Analytics

When Google introduced Attribution Modelling in their analytics, marketers learned more about Last Interactions, First Interaction and Assisted Conversions (More on this in another tutorial). But let us look at the difference between first interaction and last interaction. The Marketing channel that introduced the visitor to your website just before the conversion is categorized under Last Interaction and the channel that first introduced the visitor to your website is the First Interaction channel.

Google Analytics Profile allows Marketers to segment the traffic based on location. For most website, 2-3 countries would be contributing towards most of the revenue. Instead of filtering Google Analytics with custom segments, it is a better idea to create profiles for your top five target markets.

Here is the step-by-step tutorial:

1) Login to your Analytics Account and select your website

2) Click the New Profile Button

Google Analytics has evolved into a complex analytic software. There are tons of data for analysis.  But when it comes to key metrics that matches your business objective (read this article - KPI for Websites), you don’t need all of them. Google Custom Reports is the solution.

Before we create our first custom analytics report, you have to understand the difference between Dimensions and Metrics. In Google Analytics, it can be confusing.

Analytic software does not ignore admin and team visits by default. You have to create filters to ignore the visits. In Google Analytics, filters can be set to exclude IP address visits, and report visits only from a subdomain or directory. 

Steps to create a Filter to ignore team and admin visits in GA

1) Under Admin, click the Filters tab

With advanced segmentation, it has become easier to track visits from various campaign in Google Analytics. But marketers and agencies still use utm_source, utm_campaign and utm_medium to track click through of urls

What is the difference between utm_source, utm_campaign and utm_medium?

Each industry tracks its own analytic variables to measure key performance indicators. For e-commerce site it would be like “How many customers used the Holiday Discount Coupons”, for blogs it would be “The number of returning visitors after they have read a popular blog post”. Depending on your industry, you can create and track custom variables in Google Analytics. 

Why I need custom variables when I can use user segment?

Websites get visitors from various sources - Direct Traffic, Search Engines,  Social Media or referring sites. Each Business has its own valuable traffic  source. Understanding how visitors from each source behave in your website is crucial for conversion rate optimization. 

Once you have set your campaign and revenue goals, the next step in your ‘Marketing process’ is adding goals in Analytics. 

1) Go to Analytics Settings-> Click Edit Profile

2) Click Add Goal 

3) You can set upto 20 Goals for a Single Profile (Website) – 4 sets of 5 goals each

There are three types of Goals

Key Performance Indicators are the most important metric for your online Business. It shows how well you are doing against your Business Objectives. The type of Business defines your objective. 

If you are in a B2C Business then selling your product is one of the key Business objectives. 

If you are managing multiple blogs or websites or even a single website on which your income depends on, then it is essential that you invest in Analytics Software. Now you might ask "Why you need to invest when Google Analytics gives you all the features for free". Don't get me wrong, Google Analytics is great but use it only if you don't monitor traffic on a day to day or even on an hourly basis.