Review of Conversion Optimization Minidegree Program (Pt. 5)
How confidently do you and your business use and manage Google Analytics?
The truth is, that most businesses have many flaws when using it (mine included).
Even when Google Analytics (GA)is free for every business to use, being able to know and understand it is another different story.
But since GA is a very important tool for tracking, why not become good at it?
The good news is that I learned how to do that this week.
I learned this in CXL Institute as part of this Minidegree program, and I’ll share the best takeaways with you as well as my conclusion.
So let’s start with the basics (and some general info, just in case).
It’s important to know that when you’re using GA, you’re not analyzing data or change… you’re analyzing behavior.
You know that people converted at some point because they found you somewhere, but…
it’s what happens in between that starting and finish point that can help you.
It’s in that process where you can learn what people are doing and how you can actually increase conversions.
Every conversion process starts with a question and a hypothesis, so knowing where to look for is a must.
That’s why you should get familiar with the basic settings of Google Analytics.
There are 3 parts that you should definitely know about it: Account settings, Property settings, and View settings.
Since this is something very practical, you should know what each section does and what you’re looking for.
Next, you need to know all the answers you can get from GA.
And that’s where Reports will become your best friend.
Let’s start with Realtime reports. This is great to help you answer “Is this thing really working?”
This means it lets you see if something like a test is working as expected. Keep in mind you should not use this to make meaningful decisions on what to test (I’ll share what’s the best option in a moment).
Next, there is Acquisition reports. You can answer the “Where are your users coming from?” question.
You can see different traffic sources and channels associated to each one.
After that, you have Behavior reports. This is where you want to know “What actions are your users taking?”.
Learn where are they exiting your page, how many links you have ‘broken’ and any particular events you want to track.
This is followed by Conversion reports, which let’s you answer “What are the results of all your users actions?”.
In here, you can find how many conversions you’re having in your ecommerceas well as what’s the actual flow process your users go through.
The next one on the list is Account settings. You can create and edit filters and see everything inside the account like the permissions over a particular account, property, or view.
Close to finish, you have the Property settings. Here, you have all the tracking information you will need. Plus, you can see what products you have linked (and can link) to your GA, as well as some advanced features like custom dimensions.
Lastly, there is the View settings.
At the very least, you should always have 3 different views for each property: one where you will answer most of your marketing questions (a production view), one for testing and one as a back up.
Out of all these 3, the back up is the one where you want the most raw data as possible.
This means, you don’t want to use it or work with it in any way. You should only access this view in case you need to check something odd or some data gets lost.
That covers pretty much all the basics you need to know about GA.
But you’re not done yet.
There’s still so much to learn about it, so I want to share with you what’s going the be the most important of all.
That is the power of using filters.
Using filters can be the most powerful yet dangerous feature of GA, and you’ll see why in just a second.
Having filters properly set up can help you take smarter decisions based on relevant and “clean” data… or based on totally irrelevant information that wouldn’t have make sense if you had the right filters in place.
Some of the most basic filters you should have are the “Show domain”, “Clean data” and solve the “Fractured” page reporting.
That covers this week material with an introduction to Google Analytics.
As I said, there’s so much I can show you about how to use GA the right way.
Plus, given that everything is very practical, there are some limitations to my explanations.
Still, you can get some basic ideas and know what you need to do or whether what you’re doing is right or not.
To be honest, I found this course to GA very insightful.
Chris Mercer (the instructor) did a great job at taking someone who knew had to know GA and nothing else into feeling confident on how to track things like AOV and CPC.
The classes where very explanatory and gave more than enough of the basics.
Keep in mind this is not an advanced course, nor it is meant to take someone from a newbie (like myself) to an expert in less than a week.
There are so many nuances that are inside GA to be able to completely know them everything.
But as I said, this course is more than enough to make someone know where you should look for what, how to do it, and not feel like there are so many things to do… while feeling like you can easily screw things up.
After this course, you know you’re tracking correctly what you want, you don’t get any duplicated data, and are able to help anyone feel confident as well.
I’d encourage anyone (from business owners to CRO experts) to take this program and give it a shot.
There’s always something new you can learn, and you can definitively learn something new.
Next week, I’m going to dive into landing pages and how to optimize them.
Don’t miss this one.
Ivav I.
