Advanced Google Analytics Training: Goal Setting & Measuring Dynamics

1. Introduction - Class Overview: [MUSIC] Hello, and welcome to this class on advanced Google Analytics training. Before we dive into the main classes contents, I want to go through two things very quickly. The first is who am I? The second is what you're going to learn in this class. Who am I? My name is Joshua George. I've been involved in the Digital Marketing Industry since 2013. In addition to this, I also own the award-winning Digital Marketing Agency in the UK called ClickSlice. Here is one of our most recent awards, we've won where as you can see it says ClickSlice was named a top B2B firm in the UK, which is really, nice. In addition to receiving these awards, we also literally use Google Analytics every single day of the agency to measure how well our client websites are performing. Now, I don't show you any of this to brag or anything like that, I show you this to reassure you that what you are learning in this class is actually coming from someone who lives and breathes this day in, day out. What you're going to learn in this class? In this class, I'll be showing you how you can set up custom alerts so you can be the first to know about any major changes in your website's traffic, such as any traffic spikes, or any traffic drops. I'll also be showing you how you can link your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account as well. We'll then, be taking a look at how you can sell custom dashboard in Google Analytics. After that, we'll be taking a look at Google's new machine learning feature called Analytics Intelligence. I'll then be showing you how you can set up goals in Google Analytics to measure your business's success it's really, important you get goal sets up in your Analytics account. If you don't set up goals, literally you have no idea how well your traffic is performing and what parts of your traffic is performing the best. Once we've covered goals, I'll be showing you how you can set up e-commerce tracking. I'll also be showing you how you can set up event tracking as well to track website clicks and lastly, I'll be showing you how you can track results from specific marketing activities, also referred to as campaign tagging. This last one is really, important as it allows you to see how specific marketing activities are performing. For example, if you send out a mailer to all of your email list, you can figure out exactly how many people from that specific email marketing campaign actually went over to your website and purchase one of your products or inquired with one of your services. If you don't have campaign tagging, then you'd literally have no idea. Now, when it comes to Google Analytics, that power is really in the data and you're going to learn exactly how you can analyze all of this data and use it to grow your business even further. Without further ado, let's get started. 2. What We're Going To Cover In This Section: Google Analytics Dynamics. In this section, you are going to learn how you can set up custom alerts so you can be the first to know about big, drastic changes to your data, such as traffic spikes or even traffic drops. Really handy to know this. I'll also be showing you how you can add users onto your Google Analytics account. Really important if you are a client and you're looking to hire an external marketing agency, and is also applicable if you actually own a marketing agency and you'd like to get access to your client's Google Analytics account. I'll also be showing you how you can link your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account as well so you can have all of the data in one place. You're also going to learn how you can set up custom dashboards in Google Analytics. These are really useful. A lot of the time you will find there is a lot of information in the Google Analytics account. However, if you just want to see specific things within that account, then setting up a custom dashboard is by far the best way to go. I'll also be showing you Google's new feature in Google Analytics called Analytics Intelligence is essentially a new tool built on machine learning and artificial intelligence is a really good tool and provides you with tons and tons of insights into exactly what is going on in your account. I like to refer to the tool as literary having your own Google Analytics assistant. It's such a really good feature as we are about to find out in this section of the course. So let's jump straight into it. 3. Be The First To Know - Setting Up Custom Alerts (Traffic Spikes and Drops): In this video, I'm going to show you how you can solve custom alerts for traffic spikes and drops as well. The reason why you're going to want to do this is because if you have a big drop in website traffic, for example, maybe a website is down, then you want to be notified about that as soon as possible so you can go ahead and fix the problem. We actually used to work with a client a few years ago who was really, really against receiving email notifications. I think he was under the assumption that he already had so many emails in his inbox. He literally didn't want any more whatsoever. We didn't go ahead and create any custom alerts for his website. Guess what happened one week later, he's website got hacked and I believe it was down for 16 hours in total. Almost a full day. He only found out because someone told him on social media. Believe me, you do not want to be that type of person who find out that your website is down through social media. When it comes to custom alerts, I like to create two different alerts: One for a big drop in traffic which as I just said, could be related to your website being down or any other significant problem. The second alert which I like to create is for big traffic spikes. A sudden big increase in traffic. Big traffic spikes aren't really a problem in itself. However, it's good to know when there is a big influx of traffic to your website so you can capitalize on those situations. Maybe you just be mentioned by someone huge on online and they've sent you tons and tons of referral traffic. You want to know about that right away so you can ensure your website is working correctly and potentially even add some affiliate offers to your website or any other solid value. To set up these alerts, all you need to do is go to Admin in the bottom left-hand corner. Then you want to go to Custom Alerts on their Personal Tools and Assets. This is then going to open up a box. We can go ahead and create your new alerts. Let's simply go ahead and click "New Alert". For the first one, what I'm going to do is create an alert for a big traffic spike. As a result, the alert name is going to be called traffic spike. Apply to and the period should always remain as it says. You don't need to change any of these options whatsoever. You do want to go ahead and click this box right here, send me an email when this alert triggers. Now what we need to do is specify the conditions for this specific alert. As this alert is related to a increase in traffic, what I'm going to do is go for this applies to all traffic, alert me when sessions. What I'm going to go for is a percentage increase by more than 30 percent. This 30 percent is based on a comparison to the same day in the previous week. The reason why I like to go for 30 percent and maybe not five percent, is because a five percent increase in traffic or it doesn't really correlate to a massive traffic spike. You could get a five percent more traffic today than you did yesterday. However, you might want to go ahead and change this figure a little bit higher or a little bit lower or depending on the type of business you run. You can always take a look at your historical data to see exactly how many visitors you get a day to your website. However, if you are unsure and you're not sure what number to put down, I highly recommend that you go for 30 percent. Once you finish configuring all your options, go ahead and click "Save Alert". Just like that, you can