Welcome to Google Analytics for

Beginners
Introduction

Hi, I’m Justin Cutroni. And I’m Krista Seiden. We’re Analytics Advocates at Google. Welcome to
Google Analytics for Beginners. In this course we’ll take you through a basic understanding of
Google Analytics.

We’ll show you how to create and implement an account, set up views and filters, read basic
reports, set up dashboards, perform basic analysis, and set up goals and campaign tracking.

Defining Digital Analytics

To begin, let’s start by defining “digital analytics” and why it’s important. So Krista, what’s the
deal with digital analytics?

Well Justin, people usually purchase goods in stages.

In marketing, we have the concept of a purchase funnel. There are different stages within the
funnel that describe customer interactions. A basic purchase funnel includes the following steps:

 Acquisition involves building awareness and acquiring user interest

 Behavior is when users engage with your business
 Conversion is when a user becomes a customer and transacts with your business

In the offline world, this process can be hard to measure. But in the online world, we can
measure many different aspects of the funnel using digital analytics. We can track what online
behavior led to purchases and use that data to make informed decisions about how to reach new
and existing customers.

Digital Analytics in Practice

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Think about an online store, such as the Google Merchandise Store. It might have a goal to sell
more t-shirts. Using digital analytics, the store could collect and analyze data from their online
advertising campaigns to see which are most effective and expand those marketing efforts.

For example, the store could analyze geographical sales data to understand if people in certain
places buy a lot of shirts and then run additional advertising campaigns in those areas. They
could also use analytics to understand how users progress through their online shopping cart. If
they notice that users have trouble with a particular step on their website, they can make
changes to the site to resolve the problem.

Different kinds of businesses can benefit from digital analytics:

 Publishers can use it to create a loyal, highly-engaged audience and to better align on-
site advertising with user interests.
 Ecommerce businesses can use digital analytics to understand customers’ online
purchasing behavior and better market their products and services.
 Lead generation sites can collect user information for sales teams to connect with
potential leads.

While we’ve primarily talked about collecting data from a website, Google Analytics can also
collect behavioral data from a variety of systems such as mobile applications, online point-of-
sales systems, video game consoles, customer relationship management systems, or other
internet-connected platforms.

That’s right. This data is compiled into Analytics reports, which you can use to perform in-depth
analysis to better understand your customers and their purchase journey. Then you can test out
new solutions to improve your business.

The process of collecting Analytics data

Google Analytics is a platform that collects data and compiles it into useful reports.

Tracking a Website

To track a website, you first have to create a Google Analytics account. Then you need to add a
small piece of Javascript tracking code to each page on your site. Every time a user visits a
webpage, the tracking code will collect anonymous information about how that user interacted
with the page.

For the Google Store, the tracking code could show how many users visited a page that sells
drinkware versus a page that sells houseware. Or it could tell us how many users bought an item
like an Android doll by tracking whether they made it to the purchase confirmation page.

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But the tracking code will also collect information from the browser like the language the browser
is set to, the type of browser (such as Chrome or Safari), and the device and operating system
used to access the Google Store. It can even collect the “traffic source,” which is what brought
users to the site in the first place. This might be a search engine, an advertisement they clicked
on, or an email marketing campaign.

Keep in mind that every time a page loads, the tracking code will collect and send updated
information about the user’s activity. Google Analytics groups this activity into a period of time
called a “session.” A session begins when a user navigates to a page that includes the Google
Analytics tracking code. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. If the user returns to a
page after a session ends, a new session will begin.

Processing and Reporting

When the tracking code collects data, it packages that information up and sends it to Google
Analytics to be processed into reports. When Analytics processes data, it aggregates and
organizes the data based on particular criteria like whether a user’s device is mobile or desktop,
or which browser they’re using.

But there are also configuration settings that allow you to customize how that data is processed.
For example, you might want to apply a filter to make sure your data doesn’t include any internal
company traffic, or only includes data from a particular country or region that’s important to your
business.

And Justin, one very important thing to remember.

What’s that?

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*Once Analytics processes the data, it’s stored in a database where it can’t be changed*

Great point, Krista! So remember, when you set up your configuration, don’t exclude any data
you think you might want to analyze later. Once the data has been processed and stored in the
database, it will appear in Google Analytics as reports. We’ll show you what these reports look
like a little later.

The Analytics account structure

Now that you know how data gets collected, let’s look at how Google Analytics accounts are
organized.

All of your Google Analytics accounts can be grouped under an “Organization,” which is optional.
This allows you to manage multiple Google Analytics accounts under one grouping.

Large businesses or agencies could have multiple accounts, while, medium to small-sized
businesses generally (only) use one account. When you create an account, you also
automatically create a property and, within that property, a view for that account. But each
Analytics account can have multiple properties and each property can have multiple views. This
lets you organize your Analytics data collection in a way that best reflects your business.

