Google Analytics

In today’s lesson, we’re diving into Google Analytics—your guide to understanding who your visitors are and how they interact with your site.

To be clear: 

This course is a high-level overview on Analytics, not a deep-dive.

Why kick off with Analytics?

Analytics paints a clear picture of your visitors and their journey on your site.

The data you uncover in Analytics will set the stage for the research in our upcoming lesson.

By the end of the lesson, you’ll know:

• The key areas to focus on in Analytics
• Who your users are and how they interact with your site
• Your top converting pages and pages with high abandonment rates

(And if you have someone on your team who uses Analytics, you can forward this to them so they can pull the relevant data for you.)

Ready? Let’s dive in…

Video:

Next steps:

1. Review your Google Analytics data

• Review your Google Analytics data
• Note: If you’re new to Analytics, learn how to get started

2. Document your findings

• Update your research document (template)
• See an example research document with Analytics data

Notes:

Review the following Google Analytics data to better understand your visitors. (Watch the video to see where to find all this data.)

User attributes

The User Attributes section reveals your visitors demographics and location.

User Attributes:

• Country
• Age
• Gender
• Interests

Acquisition

The Acquisition section is essential for understanding where your website traffic originates.

Acquisition:

• Direct
• Social
• Email
• Organic

Engagement

The Engagement section reveals how users interact with your site and total revenue you make from each page.

Engagement:

• Landing pages
• Average time on site
• Number of pages visited
• Most visited pages
• Total revenue

Monetization

The Purchase Journey and Checkout Journey sections under Monetization reveal key data about your funnel such as funnel pages, click through rates, and abandonment rates. 

For example, if only a small percentage of users move from viewing a product to adding it to the cart, this indicates an area for improvement.

Purchase journey:

• Key pages
• Click through rates
• Abandonment rates

Checkout journey:

• Key pages
• Click through rates
• Abandonment rates

The E-commerce Purchases section under Monetization reveals the performance of individual products or services including views, cart additions, purchases, and revenue.

• Product
• Revenue

Tech

The Tech section provides an overview of the operating systems and device types your users use to view your site.

• Operating system
• Device type

Comments:

Video transcript:

Understanding Google Analytics

Google Analytics.

Now, before we dive into Google Analytics, a word of caution, analytics can give you great insights, but frankly, it can also be overwhelming. This is not a course on analytics. It’s a high level overview to show you the few things that you can get out of it very, very quickly. That’ll help you set up the rest of your research to help you understand your visitors.

Having said that, I’m going to show you the questions that you need to answer before you start the research process effectively. I’ll also show you in Google Analytics where you can find the answers to these questions. So let’s dive in.

This is the homepage for Google Analytics, and you’ll see here on the left hand side, we’re just going to be focusing on the elements in there.

I’m going to walk you through it very quickly.

You’ll notice that there’s acquisition, engagement, monetization, retention, user attributes, and tech.

If you’re already familiar with analytics or you have someone on your team that can do this, you can simply go through the questions that we’ve provided in the research doc and answer them.

But if you’re unfamiliar with analytics, this video will be really helpful in giving you a very quick 101 type walkthrough.

Identifying Your Audience

User attributes section will help you answer the following questions. Who are your visitors? Frankly, where are they from? What’s their age, their gender, et cetera. These types of demographic data are vital for you to paint a picture of who your prospects and your customers are. To find that, you go to the user attributes section that’s here on the left hand side, as you can see right here, and then click overview.

And right away, you can see you’ll have your users by country. You can also see the age and the gender plus a whole lot of extra information.

Analyzing User Acquisition and Engagement

Next is acquisition. This will help you understand the source or where people are coming from.

Are they coming from direct, meaning are they typing in your web address?

Or are they coming from social, like LinkedIn or X?

Are they coming from emails that you’ve sent, various email campaigns?

Or are they coming from organic search results? And if so, what keywords are you ranking for?

When you understand all of this, it helps you paint a picture in your mind of what the customer journey is going to be like.

If the vast majority of people are coming from organic search, then you need to understand the keywords that they’re searching for. And that helps you have a frame of reference in your mind when you’re doing the research process yourself.

You can find these details in the Acquisition tab. And then user acquisition. If you go ahead and click on that, you’ll see here it’ll list all the sources. And it’ll also show you the number of conversions that you have for each of them. So you can quickly identify what’s the traffic from each of these.

And then also what’s it worth to me as the business.

So, not only can you see where people are coming from, you can also see what sources are the most popular and which ones are driving the most revenue.

Next up is engagement. The questions you want to ask here is, how do your visitors interact with the site? What’s the average time on site? How many pages are they visiting? And most importantly, what are your most visited pages?

To find out, you can go to the engagement tab. And then select landing pages.

This will show you a number of landing pages. This is where people are landing on. It’s the first page that they see. So you have a list of the landing pages and you can see the engagement for each. You can also see the number of conversions and the total revenue that they’re driving.

You can see what are the traffic levels and what’s each page worth to you. There’s a lot more in the engagement section.

For example, the pages and screens, which you see right here. This is another useful tab to go through if you want to get more background info. But again, we’re keeping this very high level, so I would just focus on the landing page and the overview.

