Hey everyone, Jason here, digital marketer.
And in this Google analytics guide, you're going to learn the only three things you need
to master as a beginner to put the full power of Google analytics, working towards improving
your advertising and marketing, timestamp table of contents in the description, along
with a link to the full tutorial from this training, I've pulled out two specific parts
from the hour long training that really will help you 80, 20, the process of focusing in
on what's going to be most important when it comes to getting up and running with Google
analytics.
If you want a tutorial on how to install and configure, I'll link up that in the description
as well.
So with that, let's go ahead and dive in.
Now, chances are, you've probably clicked a link before, and then you've looked in the
URL and you've seen this crazy long text.
You're like, what is all that stuff?
Well, that is something called UTM parameters.
So when you create links for social, for your advertising, for any your emails, any place
else, what you can do is you can actually add information to the end of your URL, to
tell Google analytics things like where the traffic came from, what campaign it was, what
email was it, what specific video or ad was it?
So you can get really detailed here.
So this is an example of what a UTM URL might look like.
And at first glance you go, what on earth is going on there?
But when we color code it, you can see that there are four distinct pieces of information.
We have source, medium, campaign, and content.
So source being YouTube is where's the traffic coming from?
Medium is what type of traffic is it?
Is it organic?
Did we pay for it as a referral?
Is it affiliate?
And then we have a campaign name and then we have content, which is essentially going
to be the blog post or video or a Facebook post someone came from, or it will be your
specific ad name inside of your Facebook, Google, Instagram, Pinterest, whatever ads,
LinkedIn, whatever ads you're running.
So when it comes to how you should name these, number one, they need to be all lowercase
all the time.
Everything in Google analytics should just be lowercase, because if you change the case,
like let's say, for example, here, you're looking at AN dash general.
Well, if I capitalize AN, Google analytics is going to think that's a completely different
campaign.
And then it's just going to split the traffic between two different campaigns.
And when we're trying to analyze, we go, okay, great.
Now I have to download it in Excel and put them together.
And then, it's just a mess, make sure everything is under case.
And you name everything the exact same.
Here's a quick rundown of what you could use for staying organized with your URLs.
Remember a timestamp table of contents to come back to this diagram.
So in your campaign source, this is required.
You'd say something like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, essentially, where did
the traffic come from?
Then medium.
You could say CPC, a banner ad.
Maybe it was from a newsletter.
It's an organic, it's an affiliate or referral.
And the next campaign name, this would essentially be what's the name of the actual campaign.
And this is where you decide, right?
So if you're running Facebook or YouTube ads, then it could be the actual specific campaign
name.
Or you could just say, you know what?
I have this particular offer and any traffic that is driving to this particular page or
trying to sell this could be that campaign, right?
So later on when we're doing analysis, you'll see that that's actually how we organize our
content campaigns.
Next we have campaign term, and this is really only going to be used if you are doing some
advanced things inside of your Google ads.
So that will be taken care of inside of your Google ads automatically.
We don't have to worry about it right now.
Now finally, when it comes to giving your ad a name, this doesn't necessarily have to
be advertising.
So if you're not running paid advertising, what you can do is you can come up with codes
or names for your content.
So if you have a particular blog post, that's sending people to a landing page or sales
page, then you can go ahead and give that blog, post a code or a name, same thing, if
you're doing YouTube videos, or if you're doing Facebook posts, obviously Instagram,
you only have the link in the bio unless you're running ads.
So you don't have to worry about it there.
And you'll see later on when we're analyzing how you can actually apply the campaign and
the content code to easily see exactly what piece of content is driving you the most traffic
or conversions.
And that is all there is to it, to the breakdown of the URL.
Now, do you need to type this out every time you want to create a URL?
Of course not.
Google has your back when it comes to a free tool.
So all you have to do is go to Google, just type in UTM builder.
The first result is going to be a free tool from Google, where you literally just fill
in the blanks for the URL you want to create.
And then Google will automatically give you the tracking link.
You copy and paste that into your blog, post your Facebook post, whatever you're doing.
And then now every time someone clicks that link, all that information is going to be
sent over to Google analytics and you're going to have next level tracking.
It is one of the most powerful things you can do with Google analytics and is really
the first step to actually having Google analytics go from something that's Oh, that's a nice
data to, oh my gosh, this is such pure gold.
Like this is really…
I can't stress enough how important this particular step is.
And that's why we skipped all that other configuration stuff, because that doesn't matter if we're
not meticulously tracking all of the traffic that's coming to our site.
So now that we have all of that, we're ready to actually start analyzing.