The Google Analytics Account determines how data is collected from your websites and
manages who can access that data. Typically, you would create separate Analytics accounts for
distinct businesses or business units.

Each Google Analytics account has at least one “property.” Each property can collect data
independently of each other using a unique tracking ID that appears in your tracking code.

You may assign multiple properties to each account, so you can collect data from different
websites, mobile applications, or other digital assets associated with your business. For example,
you may want to have separate properties for different sales regions or different brands. This
allows you to easily view the data for an individual part of your business, but keep in mind this
won’t allow you to see data from separate properties in aggregate.

View Settings

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Just as each account can have multiple “properties,” each property can have multiple “views.”
You can use a feature called Filters in your configuration settings to determine what data you
want to include in the reports for each view.

For example, The Google Store sells merchandise from their website across different
geographical regions. They could create one view that includes all of their global website data.
But if they wanted to see data for individual regions, they could create separate views for North
America, Europe, and Asia. If the Google Store wanted to only see data for external traffic (that
didn’t include their own store employees), they could set up a view that filtered out internal traffic
based on IP address.

The view level also lets you set Google Analytics “Goals”. Goals are a valuable way to track
conversions, or business objectives, from your website. A goal could be how many users signed
up for an email newsletter, or how many users purchased a product. We’ll discuss Goals and
Conversions in a later lesson. Be thoughtful when setting up your accounts, properties, and
views, because you can’t change data once it’s been collected and processed. by Google
Analytics.

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Before we move on to user access permissions, there are a couple important things to note
about views: 

1. New views only include data from the date the view was created and onwards. When you
create a new view, it will not include past data.
2. If you delete a view, only administrators can recover that view within a limited amount of
time. Otherwise, the view will be permanently deleted.

User Permissions

You can assign permissions to other users at the account, property, or view level. Each level
inherits permissions from the level above it.

For example, if you have access to an account, then you have the same access permissions to
the properties and views underneath that account. But if you only have access permissions for a
view, then you won’t have permission to modify the property or account associated with that
view.

By clicking “Admin”, Google Analytics lets you set user permissions for: “Manage Users,” “Edit,”
“Collaborate,” or “Read and Analyze.”

 “Manage Users” lets users add or remove user access to the account, property, or view.
 “Edit” lets users make changes to the configuration settings.
 “Collaborate” allows users to share things like dashboards or certain measurement
settings.
 And finally, “Read and Analyze” lets users view data, analyze reports, and create
dashboards, but restricts them from making changes to the settings or adding new users.

How you configure your organizations, accounts, properties, and views can affect how your data
gets collected. Be thoughtful when setting up your Google Analytics implementation, and make
sure you align your properties and views of the data you collect with your overall business
structure.

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Welcome to a Guided Tour of the Google
Analytics interface
Account/Property/View switcher

If you have multiple accounts, properties, or views set up, you can easily switch between them by
clicking on the pulldown menu with the title of your View in the upper-left corner.

When you open up the account picker, you can select by account, property, or view. You can
also search any of these by name. To close the Account picker, click anywhere on the screen
outside of the picker.

Alert icon

Clicking the bell icon in the upper right shows you alerts about your Google Analytics properties
and views.

Alert menu

This may include data that is not collecting properly or a setting that needs to be optimized. To
close the Alerts menu, click anywhere on the screen outside of the alerts.

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Feedback, Help, and Settings

At the top right of your Analytics view are two more icons:

 The "question mark" icon lets you send feedback to Google Analytics or search Help
articles
 The user icon lets you switch between different Google accounts, manage your current
Google account, or sign out

Customization

The Customization section allows you to create custom reports, specific to your business. We'll
cover customization in an advanced course.

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Left-hand navigation

To navigate between reports, you’ll use the navigation on the left. Clicking on each of these
sections will expose the reports that belong to each section.

Real-Time Reports

Real-Time reports let you look at live user behavior on your website including information like
where your users are coming from and if they’re converting.

Audience Reports

Audience reports show you characteristics about your users like age and gender, where they’re
from, their interests, how engaged they were, whether they’re new or returning users, and what
technology they’re using.

Acquisition Reports

Acquisition reports show you which channels (such as advertising or marketing campaigns)
brought users to your site. This could include different marketing channels such as:

 "Organic” (or unpaid search)

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  “CPC” (“cost per click” or paid search)
 “Referral” (traffic that comes from another website)
 “Social” (from a social network)
 or “Other,” (a group of low volume traffic sources)

Behavior Reports

Behavior reports show how people engaged on your site including which pages they viewed, and
their landing and exit pages. With additional implementation, you can even track what your users
searched for on your site and whether they interacted with specific elements.

Conversion Reports

Conversion reports allow you to track website goals based on your business objectives.

