Google Analytics [GA4]

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Course 1 - Data Collection and Processing

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Google Analytics Data Collection

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Categorizing Into Users and Sessions

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Applying Configuration Settings

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Storing Data and Generating Reports

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Creating a Measurement Plan

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Course 2 - Setting Up Data Collection and Configuration

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Organize Your Analytics Account

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Set Up Advanced Filters on Views

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Create Your Own Custom Dimensions

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Create Your Own Custom Metrics

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More Useful Configurations

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Course 3 - Advanced Analysis Tools and Techniques

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Segment Data for Insight

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Analyze Data by Channel

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Analyze Data by Audience

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Analyze Data with Custom Reports

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Course 4 - Advanced Marketing Tools

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Course 1 - Get Started Using Google Analytics: Get to Know Google Analytics

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Use Digital Analytics to Grow Your Business

⇒ Digital Analytics is a process of collecting, measuring, and analyzing data from digital sources [websites or mobile apps] ⇐

⇒ Digital Analytics are utilized to understand how users interact with digital properties and therefore improve marketing and business decisions. If a person runs a business using a website or mobile app, one should know the effectiveness of campaigns, the most helpful contents in achieving business goals, and how users find digital properties. ⇐

⇒ The marketing funnel shows three different stages of a customer journeys and digital analytics use data to align this funnel with the business objectives. ⇐

⇒ 1) Acquisition: Involves building awareness of the product or service and acquiring user interest [which marketing channels bring customers to the digital properties]. ⇐

⇒ 2) Engagement: Happens when the users interact with their business [what marketing contents the users decide to engage with as well as sharing with other audiences]. ⇐

⇒ 3) Monetization and Retention: Happens when a user becomes a customer and makes a purchase. [how many users become customers and return to digital properties]. ⇐

⇒ All of these insights can help a business to better optimize the brand's performance and make informed decisions based on behavioral data.  ⇐

⇒ Ex 1: The Google Merchandise Store is an online E-Commerce retail site which uses analytics to gain insights into customer behavior on the website to see how users find the retail site [Acquisition], the products the users view and add to shopping carts [Engagement)] and which products users actually purchase [Monetization and Retention]. ⇐

⇒ Ex 2: A mobile Gaming App called Flood-It uses Google Analytics with a goal of finding out how the users find the App and download it [Acquisition], which screens of the App do the users visit or get stuck on [Engagement], and how many users make how many number and amount of purchases in the app [Monetization and Retention]. ⇐

⇒ The main purpose of digital analytics is to understand the progress toward particular business objective, which means that business objective must be decided first. ⇐

⇒ First, decide which business objective you want to focus on. Second, identify the metrics that drive the chosen objective at each stage. Third, define a target metric. ⇐

Learn How Google Analytics Collects and Processes Data

⇒ How data flows into Google Analytics, and how that data is processed to create insightful reports. ⇐

⇒ To connect your website to Google Analytics, one needs to add a tag to the site. A tag is a small piece of code that is added to each page on the website in order to measure user behavior or ad functionality. Tags can be added directly to the website's code or by using a tag management system like Google Tag Manager. ⇐

⇒ Once the Google Analytics tag has been added to the website, the tag will collect information about users such as their device type, their geographic location, and how they interact with different pages on the website or app. As the customers engage with website or app content, these interactions are sent to Google Analytics as events, and many common interactions are automatically collected as events in Google Analytics. For example, when a user first visits the website or app, Google Analytics will log this action as a first visit (or a first open event). When a user clicks an outbound link to leave your site, Google Analytics will record this as an outbound link click event. As events are collected, they are processed and turned into information one can see in reports, which one can then analyze to gain specific insights. ⇐

⇒ For example, when a user first visits the website or app, Google Analytics will log this action as a first visit (or a first open event). When a user clicks an outbound link to leave your site, Google Analytics will record this as an outbound link click event. As events are collected, they are processed, and then turned into information one can see in reports. One can then analyze this data to gain specific insights. [Example 1: For the Google merchandise store, analytics can show how many users visit a page that sells clothing, compared to a page that sells housewares.] ⇐

⇒ In order to collect data from apps, one needs to add the Firebase Software Development Kit, or SDK, to the app. [Example 2: For the Flood-It! app, the Firebase SDK will collect and send data, similar to the Google tag for websites. This data is processed into reports that could show one how many users are reaching a certain level on a gaming app, or it could tell one how many users made a purchase in the app, and what those purchases were.] One can also create custom events to capture what is unique and important to your business. For example, one can log events when a user signs up for a newsletter, makes a purchase, or reaches a new level on a gaming app. ⇐

⇒ Once analytics processes the data, it can not be changed. Thus, when setting up configuration, one should not exclude any data that might want to be analyzed later. ⇐