So let's take that all of that data and turn it into actionable information.
And to do that, we only need to answer three questions and use a couple of reports to start
extracting some value out of Google analytics right now.
And the three questions are, who are your customers?
Where are they coming from?
And how do you get more?
So for your audience, we're going to be looking at age, gender, location, and then something
called affinity and in market audiences.
So in your main dashboard, we're not in our settings, we've gone to overview now, you
are going to be looking under audience.
We're going to be looking at three separate places.
We're going to look at demographics, interests, and geo.
So let's go ahead and start with demographics.
Demographics.
You just have to click the overview.
And it's going to tell you the approximate age and gender of people who are visiting
your site.
And that's all that you really need to look at here.
You can play with the date ranges and do some comparisons to see how these data has changed
over time.
But essentially that's all you need.
You want to know what general age your customer or site visitors are and then what general
genders they are.
So the next one we want to look at is interest and interest is interesting because Google
actually makes something called affinity in market.
They also have topic audiences, but we won't get into that here.
So what you're looking at here are groups of people that Google has created.
Now very simply put, affinity is pretty much hobbyists and people who are actively interested
in a particular topic or have shown any behavior over an extended period of time.
Whereas in market is more of those people who are actively looking to buy.
So in market is where Google is trying to say, these people are probably going to purchase
something around this particular topic, product or service very soon.
Whereas affinity is these people generally seem to be interested in it and they probably
have a hobby or an extended interest.
So if you're doing any sort of YouTube advertising or Google advertising, then this first one
affinity is going to be very helpful.
If you're doing any sort of Google search or display, then this in market audience is
going to be very helpful in terms of trying it out inside of your ads account.
And if you're not doing anything with Google ads, then this probably isn't going to be
too helpful, especially because as you can see the percentages here on, unless you're
in a very niche place, or you have a website that is pretty much completely aligned with
one of these audiences, you're going to find overall percentage of people who fall into
one of these categories is pretty low.
I mean, 3 or 6% of total traffic for this website falling into one of these categories.
Isn't all that helpful in terms of choosing what audiences might really be good for advertising,
but it is a good place to keep an eye on.
Now, finally, we have location and location is going to be very helpful if you're a local
based business.
So if you are doing any sort of local advertising or marketing, this is going to be really cool.
And it's going to be really creepy once you realize how much information people have on
us, when we're going around, just browsing the internet.
So of course you have a map overview and you can scroll down and see the countries, but
also on the map, what you can do is you can click through to a specific country and then
you can actually start clicking through territories and States and you can go all the way down
to the city level.
So taking a look at a live example here, you can see for this particular site, most people
have come from the U.S, only four people from Mongolia.
So let's go ahead and click on the U.S and take a look at which States are getting the
most traffic for this particular site and no surprise.
The usual suspects, California, Texas, Florida, and this is going to be New York.
Now, if I wanted to take a deeper dive and really understand where these 1500 people
were from California, I can go ahead and click and zero in even more.
And all of a sudden I can start mousing over and seeing the individual cities in California
and zoom in here 105 from San Francisco, a 20 fro from Alameda.
And this is as creepy as it looks.
I mean, I'm literally seeing exactly where people are located when they are visiting
this particular site.
So if you are doing any sort of local based advertising, this is really going to be powerful
in helping you figure out where you should be targeting your ads.
Now, when it comes just acquisition and where people are coming from, the good news is even
if you haven't set up any UTM parameters yet, and given Google analytics, all that extra
juicy data, Google analytics does a somewhat, barely decent job of figuring out where people
come from, even if you're not using UTM.
So what you would do here is we're actually going to look at all traffic data, and then
we're going to be taking a look at source and medium, just so I can illustrate how powerful
UTM parameters can be once they start working in your favor.
So first let's just go ahead and go to all traffic.
And here, it's going to break down the different types of traffic that are coming to your site.
So under channels here, you can see our organic traffic, our social traffic, referral traffic,
direct traffic.
Now a keynote on quick insight on direct traffic, direct traffic is analytical way of saying
we don't know where they came from.
So you don't want a high direct traffic number, it might at first glance, you will be like,
oh yeah.
People are going straight to my site.
No, that's not what's happening.
That's where Google analytics goes.
We don't know where they came from.
So we're just going to from over here.
So UTM parameters are going to help lower that direct traffic number, but you definitely
want that to be as low as possible.
I mean, the ultimate goal would be zero, but you know, I probably not going to be able
to track literally every single person who visits your site.
So the goal should just be getting direct traffic as low as possible.