now see Google Analytics has created a custom alert for a traffic spike. Let's go ahead and create another custom alert before a traffic drop this time. Let's go over to New Alert once again. This one, I'll call it traffic drop. I'll tick the box once again to send me an email notification. This applies to all traffic and alert me when sessions. I'll go for a percentage decrease this time. I'll do exactly the same thing for any percentage of 30 percent. This is compared to the same day in the previous week. You can actually change this if you want to go to previous year. However, as you know, when you are working on your website and maybe we do an SEO, Google add any type of marketing, your traffic is ideally going to be increasing year on year. I always find it best actually to leave it as is and say the same day in the previous week. Once you finish your sessions, it's the same process once again. Simply go ahead and click, "Save Alert". Then just like that, you have now created two custom alerts within your Google Analytics account. Now you know how to set up custom alerts. It's over to you to go ahead and create your custom alerts in your Google Analytics account so you can be first to know when anything drastic happens on your website. I'll see you in the next one. 4. How To Add Additional Users Onto Your Google Analytics Account: How to add users onto your Google Analytics account. If you are part of a large marketing department and you have multiple people in your department who all need to access the same analytics account then you want to go ahead and create a user for each person that is going to access that account. It is really bad practice to have one generic username and password that everyone uses to log in. The reason why you want to go ahead and create account for each person in your business who is accessing the analytics account is because you can actually apply permissions to each account you create. Meaning if you have someone in your team who just needs to view the data for their own understanding and literally nothing else, then you can go ahead and just get them view only access. That way you drastically reduce the risk and minimize the chances of that person deleting any custom dashboards or any custom views you've set up yourself. Essentially it's all about streamlining people's workflows and things accidentally getting deleted. So to add users on your Google Analytics account, what you need to do is go to Admin, and then what you want to do is go to User Management on the right-hand side under All Website data. If you are not seeing this option right now then what that means is you do not have admin access to the account. To add users to any Google Analytics account you do need admin access. Let's go into View User Management. What we'll do on this page, it will show you all the users who are listed down on this account. I'm currently in the Google Analytics account for my own agency click size up here as you can see, as you can see at the moment we have three different users on their accounts which I've blurred out their email addresses for privacy reasons. To add someone new onto the account all you need to do is click this icon, the big plus button at the top, and then click ''Add Users'' and simply enter in the person's email address. Once you've entered in the email address do make sure you have this box selected below, notify new users by email. All you need to do is determine what decision you want to get to that user. We have edit, collaborate, and read and analyze. If you are unsure on what permission you should be giving to that specific user then you can always click the Learn More button right here under all of these options and this will let you know what all of the different options mean and then you can go ahead and set the one which suits your needs. One thing to know is that if you are setting up a Google Analytics account on behalf of a client then you are going to want to make sure you go ahead and check the box at the bottom, manage users as that will give the client all the access they need to be able to remove and add new users to their account. What I will do as well is include a link to this Google support article in the project and resource section of the course and this is a really good link to send to clients if they are struggling to figure out how they can add you under their Google Analytics account. That brings us to the end of this short video. It's all pretty straightforward. But like I said, adding people to your Google Analytics account is literally a must if you are a client or operate as part of a marketing department. That is it for this one and I'll see you in the next video. 5. How to Link Your Google Ads Accounts to Google Analytics : Hi and welcome back. In this video, I'll be showing you how you can link your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account. I'll also be explaining the main reasons why you want to do this as well. For those who don't know, Google Ads is Google's advertising platform that helps you get in front of new customers online. You've undoubtedly seen Google Ads before. Literally anytime you go onto Google and carry out research, you will see tons of Google ads at the top of the search results. We know that adds as it all had the Ad icon like so next to the search results. There are three main benefits of linking these two Google products together. Number one is that it allows you to see the full customer cycle. If it was to go inside of your ads manager within your Google Ads account, it will tell you how many clicks your ad got, how many impressions your ads got, but it won't tell you what that person's done once they landed on your website. This is where Google Analytics comes into play as if you link these two accounts together, you'll have both those data from both those different platforms all in one place, which will give you a much broader insight into the full customer cycle, aka what that customer actually does once they land on your website. The second benefit of linking Google Ads to Google Analytics is that you can enable a feature called auto tagging. What this does is automatically create a special campaign tag and it adds it to all of your Google Ad URLs which saves you tons of manual work as you no longer have to tag all of your Google Ad URLs to see where your clicks are common from. By linking these two accounts together, you are really saving yourself tons of work as all the stuff happens automatically in the background. The third and final reason, which in my opinion is actually the biggest reason why you want to link these accounts is that it allows you to set re-marketing campaigns, which essentially allows you to build user audiences in Google Analytics and show targeted ads to those specific users and bring them back to your website to encourage a conversion. Now we know the three reasons why you should link these two accounts. It's time for me to show you exactly how to do this. The first thing which you need to do is make sure you are logged into your Google Analytics account and make sure you are also logged into your Google Ads account as well. Once you're logged into both of those accounts, what you want to do is go back into your Google Analytics account. Go to Admin in the bottom left-hand corner, and then you want to go to Google Ads linking under Product linking in the middle. Then all you want to do is go ahead and select your Google Ads account and then click Continue, and then pop in a name for that Google Ads account which you are linking. Then under all website data, simply turn that on and enable that. Simply go ahead and click Link accounts, then click Done at the bottom. Just like that, you have now connected your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account. Then once you've done this, if you'd like to see your Google Ads Data within your Google Analytics account. Well, of course you need to go back into your Google Analytics account, and then what you want to do is go to Acquisition, then