can change it to campaign, source or landing
page here, I’m going to change it to source.
So we can see how different traffic sources affect what people do on the website.
Now it might look a little confusing, because it's hard to follow those flows.
But you can actually click just for one traffic source and see the flow of traffic.
So for example, we can see here that YouTube and direct are the most now when you see direct
forgot to mention this earlier.
That just means google analytics doesn't know, right?
So that's where UTM parameters comes in to shorten the amount of direct traffic that
you have, because chances are people aren't really just literally typing in your website
name.
Direct is more just google analytics doesn't know where the traffic came from.
So this is a really, really powerful tool just play with it.
It's not something that's scientific you just click through and you'll start to after 15
- 20 minutes start to really begin to understand, how people are behaving on your site.
Now, when it comes to specific pages, we're going to come over to the left hand side again
and we're going to go to site content and content drill down.
So here, we're going to be able to see the most visited pages and how they perform against
each other.
So to do that, we're going to go over to the right hand side and click on this tiny little
box here and then we're going to get a nice little graph showing us a comparison percentage.
So we'll click on the little down arrow here and then go to bounce rate.
So essentially what we're doing here is we're looking at on given the average bounce rate
for our entire site is this page, how-- does this page have a high bounce rate or does
it have a low bounce rate?
So red is bad here.
So we'll see the first two are actually below average for our bounce rate, whereas the next
two are high.
So what we want to do is we want to go to those pages and try and figure out why is
someone bouncing.
Now, all a bounce rate is is when someone goes to a page and then immediately leaves,
so they essentially bounce.
They don't really wait for the page to fully load or they're there for less than a couple
of seconds.
So what google analytics is telling us is someone clicks a link, sees the page and goes
that's not what I wanted and then leaves.
Well, that's not what we want to have happen on our site, right?
So looking at these pages we go through number three and number four and try and figure out
where are people coming from so we can go source medium and see where the traffic's
coming from.
And then try and figure out why are people unhappy when they're coming to these pages.
And so, we can start to improve our site performance, because we can figure-- we can hopefully figure
out why people don't like these pages.
And so that does it for the 10 rapports and three big questions you need to ask when going
through google analytics.
So make sure you hit that like button, subscribe for more deep dive marketing tutorials just
like this one.
And now that you're done with this video.
Make sure you check out the link in the cards and the description to the video that walks
you through how to set up your UTM parameters.
That's going to be day number one, once analytics is installed get UTM parameters up, so you
can start using those acquisition reports, because all the other reports we talked about
they're already there, they're already working, they're already collecting data, but the UTM
and the acquisition report-- UTM and acquisition, that's not being recorded right now.
So you want to get that set up as quickly as possible.
So thank you so much for watching.
Comment below with your questions and as always, keep building the business you love.