Admin

The Admin section contains all of your Google Analytics settings such as user permissions,
tracking code, view settings, and filters.

Collapse left-hand navigation

Use this pointer to shrink the navigation and provide more space for your reports.

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Welcome to a Guided Tour of the
Audience Overview Report
Date range

At the top of every report is a date-range. This lets you set the time period in which you want to
analyze report data. Click the date range to open up the date range selector.

Date range selector

This opens up a calendar on the left where you can select your date ranges. When you change
the date range, it affects all of the reports in your view. So you can switch between different
reports without having to adjust the date range each time.

You can choose between date ranges like last week, last calendar month, or last 30 days. But
you can also set specific dates by clicking the start- and end-date fields and selecting calendar
dates. If you’d like to select an entire month, simply click on the name of the month in the
calendar to the left.

Date Range Comparison

You can also compare data from two different date ranges by clicking "Compare to" and adding
in the date ranges you wish to compare. This lets you to see how your business changed over
time. 

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Segment Picker

At the top of the report, notice the segment picker. Segments are ways to look at a specific data
set and compare metrics. We’ll cover this in an advanced course. For now, notice that the default
segment includes all of the Users that visited your site in the given date range.

Line Graph

Below the segment picker are the different metrics of the Audience Overview report shown in
different formats. The most prominent is a line graph that by default shows a data point for the
number of users on each day over your selected date range. 

Duration Selector

If you wish to view this data more specifically, you can change the data points to show hourly,
weekly, or monthly, as well. This can be especially helpful when looking at large date sets. If you
are looking at data over a single day, the view will default to hourly.

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Metric Selector

You can change the metric shown from users to a different metric by selecting the drop-down
menu under the Overview tab. Analytics lets you compare this to a second metric over the same
time period by clicking “Select a metric”.

Graph Annotator

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Notice the small arrow at the bottom of the line graph. Clicking on the arrow lets you annotate the
graph with helpful notes to add business context to your data. Once you add an annotation, a
small indicator will appear on the graph that can be viewed by other users with access to the
view. Clicking any of the metrics below will show the data points for those metrics in the line
graph above.

Metrics

There are a number of helpful metrics beneath the line graph:

 “Sessions” are the total number of sessions for the given date range. 
 “Users” are the total number of users that visited for the given date range,
 “Pageviews” are the total number of times pages that included your Analytics tracking
code were displayed to users. This includes repeated viewings of a single page by the
same user.
 “Pages per session” is the average number of pages viewed during each session. This
also includes repeated viewings of a single page.
 “Average session duration” is the average length of a session based on users that visited
your site in the selected date range.
 “Bounce rate” is the percentage of users who left after viewing a single page on your site
and taking no additional action.
 “Percent of new sessions” is the percentage of sessions in your date range who are new
users to your site.

New vs. Returning Users

To the right of the metrics is a pie chart illustrating the percentage of new vs. returning users.

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Dimensions and Metrics

Understanding Dimensions and Metrics (0:51)

Clicking into the dimensions on the bottom left of the report, will allow you to see the top 10
dimensions and metrics in each category. 

Language Dimension

The default dimension selected in the Audience Overview report is “Language.” Note that the
table to the right includes the top 10 values for Language. You can also select "Country" or "City"
to view the top 10 values for those dimensions.

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To view metrics about what technology people are using to view your site, click Browser
or Operating System.

Navigating full reports: Part 1

Introduction

Previously, we showed you a high-level version of the “Audience Overview” report. At the bottom
of that report, there’s a link to “view full report,” where you can see expanded versions of each
Audience report in the left-hand navigation.

Now, let’s check out a full report.

When you open up the full report, you’ll see links underneath the segment picker that control the
different types of data in the report. The “Summary” view is a summary of the dimension
categorized by Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversion metrics. This makes it easier to interpret
these metrics in the context of the marketing funnel we discussed in Unit 1.

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“Site Usage” shows behavior metrics like users, sessions per user, new users, sessions, pages
per session, and average session duration. “Goals” will show metrics based on the number of
goals you’ve configured and will only show up if you’ve set up goals in Google Analytics, which
we’ll discuss later. And “Ecommerce” will show you transaction metrics if you’ve set up
ecommerce tracking in Analytics. Now let’s switch back to the Summary view.

Below the graph is the main data table. You can see that the first column shows the current
dimension “Country,” which was the last demographic category we selected in the Overview
report. You can switch between other dimensions like city, continent, and subcontinent by
clicking the links above the data table. It’s important to know you can also add another dimension
to the table for even more specific analysis. We call this a secondary dimension, which is a
common technique when analyzing data. For example, you could add a secondary dimension of
“device category” to the Location report to see what kinds of devices were used by people in
different countries while visiting your website.