go to Google ads. As you can see, we can now see all the data all related to Google ads. For example, if I click into campaigns, I'll be able to see all the Google ad campaigns which are connected on this specific Google Ad account. We can see all the Campaigns that are set up. You can even go into the keyword report and get a list of all the keywords we are bidding on. How much it's costing us per keyword. We can also see the average cost per click. We can see the users, the sessions, the bounce rate, literally tons and tons of data all pulled from Google ads, now in our Google Analytics account. One of the other benefits I mentioned of linking these two accounts together, is that it allows you to set up custom audiences that you can use for re-marketing. To set up those custom audiences, all you need to do is go back into admin. Then under audience definitions, if you go ahead and give that a click, you will see you have an option called audiences. This is exactly where you set up those audiences. You can see it says audience source or website data enable re-marketing. Let's go to the next step, which is adding a destination where we'd like to publish our audience. Just click Add destination. I'd like to add it in my Google Ads account and I'll also like to add it in my Google Analytics account as well. Once you've gone ahead and selected those destinations, they should pop up below, and simply go ahead and click Enable. Just like that, you can now see we are able to set our re-marketing campaigns, in Google Ads, from this specific audience. What's also good to know is that you can also create new audiences based on different variables as well. Instead of setting up a custom audience based on all of your visitors, you can set up a custom audience based on people who have maybe purchased your products. To do so, you want to go back to the audience definitions and then go into audiences. Once again, we can now see our initial audience which we set up for all users. Let's go ahead and click a new audience. This time instead of going for all users like we did last time, we could go for users who completed a transaction, or we could go for new users or returning users. It's exactly the same process. Go ahead and define exactly what type of audience you would like to create a re-marketing list for. Creating custom audiences are extremely powerful as instead of showing your ads to new people who aren't actually already familiar with your brand, you can choose to show targeted ads to people who have already been on your website, aka people who are already familiar with your brand. Those people are the ones who are most likely to actually convert and buy your products or inquire about your services. Now you know how to link these two Google products and set up these custom audiences. It's over to you to take full advantage of it. I'll see you in the next video. 6. How to Set Up Custom Dashboards In Google Analytics: In this video, I'll be showing you how you can use custom dashboards in Google Analytics to perform an in-depth analysis. What custom dashboards allows you to do is go beyond the standard reports that you have in your analytics account and literally build out a custom dashboard so you can just see the data that you would like. You can see correlations that you might not have seen in a standardized reports when you're using custom dashboards. I'm currently in the demo account for the official Google merchandise store. Let's have a look at what custom dashboards they have out in this account. To do that, all we need to do is go to customization at the top and then go to dashboards and as you can see, we've got quite a few dashboards already set up in this Google Analytics account. We've got devise real time, SEO performance, e-commerce, site performance dashboard and we have audience snapshot as well. Let's take a look at the site performance dashboard to see exactly what a custom dashboard looks like. Here it is you can see we've got quite a lot of widgets all related to the site's performance. We've got the average page and load time, we have average server response time, mobile page load time, page load time by browser, domain lookup by country. We've got redirect time for countries, literally tons and tons of data all related to the site performance. Now, you might be wondering, well, why would I want us to have a dashboard all to do with site performance? Well, many of these metrics you typically would not find in one report. A custom dashboard allows you to gather all of these metrics that you care about and put them all in one place. When would this be useful? Well, let's imagine you have a technical SEO expert in your company. You could create this technical SEO dashboard just for them, so they can look at all of the data and all of the metrics that they care about, all in one place. They won't care about all the acquisition and audience reports on the left-hand side, they literally just want to see data all related to the performance of the website as they are technical SEO expert. The dashboard you can create are not just limited to the technical elements of your website. For example, you could create a dashboard related to any Google ad campaigns that you have going on. If you have someone running your PPC campaigns, they could come into that dashboard and get all the day to day one in literally one place. Here's another example. Maybe you have a content writer who's been pumping out tons and tons of content on your blog every single month. They could add their own custom dashboard, which we're pulling metrics of how people are behaving on the website and what type of content is getting viewed the most. As you can tell whether I literally end this opportunities and reasons, why do you want to set up a custom dashboard. Now, creating a custom dashboard is actually very straightforward. All you need to do is go into dashboards again, and then click this "Create" button right here. Now we're going to have two different options when it comes to creating a dashboard, you can go for a blank canvas, which basically means starting from scratch. If I go for blank canvas and let's just leave that dashboard name as is at the moment, and then click "Create Dashboard", you will see that Google Analytics is now going to pop up a box where I can add the widgets to my specific dashboard. For example, I could add some metrics, a timeline, I can filter the metric by a data range as well. Now, this can be a little bit confusing and a little bit overwhelming, especially if you are new to Google Analytics. What I recommend you do is use a dashboard from other Google Analytics users who have already spent all the time and effort, actually creating a dashboard. This is also referred to as working smart, rather than working hard. To find these custom dashboards, all you need to do is go to the Google Analytics Solution Gallery. I will actually include a link to this in the resources for you for ease, but essentially this is a resource of all of the Google Analytics Dashboards that people have created and uploaded to the gallery. It's typically going to be filtered by the most popular ones at the top so you can get a really good idea of exactly which ones are the best ones to use. For example, we have a new Google Analytics user start a bundle right here. Let's go ahead and open that. At the top, it will give you a description of what the dashboard actually contains, what is for and how you can actually use it. Then if you are happy with this dashboard, all you need to do is click the "Import" button in the top left corner that will open a new window. We'll go through all of their metrics, which our dashboard is going to create based on that, you will need to go ahead and select a view. If you have access to multiple Google Analytics account, then do make sure you go ahead and select the right account. As I'm in the Google demo account, I'll just go for the UA, the Universal Analytics, and I'll add it to the Master View. You can see we've got a few different