Structure of a Google Analytics Account and Create Google Analytics Account

⇒ 1) An account is a collection of properties whose data is owned by a single business entity. 2) Underneath accounts, a property represents a grouping of user data, for example a website property, an app property. It is also the level where Google Analytics processes data and where you can create links with other products, like Google Ads. 3) Underneath each property is a data stream that represents the flow of data from a website or an app to the property, and the level where you can control things like what data gets collected. There are web data streams for websites and app data streams for mobile apps. If your business has both a website and a mobile app, you may have a data stream for the website, a second data stream for the iOS app, and a third data stream for the Android app. ⇐

⇒ In most cases, you should use a single web data stream to measure the web user journey. To ensure consistent user and session reporting for web journeys that span domains, use a single web data stream combined with cross domain measurement. When creating Google Analytics account, you should map the account and properties you set up back to the business structure. In general, a best practice is to set up the account structure with one account per company and one property per brand or business unit. ⇐

⇒ For first example, if a business has a single website, the account structure should be one account, one property for the website, and one data stream. For second example, if a conpany created an app for both Android and iOS, the account structure should be one account, one property for the app, and two app data streams. For third example, if the business with two distinct user bases created two different apps on both iOS and Android and a website with two distinct sections, the account structure should be one account, two properties each focused on different user base, where first property has three data streams [web data stream, iOS app data stream, Android app datastream], and the second property also has three data streams [web data stream, iOS app data stream, Android app datastream]. (Note that Analytics 360 is an enterprise level version of Google Analytics that provides additional flexibility for managing the data with things like sub-properties and roll-up properties.) ⇐

⇒ Creating New Account: 1) To set up a new Google Analytics account, first visit analytics.google.com and select start measuring. 2) name the account and choose your data sharing settings. We'll name our account, "my new account", and select next. 3) You can create multiple properties under an Analytics account, but most small or medium-sized businesses will have a single account and property, depending on the structure for things like lines of business, parent entities, and more. Name your property and select the time zone and currency for your reports. 4) Then, you'll answer a couple of basic questions about your business including business size. 4) Next, you'll be asked to choose your business objectives. This step is important because it will generate reports specific to the business objectives that you choose. Not sure of business objective, choose the get baseline reports option. You can always change and customize the reports later, but choosing correct business objective will make the reports more relevant to business. ⇐

Set Up Your Website for Data Collection

⇒ To tag your website you'll first navigate to the data stream's creation screen, choose web, and then enter your website URL. This will generate a measurement ID and website tags specifically for your website. If you are using a website builder or a CMS system, you should copy the measurement ID and paste it into your website builder account. You can select your website builder to view instructions on how to add the measurement ID to your website. ⇐

⇒ If you do not use a website builder, you'll need to install the Google tag on your website. There are two options to choose from. The first option is to use Google Tag Manager to install the tag. Google Tag Manager allows you to install code on your website pages and add to or change that code at any time using the account's interface instead of having to go back and edit the code itself. In addition, Tag Manager serves as a central place to manage and update all of your marketing and website tags. For this reason, we recommend using Google Tag Manager to install your Analytics tag. If you are already using Google Tag Manager for your website, you can easily add the Google Analytics tag in your Tag Manager account. (Note that you can also use Google Tag Manager with a CMS or a website builder. So instead of entering your measurement ID directly into the website builder integration for Google Analytics, you would create the Google Analytics tag in Google Tag Manager). ⇐

⇒ The second option is to manually install the tag on each page of your site. When you choose this option, you'll see the new website tag listed in the UI. This tag will need to be installed on every page of your website immediately after the head tag. Once you install the Analytics tag on your website, you'll start collecting many points of data automatically to the Google Analytics property. With a bit more implementation, you can even enhance your data collection with recommended and custom events. ⇐

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Confirm Data Is Being Collected

⇒ Once Google Analytics starts to receive data, the data first appears in the RealTime report, and then in other reports shortly after. You can use the RealTime report to confirm that data from your website is actually being collected successfully. First, check that user traffic to your website appears in Google Analytics. In your Analytics property, navigate to Reports, and then Realtime. If no data is showing, open up your website or app so that you're an active user. If data is being collected, you should see close to immediate RealTime activity in the RealTime report. ⇐

⇒ The Realtime report displays user activity that occurred in the past 30 minutes. You'll see the number of users as well as what devices are being used. For checking that data is properly being collected, you can focus on two main things. First, is there any activity shown in the past 30 minutes? Second, check that the data you expect is coming into Analytics. Look at the event count by event name card. This card shows all of the events being collected from your tag site, such as page views and any click events that you're sending. ⇐

⇒ This card is interactive. You can click through an event name to get the list of parameters associated with that event. And when clicking into a parameter name, you will see the value collected for it. For example, if you click on the page view event, and then on the page location parameter, you should see the URLs for all of the pages that users visited in the past 30 minutes. If any pages aren't showing up as expected, you want to review your implementation. This is a great way to debug your data collection or to generally get a better idea of what kinds of data you're collecting. ⇐