Here you can see that each row of the table represents a different segment of traffic in the
“Country” dimension. Note that Analytics is only showing you the first 10 rows of data and only as
many columns as will fit on the screen. To view additional rows, use the “Show rows” pulldown
menu on the bottom-right side of the table to select how many rows you want to see, or use the
left and right arrows to scroll through 10 rows at a time. If you wish to view all of the columns, you
may need to use the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the report.

You can analyze the data table in different ways. Clicking on each column in the table toggles the
data sort between ascending and descending. The arrow in the column header shows which
column you’re currently sorting by. Note that by default, Analytics sorts this report by users.

It can also be useful to filter the data table to focus only on the segments of traffic that are
significant. Use the filter field at the top of the table to include only rows where the primary
dimension contains your filter term. For example, you may want to look at data for a specific
country like India, so rather than scroll through the table, you could simply type “India” into the
filter field and Analytics will show you only data for segments that include the term “India.”
“Advanced,” next to the search box, lets you apply even more sophisticated rules for filtering.
We’ll cover techniques for advanced filtering in an advanced course.

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Report Visualization

 Next to the “advanced” link, there are several different visualization options:
 The “data table” view is the default visualization for most reports. This organizes your
data in a table broken out by acquisition, behavior, and conversion metrics for the
audience and acquisition reports.
 The “pie chart” icon creates a pie chart based on your data. This helps you compare the
percentages of a whole such as how many users are on desktops, tablets, and mobile
phones. You can choose which metric from your report should display in the pie chart
using the pulldown menu.
 The “performance” view shows a bar graph of your data. This helps you compare
individual segments side by side like which countries bring in the highest traffic. You can
also use the pull-down menu to select various metrics to be represented as bars.
 The “comparison view” shows you a bar graph to quickly see whether each entry in the
table is performing above or below the site average for the selected metric. If the value
for a given row is better than average, it appears green. If it’s below average, it appears
red. Again, you can use the drop-down menu to select which metric should be displayed.
 Finally, the “Pivot” view creates a pivot table in which both rows and columns can show
different dimension values for comparison. For example, a pivot table could show The
Google Store the bounce rate and number of sessions for each landing page and device
type.

How to share reports

Sharing and customizing reports

Once you’ve found meaningful data in your reports, Google Analytics offers several ways to
share or refer back to that report under the report name at the top.

 “Save” lets you create a link to the specific report in the Customization area in the left-
hand navigation under “Saved Reports.”
 “Export” lets you save a report to your desktop in different file formats such as PDF or
CSV.
 “Share” lets you email a copy of the report as an attachment and even schedule regular
email updates.

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  “Edit” lets you customize the report content by adding metric groups, filters, or additional
views. This creates a new report in the Customization area of the left-hand navigation
under “Custom Reports.” We'll cover Custom Reports in the advanced course.

Hover over the green check icon next to the report name to view the percent of sessions that the
report is based on. Sometimes, Analytics has to crunch through so much data, that in order to
return your report faster, it will only analyze a sample of the data collected. This is called
“sampling” because it returns an estimate of the exact count based on a sample of your data.

To change the report sampling rate, mouse over the green data quality icon and click the
pulldown menu. If you want your data to be more accurate and don’t mind the additional
response time, leave this set to "Greater Precision". If you wish to speed up the time it takes to
generate a report and are willing to sacrifice more precise metrics, select “Faster response.”

Audience reports overview

Audience reports are located under “Audience” in the left-hand navigation. These reports can
help you better understand the characteristics of your users. This can include what countries
they’re in, what languages they speak, and the technology they use to access your site. But it

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can also include data like age and gender, their engagement and loyalty, and even some of their
interests.

Active Users report

Let’s begin with the “Active Users” report. This can show you how many users had at least one
session on your site in the last day, seven days, 14 days, and 30 days. We call this “site reach”
or “stickiness.” If your marketing activities and site content encourage users to visit and return to
your site, the active users in each time frame should grow.

Demographics and Interests reports

Next, let’s look at the “Demographics” and “Interests” reports. The “Demographics” reports
provide information about the age and gender of your users. The “Interests” reports show your
users’ preferences for certain types of web content like technology, music, travel, or TV. This
information is useful in two ways. First, if you know your target audience, it can help verify that
you’re reaching the right people. Second, it can help guide decisions about your marketing and
content strategy.

 Note that to see data in these reports, you must first enable advertising features in the
“Demographics and Interests” reports for each property. Go into the “Admin” tab under
“Property“ and select “Property Settings.” Under “Advertising Features,” set “Enable
Demographics and Interest Reports” to on.

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Once activated, you will see data in your Demographics and Interests reports about the age,
gender, and interests of your users. Note that if you’ve just enabled this feature, it may take a
day or two for data to appear in these reports. Also, the Demographic reports may not contain
any data if your site traffic is very low or your segment is too small.