segments, different costume reports, all of these are ticked by the four as of course we're importing this custom dashboard. However, if you don't want to see any of these custom reports, this is your opportunity to actually go ahead and untick them so they don't get imported into your account. Now this page can be a little bit buggy sometimes. There is actually a button down below here which says Create, but a lot of the time you can't actually access that. If that does happen to you then what I recommend you do, is just zoom out on your actual browser. I'm currently at 100 percent. If I zoom out to 90 percent and then go to 80 percent, I can now scroll up and down on the page where before, for some reason it seems to be locked. It's been like this for a few years now. I don't know why Google just doesn't fix it. But essentially what you want to do is go ahead and click "Create", and then that is going to import the dashboard into your Google Analytics account. Then if we go back to customization on the left-hand side, then go into dashboards or even custom reports, for example, you can now see we have all of these custom reports added to our Google Analytics account. Let's go back to the dashboard tab to have a look at what dashboard actually imported. We can see we've got this mobile e-commerce dashboard, which was imported today. We'll go ahead and have a look at that dashboard. You can see it's now bring in tons of different metrics, all related to the e-commerce on mobile devices, which is actually a really good dashboard to actually have in your account, especially if you own an e-commerce website. Now if you do find the dashboard to be a little bit overwhelming, maybe there's too much information in there and it's actually causing more confusion than actually clarity, then you can also very easily delete this dashboard from your account. All you need to do is go into the dashboard that you would like to delete, then go to Delete dashboard on the right hand side, and then simply go ahead and click "Delete", and that will then remove that dashboard from your Google Analytics accounts. Now the great thing about this Google Analytics Solution Gallery, is that although it's filtered by the most popular dashboards, you can actually search for specific dashboards based on your role. For example, if you are a SEO expert, you can go to search for a solution and then pop in SEO, carry out search for that, and then it will return to you, tons of different dashboards, all related to SEO in this instance. You can take a look through all of them and really pick one which suits your specific needs. What's also really good to know is that you can actually export your custom dashboards and reports to. All you need to do is go into the actual dashboard and then under Export right here, go ahead and click "PDF". Now this is very handy, if you want to give a report to your boss for an internal business meeting to really showcase specific key metrics, it's a lot easier and quicker to go through a report, than it is actually load up Google Analytics and then find that dashboard and then start to review all that data. Now, one thing which I just want to clarify when it comes to these custom dashboards and reports, is that there are some limitations to these reports. Those being is that you can only have 20 custom dashboards per Google Analytics account. Now for the majority of people, 20 dashboards is going to be more than sufficient. If you run a marketing agency, then you may want to create multiple Google Analytics account so you can have different dashboards for all of your clients. The other limitation to these custom dashboards, is that you can only have 12 widgets per dashboard. Make sure you do choose wisely when it comes to selecting what you'd like to show it in your dashboard if you go the blank canvas route that is. That brings this video to an end. I hope you enjoyed it and got tons of value out of it. In conclusion, custom dashboards allows you to go beyond the standardized reports and get a dashboard full of data and metrics which are specific to your role. 7. Analytics Intelligence - Googles New Machine Learning Feature : Welcome back. In this one, we'll be going over Google's new feature we've inside Google Analytics called Analytics Intelligence. Analytics Intelligence is a very impressive development from Google. It was built using machine learning, so you can better understand anatomy of your data. As we all know, sometimes it can be a little bit confusing when you're trying to pinpoint some information about your website as you have so many different reports at your disposal. You have audience reports, acquisition, behavior, and conversion reports. There are a few different reports, so it can get confusing very quickly. Analytics Intelligence makes the whole process so much more easier. To access Analytics Intelligence, all you need to do is go to the Home tab in your Google Analytics account. Once you're in our Home tab, you want to simply go ahead to where it says Insights on the top right-hand side of your screen. Give that a click. Just like that, you have now access to Analytics Intelligence, it is really that straightforward. Now, there are two core parts to Analytics Intelligence. Number 1 is that you can use it to get answers to the most common asked questions. Number 2, there's an insight section which will quickly give you a broad insight into all of your data and highlight any opportunities that you should be aware of. Let's have a look at the first one, which is using it to get answers to the most common asked questions. Well, let's imagine that you want to know how many users you had on your website last week. Typically, you'd have to go over to Audience, give that a click, and then go to Overview. Wait for the page to load. Once it has loaded, you want to go ahead and select your day range. It can be a little bit cumbersome. We've Analytics Intelligence, it makes the whole process way more efficient. All you need to do is go into Analytics Intelligence, go to Basic Performance, and then you can see we have an option right here. How many users did I have last week? Give that a click. As you can see, Analytics Intelligence returns the answer just like that, very quick and no hassle whatsoever. Let's go back and have a look at what other questions we can find the answers to. Because remember, that one just gave us a very straightforward answer. However, we can actually get more detailed answers. For example, if we go into this one right here, understanding your trends, we can get a trend of the monthly users over the last six months. Let's go ahead and give that a click. We can see that instead of returning a standard answer or a figure, analytics intelligence is actually returning a line chart for the last six months so we can see an overview of all of our users in just a few seconds. Now there are literally tons and tons of questions that you can select from. If I go back, you can see there are tons and tons of different questions. Show me a trend of my bounce rate over the last three months. We can come out of understanding your trends and go to content analysis. Apologies if you can't see the name of these tabs out well. This isn't to do with me, this is actually a Google problem. As like I said, this is a new feature in Google Analytics. Clearly, Google was ironing out some creases in the way it views in the back-end, but essentially you can actually make out what it says under that Google G logo right there. You can see it says, what are my top pages in terms of page views? What pages do people spend the most time on? Really good questions that the majority of people are going to have when they're using Google Analytics. This is a really good tool for beginners. I really wish they had this when I first started to learn Google Analytics because trust me, it took me a lot of time figuring out where the stuff actually is. However, you don't have to worry about that as you now have this analytics intelligence option. That's the first