Google Analytics

Owned by Steven Bassett (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Dec 30, 2022 by RobLoach
5 min read

Getting Started

Interview the client

Do this as early as possible!
Find this information so you can set up segments / tracking / goals.
We need this information to form our questions to ask the data about.

Identify business goals

Try to get this from the client as early as possible. After you get these notes, list out possible ways of measuring these goals and what you might need to do ahead of time to get this going.
  • If a non-profit
    • "... how do donors find contact information for donating, or where is the donation form?
    • Are you gathering performance statistics for your mission, if so how?"
  • if it is a university, there are generally some pretty obvious goals.
  • Increase admissions.
  • Increase user happiness!
  • ...

Setting the client up


We will need to make sure we have some basic features enabled by us or by the client themselves.

  • You may also find the need to set up multiple profiles prefiltered for specific audience segment . You’ll also find load time for any complex reports much improved. Use the same filter screen as above to set up a series of profiles.

Google Tag Manager (GTM)

The new way to set up Google Analytics employs GTM, Google's powerful toolset to manage and support multiple analytics tags (including Google Analytics of course) and set up sophisticated tracking campaigns. Using GTM allows clients to access and manage their own events and setup campaigns that can be monitored in Google Analytics, without requiring any additional developer assistance.

There are several advantages to using GTM to setup Google Analytics on a project:

  • Once set up, new Tags and custom Tags can be added and managed by marketing managers without requiring updates to web pages or touching any code
  • Triggers and Actions allow for custom events and micro-interactions to be tracked (and monitored in Google Analytics)
  • Other tracking tags can be managed besides GA, using the GTM interface, again without requiring any code changes

Learn more about how to setup GTM at the Google Tag Manager Help Center. To set up GTM on either WordPress, or Drupal, see the Google Tag Manager kalawiki page.

Deliverables

  • Segments
  • Dashboards
  • Annotated notes. (You will need this yourself).
  • Visualizations that show what you're reporting back. (Most difficult to do well).
  • Presentation of the data. Be as visual as possible.

Where I start


Take lots of notes, as you go. Shortcuts are great, use them often.
Reuse dashboards / segments / reports from project to project.
Save shortcuts as you go. It takes a while to filter out the data to something that you can be informative. Looking at just big graphs doesn't answer many questions.
  • Performance, that matters a lot to me, and it turns out that can be one of the quickest way to make to lose your audience.
  • Look at how much traffic you are losing from providing a suboptimal non-desktop experience.
  • data to back up RWD;
  • Content efficacy
  • Let's see what pages are performing well and not this can include looking at bounce rate and %exit. 
  • Find what pages are doing well and driving most of the traffic.
  • From here analyze how this is working.
  • Find what the goal pages are and look at how people end up there:
  • Example: register for an event
  • find what the url pattern is and set that as a condition in looking at the behaviour patterns.



Dashboards

Dashboards are an effective deliverable. The go beyond conclusions to provide active insight into the site into the future. They also help organize and bring focus in a sea of noise, can be shared and downloaded as PDFs, or sent out via email on an automated schedule to users.

www.dashboardjunkie.com provides some excellent dashboards, and we draw some of these into our flows below.

Sharing Dashboards

We don't need to build dashboards from scratch. Instead we pick up on some existing work and extend it.

Here are some very useful dashboards that can be imported into any Analytics account by clicking on the links below. (We also store them on the main kalamuna.com google analytics account profile.)
You will be prompted to select a view to import the dashboard into. Select the appropriate domain target:
When you share a dashboard, it will initially be available only to you, and is listed under the private listing. Click share again and "Share Object" so other team members can access these dashboards.
You can safely delete the Private dashboard once it is made public for clarity.



You can share new dashboards via Share > Share template which will generate a link.



Segments

Here are some audience segments you can import too:




Tools

google chrome plug-in

There is a chrome extension that lets you see really easily what users are clicking on a page /segment. 
Download it HERE.
Looking at bounced sessions indicate where people leave the site after clicking and can indicate a poor experience, and need for improved IA, design, or content that does not fulfill the promise of the link's call to action.


Campaigns


Segments


Bots

Bots can give false positives on impressions and users. We want to filter these out.

Check the settings configurations to make sure the Bot filtering option ins checked. It wasn't on kalamuna.com for some time.


Resources



TODO