Geographic reports

The “Location” report under “Geo” is one of the most useful Audience reports. Google Analytics
can anonymously determine a user’s continent, sub-continent, country, and city through the IP
address used by their browser. Notice the geographic heat map at the top of the report, which
you can adjust to display different metrics. For example, switching the map to show “percent of
New Visits” lets you identify potential new markets based on new user traffic to your website.
This can help you decide whether to build awareness or invest in customer loyalty in particular
locations.

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You could also use the table below the visualization to identify areas that have a high number of
conversions (or transactions), but low traffic rates. That could indicate untapped markets to target
with advertising.

Another analysis technique is to identify the regions where you already have a large audience,
but lower than average performance. For example, if certain regions have a higher than average
bounce rate (or users that leave after viewing a single page), you might need to optimize your
advertising or website. Perhaps you need to translate your ad or site into the local language or
add geographically-specific content.

Behavior reports

Below “Geo,” are a set of behavior reports that help you understand how often users visited and
returned to your website. The “New vs Returning” report breaks out acquisition, behavior, and
conversion goal metrics for new and returning users. You can look at this comparison over time
to see how audience loyalty may be shifting. Consider your website objectives, as well as your
marketing activities, when evaluating the mix of new and returning users to your site.

Technology and Mobile reports

Underneath Behavior reports, the “Technology” and “Mobile” reports can help you understand
what technologies your audience uses to consume your site content. These reports can help you
fine-tune your site to make sure it’s fully functional on different devices and browsers.

For example, you can use the “Browser and Operating systems” report to quickly identify issues
with certain browsers on your site. If your site has a comparatively high bounce rate on a mobile
browser, you may need to create a mobile-optimized version of your website with streamlined
content and simpler navigation.

It’s also a good idea to understand if users are migrating from desktop to mobile and plan your
development accordingly. You can use the “Overview” report under “Mobile” to see a breakdown
of your traffic based on smartphones, tablets, and desktop devices. Check this report to see how
quickly mobile usage of your site has grown over time.

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The “Devices” report lets you see additional details about the devices used to browse your site.
This includes the mobile device name, brand, input selector, operating system, and other
dimensions like screen resolution. These reports can give your developers and designers
direction on how to create a mobile-optimized experience to best suit your users.

Acquisition reports overview

“Acquisition” reports are located under the “Acquisition” section in the left-hand navigation. You
can use the Acquisition reports to compare the performance of different marketing channels and
discover which sources send you the highest quality traffic and conversions. This can help you
make better decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts.

Before we discuss Acquisition reports, it can be helpful to know how Google Analytics identifies
traffic sources for your website. When a user lands on your site, the Google Analytics tracking
code automatically captures several attributes (or dimensions) about where the user came from.
This includes the traffic medium, source, and marketing campaign name.

You can think of the medium as the mechanism that delivered users to your site. Some common
examples of mediums are “organic,” “cpc,” “referral,” “email,” and “none.” Let’s look at these
different types of mediums:

 “Organic” is used to identify traffic that arrived on your site through unpaid search like a
non-paid Google Search result.

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  “CPC” indicates traffic that arrived through a paid search campaign like Google Ads text
ads.
 “Referral” is used for traffic that arrived on your site after the user clicked on a website
other than a search engine.
 “Email” represents traffic that came from an email marketing campaign.
 “(none)” is applied for users that come directly to your site by typing your URL directly
into a browser. In your reports, you will see these users have a source of “direct” with a
medium of “(none)”.

“Source” provides more information about the medium. For example, if the medium is “referral,”
then the source will be the URL of the website that referred the user to the site. If the medium is
“organic,” then the source will be the name of the search engine such as “google.”

Under “All Traffic” let’s look at the “Source/Medium” report in The Google Store Analytics account
using the dates August 1, 2015 through August 31, 2015. This shows the sources and their
respective mediums sending referrals, search engine traffic, and direct traffic to the site. Notice
that the default sort is users.

To identify effective traffic sources, we can look at the source/medium combinations with the
most users, but that doesn’t necessarily mean this was the best traffic. Ideally, traffic should be
“high quality,” meaning that users who arrive from a source engage with the website or complete
a conversion. A good indicator of traffic quality can be bounce rate.

Our top traffic source is Google organic search, which has a relatively low bounce rate compared
to other sources. Our second most popular traffic source is direct traffic. YouTube referrals were
the third highest traffic source, but had one of the highest bounce rates. Let’s do a bit more
analysis to understand if this is a problem.

We can click into the comparison view and select the metric “bounce rate” to compare bounce
rate for each source/medium combination to the site average. Sure enough, we can see that our
YouTube traffic is bouncing at a much higher rate than the site average. The Google Store may
want to investigate to make sure that YouTube traffic is landing on a page that’s valuable to
those users.