part of analytics intelligence. It allows you to get answers to the most common asked questions. The second part, which is going to be the most valuable and actionable for you, is going to be the actual insights a tool gives you. You can see at the top of Analytics Intelligence, we are on tab which says insights. If I go back to Home, you might actually see the full word. I do believe it's all a little bit congested at the moment. You can actually see the word insights. Now, you can see it's giving me two notifications right here. It says one of your top five landing pages is loading in slowly. Now, that is something you definitely want to be aware of, as of course is your top five landing pages. It's taking ages to load, which is going to result in a poor user experience. To find out what page is actually referring to, what we need to do is give this a click, is then going to expand and give you a breakdown of those top five pages and let you know exactly how long it takes for them to load. You can see this page right here takes 10.4 seconds to load. Now that is really high on average, all pages should ideally load under free seconds. Any page that takes over three seconds to load can actually have a negative impact when it comes to SEO. You can even see that Google gives you a little summary and a bit of a description of why page speed actually matters as well. Again, this is all information that you can act upon to improve your website going forward. If we go back now, you can see it's going to automatically put us under the Read tab, which basically tells us we have now read these notifications. To see any more notifications you have, simply go back into the Insights tab. You can see we have another one right here. More users return to your site in April. Again, that is an indication to us that more users will return to your site in April. Now you can see it says you had 63,000 users in March, 3.25K came back in April, which means 5.8 percent of the users returned to your website. In this case, we can see our returning users for April is actually a little bit higher than March. If our returning users, for example, were really low, maybe one percent, then that is a very clear indication that hey, something might be wrong on our website. Maybe we've got a redesign. But regardless of what actually happened, Analytics Intelligence gives you the insights and the data so you know exactly what is going on in your website quickly and efficiently. I highly recommend that you go ahead and check it out for your own Google Analytics website as it is a really good tool. Every single week, Google expands on it and adding more questions and more options. That is it for this one, I hope you found it useful, turns the value in this small but very powerful feature. I'll see you in the next one. 8. How to Set Up Goals in Google Analytics To Measure Your Businesses Success: In this video, you are going to learn why and how to set up goals in Google Analytics. Goals are literally one of the most important things you can set up when it comes to configuring and setting up a Google Analytics account. First things first, what is a goal? A goal represents a completed activity called a conversion that contributes to the success of a business. As all businesses are different and measure success in different forms, a goal can actually be different things. For example, if you own an e-commerce website, then a goal you may want to track is users on your website who make a purchase. If you can see how many purchases are coming through your website, then you'll be able to understand how well your website is performing. However, if you're not an e-commerce website owner, maybe you're a local business owner or a service-based business, then a goal that you may want to track is when users submit a form on your website or any formal contact information, and you then have all of the details which you can use to market to them and sell your services. If you own a gaming app, then potentially you'd want to set up a goal when users complete a level in the game as then they're more likely to pay for your additional upsells. A goal is literally any specific action that users take on your website that would be valuable for you to know about. If you don't set up goals, then all you can measure is how many users are coming to your website, and yes, you can be focused on growing that, but if those users aren't completing those specific actions which are valuable to your business, then it's going to be really hard for you to grow your business going forward. Hopefully now you understand exactly why it's so important to set up goals in your Google Analytics account. It's good to know as well that goals are not automatically set up by Google, as like I just discussed, all businesses measure goals in different forms so it's actually up to you to go into your account and configure the goals based on your specific business, which of course, I'm going to show you exactly how to do in this video right here. Setting up goals is actually quite straightforward. All you need to do is log in to your Google Analytics account, then go to Admin in the bottom left-hand corner, and then go to Goals on the right-hand side under All Web Site Data. Then go ahead and click "New Goal", and we now have free options which we need to go through to set up the actual goal. We have number 1, the goal set up, number 2, the goal description, and number 3, the goal details. Let's start with number 1. The first thing which you need to decide on is if you want to set up a goal from complete scratch, which would be custom, or if you want to use a goal template which Google has already pre-configured for you. Now, I highly recommend that everyone goes for a templated option, as 99 percent of people are going to find a pre-filled templated option that applies to their business. For example, we have revenue right here at the top for e-commerce websites. However, just a word of warning, if you do actually own an e-commerce website, then I do not recommend you set up goal tracking to measure how many transactions and sales are coming through your website, as you are going to be far better off just enabling e-commerce tracking, which I'll show you how to do in the next video, by the way. But essentially there are tones of different goals. As you can see, we have to create an account, which comes under acquisition. We have inquiry-based goals, so contact us, read reviews, request a callback a callback, people accessing a live chat, downloading or installing some software, maybe a PDF, we have engagement related goals to do with adding stuff to people's favorites, media plays, subscribing to a newsletter, literally tons and tons of goals that you can select from. Now what's also really good to know is that the setup process for a lot of these goals are actually the same, so it doesn't really matter which one you select. For example, let's imagine you are a service-based business, and the goal you want to track is when people submit a form on your website. You could go for, get a call back right here, which is when people request your service or a phone call, or you could also go for a sign-up, which is when people actually subscribe to a newsletter, update alerts, or join a group. Both of the setup process is exactly the same, which is why I'm saying it doesn't matter. In my instance, I'm going to go for sign-up and then click "Continue". We now need to give our goal a name. I'm going to change my name from sign-up and go to Contact Form Submission. The goal slot ID should remain exactly how it is, so don't change anything there whatsoever, and under Type, you want to go for Destination. Essentially what this is is we're going to give Google Analytics a destination URL, which is going to use to measure when a goal is completed. This is by far the best type to use when it comes to setting up goals for contact forms as when someone submits a contact form and they land on a thank-you page, which is going to be your destination page, well, there's