Visualizing the Purchase Funnel

Now this may be the most important part, and this is where you look at the funnel itself. This helps you to visualize what does the funnel look like, and where are people leaving? It’s not uncommon when you’re looking at a funnel to realize that there’s one or two pages that the vast majority of people are dropping off from.

Those are the pages that you need to gather more research on, and those are the pages that have the biggest opportunities for you to grow and learn more about your audience. So it pays to go through the funnel and map this out and see how it works.

This used to be a pain, but analytics has recently introduced some new functionality that lets you visualize this pretty simply.

This is called the purchase journey and you can see here it’s under the monetization tab and then you select purchase journey. And what this does is it will show you the key steps that people need to go through in order to purchase from you. So the one on the left, this is always going to be people just starting the session. So that’s always going to be 100%.

The second step in this case is to view a product page. So let me walk you through the visuals and the numbers here. The number 47%, which you can see right here, what that’s saying is 47 percent of people who started a session, that’s the step one, 47 percent of them actually made it to viewing a product.

So there’s a lot of opportunity there. If only half the people on this site are viewing a product, there’s a lot of opportunity to get more people to view a product before they leave the site.

Now that once somebody has viewed the product, we see a huge drop off here as well. Only 17 percent of people who view a product will actually take the next step and add it to their cart. So 17 percent is a pretty low number.

And this lets you know very quickly, Aha! If I’m looking at the product pages, not a lot of people are adding items to their cart. But why? And it’s these types of questions that you need to find out. It’s these types of questions that will give you the answers that will help you increase your sales and design a better website.

From step three, adding to cart, it then goes on to step four, which is begin the checkout process. You can see here that 42 percent of people, once they’ve added an item to the cart, will actually begin the checkout process. That’s not bad. We could definitely improve that, but 42 percent is still a pretty good number.

Furthermore, once somebody has already begun the checkout process and you look at step five, which is to purchase 51 percent of people who start the checkout process ultimately buy. So again, there’s some opportunities there. If half the people that have said, Hey, I’ve got this item in my cart, I’m in the checkout process.

But you know what? This isn’t for me. That’s another opportunity for us to dive into the research and understand why are half the people leaving when they’ve already gone so far through the funnel.

Speaking of the checkout process.

Exploring the Checkout Journey

You can also use what’s called the checkout journey, which you can see here on the left hand side. The checkout journey actually breaks up this checkout process and gets you much more granular. So you can see here 100 percent of people who start the checkout process, and then of them 77 percent add shipping, which is pretty good.

Then a whopping 95 percent of people will add payment once they’ve already added their shipping details. So there’s not really a lot of opportunities there when you’re looking at payment. People understand it. They know how to do it. They get it done. Once they’ve added payment, only 66 percent of people actually make a true purchase, which is interesting.

So you start thinking, well, What opportunities are there? If somebody has already added their payment information, but they didn’t click the buy button, that’s a pretty big jump, right? You know, like one out of three people are still deciding not to buy.

You need to answer that question. Why aren’t people buying if they’ve already provided their payment details? And again, that’s where the research that we cover will answer those questions.

Monetization and Product Analysis

Now, let’s talk about monetization. This helps you understand how much you’re making from each product. Now, of course, if you just have one product or one service, you can just see that pretty easily. But if you do offer multiple products or multiple services, analytics can break that down for you as well.

You can do that under the e commerce purchases section. And as an example, you can get all of the product names that are listed here. And then you can see how many times they’ve been viewed, how many times they’ve been added to your cart, how many times they’ve been purchased, and what’s the revenue for each of them.

This makes it very easy for you to identify what are those top purchases, what are those top products that your business is offering. And again, when you’re doing your research, you want to understand, you want to keep this in the back of your mind, what these prospects are interested in. And they always say you vote with your wallet.

These are your customers voting with their wallets, but you may find some other opportunities. For example, you may see a product that converts really well, but it doesn’t get a lot of traffic. Now is that because they’re not getting a lot of traffic from the search engines or are people not aware that you sell this product?

Again, these are all really important questions that your research will uncover.

Understanding User Tech Preferences

You’ll also want to look at the operating system and device type. Simple questions to ask that are invaluable. Are visitors using mobile or desktop, or is it an even split between the two? And what type of operating system are they using? That is, are they using a MacBook? Are they using Android on their phones?

Are they using iOS? All of these help you to paint a picture in your mind. If you realize that 95 percent of your users use desktop, then by all means when you’re doing your research, you want to focus on desktop. If you find that it’s mobile, then focus on mobile.

And if there’s a split, you need to look at both of those.

To find the tech, you can go to the tech section here on the left hand side and then click the overview and you’ll see the operating systems and then also the device categories. So in this example, you can see it’s a pretty even split between desktop and mobile. And then there are a few people out there that are using tablet as well.

Conclusion and Next Steps

Now, as I mentioned, this was a high level view. You can get in to analytics and you can get this information pretty quickly. Once you have all of these data points, go ahead and add them into your research document so you can reference it later.

We’ve made it easy for you in the template. We already have several tables that have all of the placeholders for this, so you can just go ahead and plug in the numbers as you see fit.

Now it’s really important that you do take the time to do this. You need to understand the funnel. You need to understand where people are coming from so that when you’re doing your research, you can dive in straight away.