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If we want to see only the “organic” sources sending traffic to the site, we could type “organic”
into the filter. You can see that Google referred more traffic than any other non-paid source and
had a relatively low bounce rate compared to other sources. This means that users arriving from
Google Organic search are landing on highly relevant pages.

Now let’s compare the performance for all of our various Google marketing activities that
generated traffic by changing the filter to “google.” We can now see that organic traffic was our
biggest traffic source, followed by google/cpc, which represents paid search traffic using Google
Ads. This is a great way to add context to your analysis and understand which marketing
activities are generating success for your business.

Channels Report

There are other ways to view which traffic sources bring the most engaged users to the site.
Using the “Channels” report, we could view traffic by channel, which bundles the sources
together under each medium. Traffic sources are automatically grouped into basic categories (or
channels) like Organic, Social, Direct, Referral, Display, etc.

Clicking into each channel will break out the individual sources for that channel. If you want to
group your sources differently, you can create your own channel groupings in Google Analytics.
We’ll cover this more in an advanced course.

Referrals Report

If you want to view your traffic organized by which sites have linked to yours, you can look at the
“Referrals” report.

You can even click into individual referrals to see which specific web pages link back to your site.
If you want to understand which specific pages of your site are being linked to, you can add a
secondary dimension of “landing page” to the report. This will show you which external sites are
sending traffic to each of your specific pages, and potentially offer you a source of new
advertising partnerships with those referring websites.

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Behavior reports overview
You can find the “Behavior” reports under “Behavior” in the left-hand navigation. It’s important to
understand how Google Analytics calculates behavior data. If you recall, Analytics uses a small
piece of Javascript code on your website to collect data. Every time a user loads a page on your
website, this tracking code creates a “pageview” that is reported in Google Analytics. Analytics
uses this to calculate many of the metrics in the Behavior reports. For example, the “Total
Pageviews” metric is simply the sum of each time a user loaded a page on your website.

Let’s begin by looking at the “All Pages” report located under “Site Content” and scroll down to
the data table.

 The “Pageviews” metric shows how frequently each page on your site was viewed. By
default, this report will show data by the page URI. The URI is the part of the URL after
the domain name in the location bar of the browser. If you switch the primary dimension
of the report to “Page Title,” you can view this report by the title listed in the web page’s
HTML.
 Other metrics in the “All Pages” report like “Average Time on Page” and “Bounce Rate”
indicate how engaged users were on each page of your site. You can sort the report by
these metrics to quickly find low-performing pages that need improvement or high-
performing content to guide future content decisions.

The “Content Drilldown” report under “Site Content” groups pages according to your website’s
directory structure. You can click on a directory to see the pages of your site within that directory.
This is especially useful if you’re trying to understand the performance of content in a particular
section of your website. If you switch to the pie chart view, you can quickly see which sections of
your site are most popular with your users.

The “Landing Pages” report under “Site Content” lists the pages of your website where users first
arrived. These are the first pages viewed in a session. You can use this report to monitor the
number of bounces and the bounce rate for each landing page. A high bounce rate usually
indicates that the landing page content is not relevant or engaging for those users.

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The “Exit Pages” report under “Site Content” shows the pages where users left your site.
Because you don’t want users exiting from important pages like a shopping cart checkout, it’s a
good idea to periodically review this report to minimize unwanted exits.

The “Events” report tracks how users interact with specific elements of your website. For
example, you can use this report to track when users click on a video player or a download link.
Event tracking requires additional implementation beyond the Analytics tracking code snippet,
which we’ll discuss in more detail in an advanced Google Analytics course.

How to track a marketing campaign

Marketing campaigns can take several forms. Your business may want to advertise using text
ads on search engine results, banner ads placed on strategic publisher websites, or you may
have social media or email campaigns that communicate your brand and products to customers.
It’s common to use a combination of these marketing activities to drive sales and website
conversions.

   

Marketing campaigns are tracked in Google Analytics through “campaign tagging.” Campaign
tags are extra bits of information that you add to the URL links of your online marketing or
advertising materials. These include tracking parameters followed by an equals sign and a single
word or hyphenated words that you designate.

When users click on a link with added parameters, the Google Analytics tracking code will extract
the information from the link and associate that user and their behavior with your marketing
campaign. That way, you can know which people came to your site through your various
marketing activities.

For example, the Google Store has a monthly email newsletter it sends to its customers with
links back to the Google Store website. Adding a campaign tag of “email” to these links allows
the store to easily identify the users that came to the website from the email newsletter in Google
Analytics.

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There are five different campaign tags that help you identify specific information about your
campaign traffic. Medium, Source, and Campaign are required campaign tags. You can also add
tags for Content and Term.

We discussed medium and source when we introduced you to Acquisition reports.