only one way that person could have got to that thank-you page, and it's by filling in your contact form. So go ahead and click "Continue" once you've selected "Destination". Now what we need to do is put in the destination URL. This is going to be the URL of your thank-you page, which people land on once they submit in your contact form. Now, not all contact forms actually redirect to a thank-you page so if your form doesn't actually do that, then what you will need to do is go into the backend of your website, and get that configured just to make sure you are tracking things accurately. If you are not sure what your thank-you page URL is, then the best thing to do is to actually fill in the form as if you are a user, and then once you land on a thank-you page, simply go ahead and copy the URL and enter it in this box right here. Now you don't want to enter in the full URL. As you can see, Google actually stated that in the text below. You want to ahead and just enter in the part after the forward slash, which is going to be something like thank-you in my instance. Then the last thing which you want to go ahead and do, is actually assign a monetary value to the conversion. Now you don't have to do this if you don't actually know how much each goal is actually worth to you. However, if you do have some indication, then it's going to be quite useful as it's going to provide more tangible data in your Google Analytics account. Now, let me give you some rules of thumbs of what you should actually use when it comes to assigning a value to each goal in your account. Here is my general rule of thumb when it comes to assigning goal values. If you own an e-commerce website, you should leave it as it is and put no value, primarily because you want to be tracking your revenue through E-commerce tracking, which as I said, I'll be showing you how to set up in the next video. If your goal is classified as Lead Generation, which would include form submissions like in my instance, then what you should put down for your goal value is your expected revenue per lead. If you're setting up goals for email subscribers, then typically the average email subscriber is going to be worth somewhere between 3-$10 so on the lower end, as of course, not all of your e-mail subscribers are actually going to take action and buy your product or service. If you're tracking engagement, then that's going to be super low. I recommend you put down $1 or less. That is my rule of thumb. If you're in the Lead Generation category, and you're struggling to figure out what revenue you can expect per lead, that fills in your form on the website, then a pretty solid strategy you can actually follow is to work backwards. Let's imagine your sales team closes 10 percent of people who submit a form inquiry, and the average amount of money a person spends of your business is $1,000, then you might assign your goal value as $100 per lead, which of course is 10 percent of $1,000. However, in contrast, if only five percent of formal submissions actually result in a sale, then you might only assign $50 to your goal. I hope that gives you an idea of exactly how you can work backwards, to figure out what value you should be putting down in your account. However, like I said, if you don't know what value you should be using, then it's best to just leave it as off as default. However, once you're happy and you finish setting up all three steps of the goal process, all you need to do is go ahead and click "Save". Now you can see our goal has been created and it is currently turned on and recording any other specific actions which we just configured. In summary, setting up goals is something you definitely want to be doing in your account. It's going to give you more data and let you understand exactly how well your website is performing rather than just seeing how many users your website is getting. That is it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you in the next one. 9. How to Set Up Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics: E-commerce tracking. In this video, I'll be showing you how you can set up and enable e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics so you can measure the number of all your transactions and revenue generated by your website. The first step to set this up is to enable the feature. To do so, head into your Google Analytics account, and then go to admin in the left corner, then you want to find the e-commerce settings which is right here, e-commerce settings, and then all you want to do is simply toggle this from off to on. Now as you can see, once we turn it on, we have another option below, which is enable enhanced e-commerce reporting. Allow me to go back to my PowerPoint slides to explain the difference between standard e-commerce tracking and enhanced e-commerce tracking. As you would have saw, there are two main methods of being able to track sales data from your website. We had the first one, which is a standard e-commerce tracking. Now the standard e-commerce tracking allows you to measure the number of transactions and revenue that your website generates. The enhanced e-commerce tracking, well, it provides you with a bit more information about user interactions with products on your website, along with the user's shopping experience. For example, how many impressions your product gets, how many clicks your product gets, how many people add it to the cart, the whole initiation of the checkout process, transactions, refunds, literally so much more information. However, setting them up requires more work and it may include a cost if you was to outsource setup. I recommend that you only set up enhanced e-commerce tracking if you don't have any other tool that allows you to analyze the customer journey, sales funnel, and revenue generation. Therefore, if you are just getting started with Google Analytics, then I highly recommend that you just go for the first option, which is going to be e-commerce tracking. Therefore, if you are just getting started with Google Analytics e-commerce reports, then the standard option is going to be the best choice. Let's go back into our account and make sure we don't have enhanced e-commerce reporting on. Let's go ahead and click "Save." Now that is a first step completed. The second step to set up e-commerce tracking is to actually add the code onto your website. Now, the great news is that if you are using a shopping platform such as Shopify or Magento, then you don't have to do any additional steps as they built their platform so that it's very easy to send data across into your Google Analytics account. Literally, all you need to do is enable those reports like I just showed you how to do, then you'll be able to see data in your Google Analytics reports. The way it works is it uses the standard Google Analytics tracking code that you've already added to your website. Ensure once you have the Google Analytics tracking set up, all you need to do is enable the e-commerce tracking and you're pretty much good to go. If you are using another platform, maybe WooCommerce for example, then what I recommend you do is you go ahead and check out their support documents to see the easy steps to get this out too. If you are not using any shop system on your website and you'd like to track all of this data, then what you need to do is essentially add all of this code manually to your website. Now there's quite a lot of JavaScript and HTML involving adding all of these transactional data to your actual website, so if you're not familiar with code, then I highly recommend you hire a freelancer to actually set this all up for you. It's a pretty standard process, so finding someone shouldn't be too difficult. The final step to set this all up is to simply go back into your Google Analytics account and just verify that it's working. To do so, you want to go to conversions, and then go to e-commerce, and then go to overview. Then after a few days of a data populating, you should able to log into your Google Analytics