Growth Marketing 4
--
- Who are your users?
- Where do they come from?
- What actions do they take?
- What are the results of those actions?
To get the right answers he took us on a journey to getting to know the realtime, audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversion reports. Then we went through how to properly set an account, its properties, and specific views to help us answer the right questions.
We ended up the basics with understanding different results: traffic sources, destination goals, duration goals, pages per session goals event goals, and e-commerce.
I have to give credit to Mercer as he managed to keep my attention on a tight leash even when he was going through some not so interesting subjects. Also, last week was the week that truly made me understand that this course was everything it promised to be and then some. I’m in for another 8 weeks that requires my utmost attention.
This week we dive deeper into Google Analytics and level up by looking at what segments are causing what results, how your traffic sources work together, and attribution.
Merces makes the most important thing to learn from this course at the beginning. Good data can tell a good story but you need to work for it, great data on the other hand makes everything so much easier by doing the storytelling itself.
Clean Data
Filtering out SPAM
Dirty Data hides the story Google Analytics wants to tell you. Your job is to make it clean.
First, you gotta go for the low-hanging fruit and enable bot filtering. Then you should create a filter that matches the source that your identified spam comes from.
Remember that filters are a very strong tool for Google Analytics. That said they should be created with a lot of care and attention as they alter the data for good.
You can set up excluding filters for hostnames, sources, and passwords. Better test this in your test view prior to real application in your production view.
Removing internal hits
Traffic from internal hits can really skew your data and change your decision-making process. The easiest way to filter internal traffic for you and your team is to install a browser extension.
Another way to do is to create a filter that excludes your company’s static IP address. You can also exclude UTM sources that contain a certain word such as ‘test’ and remove them.
Traffic from internal hits can really skew your data and change your decision-making process. The easiest way to filter internal traffic for you and your team is to install a browser extension.
Another way to do is to create a filter that excludes your company’s static IP address. You can also exclude UTM sources that contain a certain word such as ‘test’ and remove them. You need to employ Google Tag Manager.
Cross-domain Tracking
Google assigns a user ID(client ID which is a number) to each unique user it can identify. Users can have multiple sessions. If a person clicks on a Facebook ad and to receive an offer, they receive an ID. If they then move on to the shopping cart page and eventually the ‘Thank you!’ page the ideal scenario would be attributing the traffic source to Facebook. Let’s say that they come back for a 2nd session through a Google ad and proceed to follow the same steps in the first session. The traffic source would be attributed to the Google ad. We wouldn’t have any issues if all the pages were tied to the same domain. But what if your cart page belongs to a different domain? Then imagine they come back to the ‘Thank you!’ page that’s in the first domain they landed from the ad. Now your user is crisscrossing between domains.
How to fix Cross-domain tracking?
In order to look back into that user’s history and avoid the middle step in the second domain, you can add that second domain to your referral exclusion list.
Finding Answers
Funnel Tracking: Goal Flow vs. Funnel Visualization
Goal flows can help you dig down and understand how different segments and sub-segments behave during their journey in detail. Funnel visualization on the other hand is a more broad overview of your whole audience.
Goal flow can trace historical data but funnel visualization starts storing data from the day it’s set on.
Segments
Segments are similar to filter but they’re not exactly that. The difference if filters permanently alter the data although the problem is temporary. Segments on the other hand are temporary filters which, you can remove once you’re done with them.
Custom Reports
Custom reports help you put on top of the built-in reports and allow you to slice and dice your data in any way you want. You can ask really to the point, specific questions to find the right answers to them.
Mercer goes on to give a lot of useful tips on what’s covered in the Intermediate Google Analytics course before we move on to Google Tag Manager.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager tells a more complete story as it provides data on which buttons users clicked, which videos did they play and other similar detailed interactions.
You set up GTM by injecting the script in your source code just like GA.
Tag is basically a script on pages when you want certain things to fire. Basically, you ask the system to inform you as people go through certain motions. It can be a conversion, or just a show up among many other options. Tags are what you want GTM to do.
Triggers are behaviors when a certain action happens to its associated tags. For example, you can train GTM to fire a trigger to inform Adwords when a conversion occurs. Triggers are when you want GTM to do tags.
Variables are simply the information GTN needs to do what you want it to do when you want it to do it. You can be informed about which videos are being played on your website. Or you can be informed about the value of a certain conversion.
Data layers help you temporarily store the details of certain situations that are important to the tag manager.
After high-level and theoretical information on GTM, Mercer goes on to explain how to put things into practice and goes on to explain matters in detail.
There is so much to take in, in this course hat can be only internalized by practice. I highly suggest going over this chapter if you’re not already an expert on GA and GTM.