 “Medium” communicates the mechanism, or how you sent your message to the user. You
could include “email” for an email campaign, “cpc” for paid search ads, or “social” for a
social network.
 “Source” communicates where the user came from. This could be a specific web page or
a link in an email. Source could also differentiate the type of medium. So if the medium
was “cpc” (or “cost per click” paid traffic), the source might be “google,” “bing,” or “yahoo.”
If the medium was “email,” the source might be “newsletter”.
 “Campaign” can communicate the name of your marketing campaign such as “2015-
Back-To-School” or “2015-Holiday-Sale”.
 “Content” can be used to differentiate versions of a promotion. This is useful when you
want to test which version of an ad or promotion is more effective. If you’re running a test
between two different versions of a newsletter, you might want to label these tags “v1-
10dollars-off” and “v2-nopromo” to help differentiate which newsletter the data is
associated with in Google Analytics.
 “Term” is used to identify the keyword for paid search campaigns. You would only use
this field if you are manually tagging a paid search campaign like Bing or Yahoo!. We’ll
talk about the best way to track Google Ads in a later lesson.

To add these parameters into the URLs associated with your ads, Google Analytics provides a
tool called “URL builder” in our Help Center, which we’ll cover next.

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Tracking campaigns with URL Builder
To navigate to the URL builder in the Help Center click the link at the end of this lesson and scroll
down to the URL builder form.

In the first step, type in the URL of your website (or where you want your ad or campaign link to
take users). Then fill out fields for the campaign, source, and medium. Optionally, you can fill out
the fields for term, content, and name. Term, content, and name can be any values you want,
just make sure that they’re descriptive enough to recognize when they appear in your Google
Analytics reports.

A quick note about naming conventions. Typically, you’ll use single words to name your tags.
If you use phrases, then the URL builder will add underscores between the words to avoid
spaces in the URL. Be sure to use consistent spelling and capitalization when entering tag
values. Since Google Analytics is case sensitive, a campaign named “PROMO1” in all
uppercase will show up separately from a campaign named “promo1” in all lowercase. Also,
make sure that you use consistent medium names like “display” for banner ads and “email”
for email campaigns.

When you click “Generate URL” at the bottom, you can see that the URL Builder generates the
link with all the correct campaign parameters attached.

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This provides an easy way to quickly generate campaign tags for tracking. But keep in mind, you
can only use it to build out one URL at a time, so you probably won’t want to use it to build each
URL if you have a large campaign. Instead, you can use a spreadsheet to simplify the process.
We’ve provided an example template at the end of this lesson that you can use to manage your
campaign values for bulk URL-building.

Before launching a campaign with this link, you’ll want to verify that your tracking tags are
working correctly. Sometimes a website configuration can break Google Analytics Campaign
tracking. Here's a simple way to test your campaign before you launch it. First open an incognito
window or private browsing session. Then, copy and paste the link you created to track your
campaign into the address bar of the browser. Once your website loads, navigate around your
site and complete some of the critical actions. For example, if one of your website objectives is a
trial signup, complete the signup process on your site. Or, if your campaign contains a coupon,
try submitting a transaction with the coupon applied.

It’s a good idea to try this with each URL you created. You can instantly see campaign
information in the Real Time reports or wait a few hours to review the data in your standard
Campaign reports. Then visit the “All Campaigns” report in the “Acquisition” section under
“Campaigns.” This report lets you compare incoming traffic from your various marketing
campaigns. To verify that the campaign is collecting data properly, type the name of the
campaign into the filter. You should see an overview of the campaign clicks that you tested.

If you click on the campaign name, you can see the source and medium data that you entered
into the URL Builder. If you want to verify the other campaign tags you added to your URL, add a
secondary dimension such as “ad content.”

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This lets you view the primary dimension of “Source/Medium” broken down by the “content” tag
you added to your links. The Google Store differentiated the “content” tag for their email
newsletters by whether they were offering promotions or not. By adding the secondary dimension
of “Ad Content,” we can see which promotions were most effective at driving people to the
website.

There are many other ways to analyze campaign data, which we’ll cover in an advanced course.
Using the URL Builder in conjunction with Google Analytics reporting, you can quickly
understand which campaigns drove the highest quality traffic to your site.

How to use Analytics with Google Ads

Google Ads is Google’s advertising system that allows businesses to generate text and display
ads. Text ads show up next to Google search results by matching keywords you can bid on with
users’ search queries. Display ads are advertisements consisting of text, images, animation, or
video that show up on a vast collection of websites called the Google Display Network.

Since the Google Store wants to sell t-shirts, they could bid on keywords such as “Google t-shirt”
and “Google clothing.” When people search Google for a particular product like “a really cool
Google t-shirt,” Google Ads will show a relevant text ad for the Google Store if the ad meets
Google Ad's quality guidelines. This type of advertising can help attract customers from the
millions that use Google Search and the Display Network every day.