account and see exactly how much revenue has been generated for your website, your e-commerce conversion rate, your transactions, your average order value, and you can also see a breakdown of your sales by product as well. It's literally that straightforward. A lot of people seems to get really confused and overwhelmed when it comes to tracking all of this data but literally, all you need to do is ensure you already had the analytics code installed on your website and then enable the feature and hook the two up together. As you can imagine, once you have all these data in your account, it's going to give you more insight into exactly how you can optimize your website to generate more sales from your users. That is it for this one. Now you know how to set it up. I highly recommend that you do set it up if you own an e-commerce website, and start to take full advantage of all of the data. 10. How to Set Up Event Tracking To Track Website Clicks: Event tracking. In this video, I'll be showing you how you can set up event tracking in Google Analytics and the reasons why you want to use it. First things first, what is event tracking? Event tracking allows you to capture user interactions with elements of your website, which Google Analytics does not automatically capture. The keyword being here would be, automatically. You see, Google Analytics, whilst it does collect tons of data about the user, there are specific features which it's not able to actually capture. This is where event tracking comes in. Let me give you some examples and use cases of when you'd be using event tracking. You could use event tracking to track how many people are clicking on a phone number on your website. As you probably already know, you can actually have a clickable click to call phone number on your website. When people actually go ahead and click that phone number, and then what happens is it triggers the calling feature on the person's mobile device and actually makes a phone call. Now, of course, we can't have our Google Analytics code on the person's phone. We're not able to track when people are clicking those click to call phone numbers. However, with event tracking, we can do exactly that. Another example would be external link clicks to maybe a third-party live chat, for example. A lot of websites do have live chat support on their website. Some of them actually link to a third-party website. In this instance, once again, if you're using the standard Google Analytics tracking, you won't be able to pick up how many people are actually clicking on that link and going to a third-party website. Another example could be video plays that wouldn't be trackable for the standard Google Analytics. Podcast plays selected color or size; now this applies to e-commerce websites. If you have a user on your website who is browsing a dress, for example, and there's multiple colors, you won't be able to tell what colors that user is clicking through by the standard Google Analytics reports. Here's some more examples, you can have click to social profiles, abandonment of a form field, clicks on email addresses. There are literally so many instances when you can use event tracking. It definitely has its own advantages. Now we've covered the benefits and the use cases of event tracking. Let's move on to the next step which is how to actually set up event tracking. Setting up event tracking is pretty straightforward. Essentially, all you need to do is add the event tracking code to the links that you would like to track on your website. Then when someone clicks on that link, that interaction is tracked and displayed as an event in Google Analytics. Let's head over to the Google Analytics demo account and I'll show you exactly where all your events are going to be stored in your Google Analytics account. What you want to do is log in to your account and any event you create is going to be under the Behavior tab. Then it's going to be under Events. Then if we go to the Overview tab, we can see the total number of events on this website in the specified date range. This is the template event tracking code. Don't worry about trying to screenshot here as I will upload it for you as a downloadable PDF. You can simply go ahead, open that PDF, and copy it for your use. Before I show you how you would add this to a link, let me explain what each part of the code actually means, as it is really important you understand this, as essentially what you put in this code is going to appear in your Google Analytics account. The first part of the code is pretty much templated and doesn't really change or this part right here. The only parts which you need to change are the parts I put in color. Hopefully, this makes loads of sense as I had actually tried to color coordinate it as well, to make it super easy to understand. Essentially, category, what that is, that refers to typically the object that was interacted with. For example, you might have a PDF on your website. When people click a link, it might automatically download that PDF. As a result, you want to describe what that is. That is exactly what the category is. The next part, action, well, this would be the type of interaction, e.g., did someone play a video? Did they download something? The next part, which is the label, that is useful for summarizing what the event is about e.g., in this instance, it would be the name of the PDF. The value is the last part which is actually optional. You typically won't see this in your Google Analytics account as not a lot of people actually fill it in. But if your event does have a numerical value associated with it, then you can go ahead and pop in a number at the end. These fields are really important, as I was saying, the category, the action, and label, as essentially what you put in these fields is what is going to appear in your Google Analytics account. Let me give you this example by going back to the Google Analytics demo account. I'm in Behavior, I'm still in the Events. You can see we have our three sections right here, category, action, and label, just like we have on our PowerPoint slide, category, action, and label. Remember, value is optional, the first three are all required. If I go back to the Google Analytics account, if we go into action, we can see the action people are completing. This would be a Quickview Click, a Product Click, a Add to Cart, a On-site Click. If we go to Event Label, we can actually see the name of the product that people are clicking on. We've got the Google Eco Tee Black, we have a Chrome Dino Dark Mode Collectible, so it makes it really useful. I highly recommend that you actually give it some thought when it comes to actually naming these fields. Let me give you an example of how you'd add this to a link. This is the template which we just looked at. This is a standard version without any of the colors on it. This would be us adding it into a link on our website. I will give you a few seconds just to see if you can figure out what is a category, what is the action, and what is the label. Did you manage to spot what was what? If not, no worries. Let me add the color fields back on so you can see things very clearly. At the start, what we basically have right here is going to be the original URL on our website. We have example.com/pdf/pricelist.pdf. This is basically a link on our website where people can view a price list of our services. We then had the event tracking template coming off of the URL, which is onclick equals ga send, event PDF, which is going to be the category. This is what people are interacting with. Then we have download. Again, this is the action people are taking. Then we have the label which is telling me exactly what that PDF is about, which in this instance is a company price list and they have downloaded the PDF. The last part where it says Download PDF. Well, this is actually what the user would see on the actual website when they click the button. This is the text that the user would actually see on the website. They would see the text, Download PDF. They would click that, and then the PDF would get downloaded. That is essentially how you'd add the event tracking code to the links on your website. All you need to do is take the template, replace the fields with fields relevant to your specific action, update the links on your website, and then your data is all going to populate and get pulled across into your Google Analytics account under the Events, Overview tab. Now you know how to set up event tracking. I highly recommend that you go out there and set it up. It is really useful, especially for local businesses who would like to track click-to-call phone numbers. That's it for this one. I'll see you in the next video. 