Now you can do on this page other than just generally seeing some statistics is actually
going up and adding something called a secondary dimension.
So you click on the little secondary dimension, dropdown menu, and you're going to click on
source and medium.
Now this is going to be a little redundant compared to what we'll do next in the acquisition,
but this will just be helpful, especially if you're not doing UTM parameters.
This is pretty much as far as you need to go.
And then it's going to start telling you the type of traffic and source.
So if it's organic, did it come from Google?
Did it come from Bing?
Is the Google traffic organic?
Is the Google traffic paid?
Is the Bing traffic paid?
Is the Bing traffic organic?
Same for Facebook and other social media sites.
And so it just gives you a wider breakdown of specifically what's being put into those
broad categories.
Now, if you don't have a lot of traffic like this particular account, then this is as far
as you need to go.
But if you have a lot of traffic or you've already started playing with your UTM links,
then you're actually going to want to click on source medium on the left hand side.
So that source medium becomes the default.
And the reason you'd want to do this is because when source medium comes to the default, you
can go ahead and click on secondary dimensions.
And then you can start looking at things like your campaigns and your ad creatives.
It just gives you a little bit more flexibility.
So if that sounds like fun, then go ahead and do it.
If that sounds just like more work or redundant, then just skip it and stick with the channels.
Now, the final one, we want to talk about, a little bonus here is going down to campaigns
under acquisition.
And this is only going to work if you're already doing UTM parameters, but I just want to show
you why UTM parameters are so important.
So when you set up UTM parameters, you remember in our URL, we had a place to say campaign,
and we had a place to essentially give the ad creative a code.
Well, something that we can do here is when we click on campaigns, you'll see all of these
campaigns have been set up using a UTM parameter.
They didn't exist until we put them in a URL.
So now we are able to see all of the traffic for each one of our offers.
So on this particular YouTube channel, every once in a while, I offer something for free
in our free memberships website, the aspire notebook.
And so instead of just linking it in the description, there's a UTM parameter link in the description
that says what the lead magnet is or what the free offer is.
And then also says what specific video.
So if we go to secondary dimension again, and we click on advertising and ad creative,
all of a sudden, we're actually able to see the specific video that drove those people
to the website or the landing page.
And I can't stress enough how powerful that is.
I mean, just look at this data.
This is telling me that whatever M 15 is, is really good at driving new people to the
website, compared to something like B41, that's the only driven 96 people.
And so you can actually start getting some insight as to which blog posts or pieces of
content that you're putting out, actually drive action to your website, actually bring
people over to your site.
Now, the final question we have is how do we get more?
And this is the most complicated one.
At this point, we now have a general understanding of where people are from and who they are
and their interests, or what they're specifically looking to buy via in market audiences.
And you've seen the power of UTM parameters once they start working.
So you can actually optimize your ads or your content.
Now it's time to say, okay, what is actually driving people to take action on our site.
And this is something advanced called conversions.
And so I've gone over to another view of this same property.
So now you can see here that there's actually a dropdown menu in the conversion section
where I can choose something called goals and goals is something that's part of the
configuration process that's advanced.
And so if you want to start meticulously tracking how many people enter their name and email
on a certain page, or how many people buy a certain product or purchase or go through
and fill out a certain form to get on the phone with you.
This is where you're actually going to start setting up goals.
And this is the next step.
This is the beginning of intermediate.
So everything we've covered so far, beginner, you're good to go.
You can actually start using Google analytics and your primary goal is to get UTM parameters
across everything that you do, that should be priority number one, even before you set
up goals is just knowing where's traffic coming from?
Getting all your traffic organized and categorized.
Now, when it comes to setting up goals, there are a lot of different ways you could do it.
It would be twice as long as this video so far.
So all you have to do is click on conversions on the left hand side, and you'll get this
pop up that'll essentially show says, Hey, you haven't set up any goals yet.
So you can go ahead and click on set up goals.
And Google will actually start to guide you through setting up your first round of goals.
And I highly recommend using Google tag manager in conjunction with analytics.
So that setting up your goals is a breeze.
So thank you so much for watching.
I sincerely hope you got some value out of this video and you just saw the tiny picture
of everything that you could do with Google analytics.
So I sincerely hope it wasn't too overwhelming.
This one was a good overview and had enough little advanced things that you have plenty
to do, and just shows you the power that you have with this free tool, Google analytics.
So go and hit that like button and subscribe for more in depth marketing tutorials and
strategy guides, just like this one, comment below with your Google analytics questions
and until the next, keep building the business you love.