When you link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account, you can:

 view Google Ads click and cost data alongside your site engagement data in Google
Analytics;
 create remarketing lists in Analytics to use in Google Ads campaigns;
 import Analytics goals and transactions into Google Ads as conversions;
 and view Analytics site engagement data in Google Ads.

To set up a Google Ads account, navigate to the link at the end of this lesson and follow the
instructions to create an account. It should take less than twenty minutes.

To link Google Analytics with Google Ads, first make sure you are logged into Analytics using the
same email as your Google Ads account. You can find the email you’re signed in with in the
upper right-hand corner. Note that you must be an administrator on both accounts.

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Next, click the Admin tab. Then make sure you’ve selected the account and the property you
wish to link to your Google Ads account. Under the Property section, select “Google Ads linking.”
Click the button “New link group.” Any Google Ads accounts you have linked to your Google
account will automatically appear. Check which account you wish to link and click “continue.”
Next, type in a “Link Group Title.” This could be your Google Ads account ID.

Now select the view in which you want the Google Ads data to appear and select “Link
accounts.” The linked account will show in your Link group list with the title you entered.

Auto-tagging

When you link your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts, campaign data is shared
between the two systems, but it still requires campaign tracking. Although you can manually add
campaign tracking tags to Google Ads URLs using the URL Builder as we did earlier, there is a
better option. Google Ads can automatically add a special campaign tag to your Google Ads
URLs through a feature called auto-tagging. Auto tagging is required to get specific Google Ads
dimensions into Google Analytics. These are some of the Google Ads dimensions available:

 Query match type shows how a Google Ads keyword is matched to a user search query.
 Ad Group shows the ad group associated with the keyword/creative and click.
 Destination URL shows the Google Ads destination URL configured in your Google Ads
ads.
 Ad Format describes whether the ad is a text ad, display ad, or video.
 Ad Distribution Network shows the network used to deliver your ad.
 Placement Domain is the domain on the content network where your ad was displayed.
 And Google Ads Customer ID is the unique ID assigned to your Google Ads account.

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All of this data can help you better analyze the performance of your Google Ads campaigns. For
example, you can quickly compare the performance of different ad formats using the Ad Format
dimension. You can also fine-tune your keyword matching strategy by analyzing the performance
of your keywords based on their match type. Note that these additional dimensions and reporting
features are only available when you link your Google Analytics and Google Ads accounts.

Once we have linked Google Ads with Analytics, we can find Google Ads reports under
“Acquisition” in the left-hand navigation.

Campaigns

If we click on the “Campaigns” report, we can see how well our various Google Ads campaigns
are performing. Notice that this report organizes Google Ads campaigns using the names
assigned in Google Ads. This is one of the benefits of linking Google Ads with Analytics.

Note at the top of the report you can switch between desktop, mobile, and tablet metrics to view
the performance of campaigns across different devices. In the data table below, you can use the
Acquisition metrics to see how the clicks for each campaign and the total amount paid for those
clicks. CPC shows the average cost for each click. Under Behavior, you can see user
engagement for each campaign. And under Conversions, you can see the conversion rate, the
number of actual goal completions, and how much these conversions were ultimately worth to
your business for each Google Ads campaign using the pulldown menu.

Keywords

Now let’s look at the “Keywords” report. This can help you understand how well keywords and
individual ads are performing. For example, if a keyword is bringing in a lot of traffic but has a
high bounce rate, it might indicate a disconnect between the ad and landing page content. If you

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have a keyword with a high conversion rate but low number of impressions (or number of times
an ad was shown), you may want to raise your bid for that keyword, so the ad is shown more
often and reaches a larger audience. You could also add “Device Category” as a secondary
dimension to break out these keywords by the kinds of devices that users were on when they
clicked your ad and visited your site.

Bid adjustments

Finally, let’s look at the “Bid adjustments” report. Bid adjustments are a Google Ads feature used
to automatically adjust keyword bids based on a user’s device, location, or time of day. For
example, if the Google Store opens a temporary location during the holidays to sell merchandise,
they might want to add a bid adjustment to increase ad visibility on mobile devices within three
miles of the store during the hours of operation.

The Bid Adjustment report in Analytics lets you analyze Google Ads performance for the bid
adjustments you've set for your campaigns. You can use the selector at the top of the table to
evaluate campaign performance by the device, location, time of day, and remarketing list bid
adjustments. We’ll cover remarketing in an advanced course. To see all of your bid adjustments
and metrics for a specific campaign, you can click on that campaign name in the list.

You can see how powerful Google Ads can be for you business when paired with Google
Analytics. It allows you to really understand the value of your marketing and make adjustments to
improve your return on investment.

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