⇒ If you're still not seeing data, you may have an issue with your website tag implementation. Below you'll find a link to the Help Center where you can find some common issues and how to resolve them. ⇐

⇒ You can also use Google Tag Assistant and the browser extension, Tag Assistant Companion, to determine whether your tag is implemented correctly. Tag Assistant is a debugging tool, and the optional (but recommended) extension provides additional debugging information when using Tag Assistant. ⇐

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Manage Account Access and Settings

⇒ The admin menu is an essential tool to manage users, accounts, properties, and data streams. It's also where you manage the creation of advanced features such as custom dimensions and metrics, audiences, and more. ⇐

⇒ Let's take a look at the admin section where you can manage your Google Analytics account and property settings. If you want employees or colleagues to access your reports and data, you can add or remove users in your account. On this screen, you can view who has access to your account and the level of permissions they have. Let's add a new user. Enter the user's email address, and then choose which level of access the user should have. There's a brief description under each role. The administrator role provides full control of the account, including adding additional users. The creator of the account has administrator access by default. Let's say you grant access to an analyst on your team. You would choose the analyst as the role, which will allow the user to create and edit dashboards and reports. However, they will not be able to edit account and data settings or manage user permissions. Next, you can restrict business sensitive data like cost and revenue metrics. In this case, the analyst should be able to see this data, so you should leave these options unchecked and click add. ⇐

⇒ An administrator can always edit a user's access level or delete users at any time. Additionally, in admin, you can edit the account property and data stream settings. In data stream settings, you can do things like modify, enhance measurement settings, and configure your main tag settings. There are additional data settings outside of the data stream where you can enable or disable various data collection features, including data retention. You can adjust the retention period for data collected that is associated with cookies, user identifiers, or advertising identifiers. This setting doesn't affect most standard reporting, which is based on aggregated data, but will affect the data used in more advanced tools like Explore. ⇐

⇒ If at any point you want to delete a data stream, property, or even an entire account, you can do so in the admin menu. When you delete an account property or data stream, it will move into the trash can where it'll be held for 35 days before being permanently deleted. You can see what's scheduled to be deleted in the trash can, and you can restore anything you've deleted before the 35 day window expires. You can view changes you or others have made to the account in the account change history. There are many more settings found in the admin menu. If you can't find what you're looking for, try using the search located at the top of the page. ⇐

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Power Your Reports with Dimensions and Metrics

⇒ With each interaction to your website or app, an event and parameters containing information about the interaction are sent to analytics. An event could be when a user first opens your app, watches a video, or views a page on your website. Events are sent with additional data called event parameters. Event parameters add context to the event. ⇐

⇒ For example, when someone watches a video on your website, an event is fired when someone clicks play and is associated with event parameters, like the name of the video and how long the video was watched. Along with events and event parameters, user data, like geographic location and the device being used, are also sent. These are called user properties. Google Analytics uses events, event parameters, and user properties to aggregate data into reports. To visually represent this data in reports, analytics uses dimensions and metrics. A dimension is an attribute of your data. It describes your data, and it's usually text as opposed to numbers. ⇐

⇒ An example of a dimension is the event name, which shows the name of an event that someone triggers on your website or application, such as a click. A metric is a quantitative measurement, such as an average, a ratio, and a percentage. It's always a number as opposed to text. One way to think about metrics is that you can apply mathematical operations to them. An example of a metric is event count, which shows the total number of times an event was triggered. Google Analytics already includes a number of common events and parameters that you can use to collect information on your website, like page views and purchases, but in some cases, like the events collected with enhanced measurement, you will need to register custom dimensions and metrics before they show up in your reports. ⇐

⇒ When you first set up Google Analytics, data automatically gets collected and starts flowing into your reports. However, there will be events that are specific to your website or app that you can set up to make your data even more useful and specific to your business needs. We'll cover custom events and how to register custom dimensions and metrics in the next course. ⇐

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Course 2 - Manage GA4 Data and Learn to Read Reports: Start Using google Analytics

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Navigate Your Google Analytics Account

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Manage Your Google Analytics Events

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Manage and Filter the Data You Collect

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Manage Your Google Analytics Conversions

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Understand Google Analytics Reports

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Get to Know the Predefined Reports

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Filter and Compare Data in Reports

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Use Explore for Advanced Analytics

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Course 3 - Measure Your Marketing With Google Analytics: Get Familiar With Marketing Data in Analytics

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Use Digital Analytics with Marketing Data

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Measure What Matters with Conversions

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Give Proper Credit with Attribution

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Group Valuable Customers with Audiences

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Use Analytics Together with Google Ads

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Course 4 - Go Further with Advanced Features in Google Analytics: Customize Analytics Data for Your Business Needs

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