11. How To Track Results From Specific Marketing Activies - Campaign Tagging: How to track results from specific marketing activities using campaign tagging, also known as a URL builder. Why would we want to do this? We've seen in our source medium report under Acquisition in our account that we can see where our traffic is coming from by the source and the medium. For example, we can see traffic is coming from Google and is coming in organically from the search results. However, it's much harder to see if an individual email or individual tweets or Facebook post really had any impact, and that's exactly where campaign tagging comes in. With campaign tagging, it allows you to create a unique link which you can use for those things. Then all of the data and results for that specific marketing activity, whether it's an email you send or a Facebook post, will all get brought into your Google Analytics account. To create one of these special links, we need to use this tool right here called the Campaign URL Builder. You can simply find it on Google by just carrying out research for Campaign URL Builder. However, I will add a link to this in the resource section of the course, just so you've got it for ease. What this tool allows us to do is add additional information to our original link, also known as UTM tagging. You can see right here, we've got UTM and we've got the source, we've got the medium, and we've also got the campaign. This would be your unique final link that you'd share in your specific marketing activity and the great thing about this is you can actually name whatever you want these campaign sources and mediums to be all above. Once you go through this process, which I'll show you how to do in a second, all of this data will automatically get pulled into your Google Analytics account under Campaigns right here, under Acquisition. If we go to All Campaigns, we can see that for the Google demo account for the Google merchandise store, they have all these campaigns sets up right here. If we go into the Campaign, we can then see the source and the medium of the specific campaign. Let me run through exactly how it would work as we already set up one before I recorded this video. Essentially all you need to do is visit this URL. Then what you want to do is put in your website URL. I've gone, for example, website.com, just for the purpose of this training video. However, what's really important to know is that if you are running a promotion on maybe a specific page on your website, then instead of just putting in your homepage, like I've done so, all you actually want to do is put in the full URL of that specific page. Once you put in your website URL, you want to go down to the next part, which is going to be your Campaign Source. This is essentially where the traffic is coming from. Now let's pretend I own an e-commerce website and I'm sending out a marketing email to everyone on my email list. The Campaign source in this instance is going to be a newsletter and not Google. The campaign medium is going to be the marketing medium. What specific medium that traffic is coming from, which in my instance, is going to be an email as it's coming from an email marketing campaign. The next thing which we need to do is put down a campaign name. This is essentially the name of the campaign, it's a really good idea to put something here that you actually are going to remember in the future. For example, if this was a black Friday sale, I would literally put Black Friday. When I see this data in my Google Analytics account, I know that all the data from this campaign came from my Black Friday email marketing campaign. The campaign term below is not actually required. You can use it if you are running any paid Google Ad campaigns. We don't really need to do this whatsoever and the same applies to campaign content. Essentially you only need to fill in the top four rows, the website URL, the campaign source, the medium, and the campaign name. Once you go ahead and populate all those details, the campaign URL Builder is then going to generate this unique link which you can see below. Then essentially, all you need to do is copy that URL and then add it into your specific marketing element. What I would do in this instance is I would go into my email marketing tool, I would then create my email, and paste this link into that specific email. Alternatively, if wish to create a special link which you'd like to share on Facebook to measure the success of that specific Facebook post, then it's exactly the same process. You'd copy the URL, you'd go over to your Facebook account. You'd then go ahead and create your actual Facebook post and you'd simply paste in that special link that we've just created now and then go ahead and click "Post". Anyone who interacts with your website from that specific link from Facebook is all going to get pulled into your Google Analytics account, where you can see how many users came from that link, you can see the number of sessions, we can see the bounce rate, how many pages they viewed per session. You can even see the e-commerce conversion rate, the number of transactions, and the revenue all coming from that traffic, if you have e-commerce tracking sets up. As you can see, it's a really, really powerful tool. It gives you tons of data and insight from a specific marketing channel. I have actually received quite a few questions from people saying, can we use this on other platforms as well? Yes, it is exactly the same process. Essentially, all you need to do is copy your unique URL and then go into whatever other platform you would like. Maybe Twitter, for example, create your tweet and then go ahead and paste in your unique link. Then once again, all the results from this specific tweet is then going to get pulled into your Google Analytics account. I hope you can see just how powerful this feature actually is. Not a lot of people are actually aware of the campaign tagging tool, let alone actually use it. You now know why and how to use it. I highly recommend that you go out there and you create your own unique marketing links and really start to measure how much of an impact your specific marketing campaigns are having. That is it for this one and I'll see you in the next one. 12. Conclusion: Hello, now, Google Analytics experts. Well, I certainly hope this isn't goodbye forever, and it's just a goodbye for now. I thank you so much for making it to the end of the course of me. I'm really taking your time to understand exactly how to leverage Google Analytics to improve your website's performance. Knowing how to set up things such as goals is a vital component in understanding exactly how well your website performs. If you don't set up goals, then literally, you are going to be shooting in the dark and making changes to your website, all based on assumptions, which is definitely something you want to avoid at all costs. Like with anything in digital marketing, the power is always in the data. I really hope you find the course valuable. Please be sure to leave me a review and share your feedback. It would also be great if you could share the course on your social media platforms as well as sharing is caring. Once again, thank you. I hope you loved it. I had a great time making this course and hopefully I'll be seeing you in another one. Goodbye for now.