Module 28: Google Analytics: Interface and Setup

Presenter:
Dr. Tejinderpal Singh
Associate Professor
University Business School
Panjab University Chandigarh

Hello everyone, welcome to the second Module of this week and the name this Module is:
Google Analytics: Interface and Setup. I hope, by now you have fair ideas about what is the
purpose of Google Analytics and why it is a must have tool for every digital marketers. Now this
is the time to learn various aspects of Google Analytics practically with live demonstration. In
this module, you will specifically learn.

How to set up Google Account from scratch?

What is the Structure of Google Analytics Account?

Hoe to study the interface of Google Analytics?

So, without wasting any time let us begin with Setting up with GA Account. We ready with you
Gmail ID preferably you used for Google Ads

To set up the Google Analytics account, Go to analytics. google .com . The link is given in the
description,

Login to the account with your Gmail ID, you may use any Gmail ID here. But I will suggest
you to please don't use your personal Gmail ID here. Further, you may use the same Id that you
are using for Google Ads.

Now this is the place where we will create our Google Analytics account which have three
steps.

First, we will sign up to the Google Analytics, click on sign up.

First we have to give any name to the Google Analytics account. Give any name to this account.
I am giving the name of digital mooc. Here you need not to be very particular. Any name that
you can remember you can give that here.

Next we have the account data sharing settings. Here Google says that the data that has been
selected by the Google Analytics it is safe and secure and Google will not share this data with
anyone except you.

Here are few settings , let them be default

Click next

In the second step , we have to tell to Google, what do we want to measure.

You would like to measure the data from a website orfrom app or both from website and app

We don't have any mobile app as of now, so we would like to measure the data from website. We
would like use the website that we have Designed during this course.

Make sure that this button is checked.

Click next

Now in the third step,

We have to set up the property by giving the required details. Now what is the property here?

Property is nothing it may be your website or it may be your mobile app. As I have said that we
want to measure the websites only so we have to provide the details of our website only here.

Here we have to give the name of our website.

This is the name of your website not the URL so give any name here by which you can easily
recognize your website.

Next we have the URL of our website. Select here whether your website is http or https. As we
designed http website only, let it be Http. Give the URL of your website.
Next, select the appropriate Industry to which your website belongs. You may search for the
industry I am selecting here job and education. If your industry is not listed here don't worry
select others. You may change it latter on as well.

Next the reporting time. This is very important setting. You have to select the time zone
according to country. I am selecting India here.

Click on create

This is the Term and service agreement from Google Analytics .Select your country or region
from here. I am proceeding with United States. Read all terms and conditions in the free time For
the time being Check these boxes and click I accept.

It is success, let the page get loaded. Yes, we have created the account. Get rid of these
unnecessary notifications.

This page is very important. Here, we have the tracking code details.

This is the Unique tracking ID of our Google Analytics and this is website Tracking information
having the tracking code that we have to embed in our website.

Google recommends that paste this tracking code in the Header section of your website.

So, copy this code from here.

Go to the WordPress dashboard of your website

Here we will embed this code in the header section of the theme. To do it go to Appearance from
here click the Theme Editor , on theright-hand side , look for the Theme Header, Click it ,

Now , we have to paste this code between these two head titles. Just paste your code here above
the PHP- wp -head . if there is no space, press enter to create the space .

Just paste the code that you copied from GA. This is the code and have successfully passed it .

To save it Update the file,

But , if you think this is a difficult process and you are not familiar with Coding, then don’t
follow it . we have another easy method to do the same thing.

And that method is to use the WordPress plugin.

Go to plugins.

Search for the plugin Google Analytics and Install this plugin GA Google Analytics. Activate it.

Go to the setting of GA Google Analytics

Go to plug in settings, here we have the Google tracking ID and this is the place where we to
enter the Google tracking ID. To copy the Tracking ID . Go back to Analytics. Copy this
tracking ID and paste it here. Let all other setting be default and save the changes.

Our Website is linked to Google Analytics. Here, I have explained the two methods of linking
the Website to our Google Analytics Accounts. Please use either of two methods only otherwise
there may be a problem if you use both the methods simultaneously.

Let us at go back to our Google Analytics account,.

Go back from here. Go to Home and this is our Google analytics dashboard.

Everything is Zero here. But How do I know that my website is actually linked to the Google
Analytics and it has started fetching the data.

The one of the easiest ways to confirm it. Just visit your site from the mobile phone or from the
same browser in which you are working and see whether this Zero is changing to 1 or not

I am visiting my site from a mobile phone and it changes to 1 now. So, it is confirmed that GA
has started fetching the data from my website.

This is the quick and easiest way to confirm it is,

Go to All website data and see your property is listed and it is fetching the All website Data.
So finally, we have set our Google Analytics account. I would like to remind one important thing
here though we have discussed the two methods to link our website with Google Analytics but
you are advised to use one methods only either pasting the code in the header section of your
website or using the WordPress Plug in for this purpose. In the next video I will talk more
about Google Account Structure.

PART -2

Welcome back, In the last part we saw hoe to set up Google Account by linking it to the website.
I hope all of you must have linked your website to the Google Analytics Accounts. It is must for
all of us to proceed further. In this part I will focus on understanding the structure and Interface
of Google Analytics. So, let us start.

This is the interface of GA after linking of your website with GA. You can see, it shows nothing
here in the form of data. Don’t worry, not very soon you are going to see lot of data here and we
will talk about each and every aspect of this dashboard in very details. But before that it's very
important to understand the structure of Google Analytics account. It becomes very essential to
organize your Google accounts in a proper way to extract the maximum information from
Google Analytics .

How Google Analytics will collect, process and present the data it all depends on how Google
Analytics account is organized. To properly understand the structure of Google Analytics
account, click on admin.

The Google Analytics account has three layers i.e. Account, Property and view.

Under admin tab, we have three layers of Google Analytics account.

The first one is account

Second is property

And third is view.

Let's talk about these layers one by one

First We have the account.

Account is at the top level in the hierarchy and you must have at least one account to use the
Google Analytics. There can be multiple accounts is associated with mail one mail ID. But why
there is a need to create more than one account. For example, I am offering Consultancy Services
to so many organizations; In this case I will create multiple accounts associated with various
organizations with the one mail ID only. I can manage them separately from the same ID.

What in the present example we have only one account that we have just created that is digital
mooc and I think one account is sufficient here for me.

You can use this tab to change the settings related to your account that have you set at the time of
setup of the account.

Click on settings

You may change the name of your account from there if it is needed in the future along with the
other settings.

Next we have the user management. From here you can add more user to this account with
restrictions Like you can edit collaborate Read analyze etc . I will talk about it in future. You
may explore other option from here related to you account.

If you want to create a new account click on this button create new. Again, the same process will
start that we have used at the time of account setup.

Here, it says that we can create of 50 accounts associated with one mail ID. But for us One
account is sufficient. Click cancel or Go back.

The second layer is property. We know what is property? A property may be your website,
mobile app or a sub domain .

Under each account there can be multiple properties that you can create. At present we have
linked only one website to the account so it is showing me one property only that we have just
created. If you want to change the settings of property click on settings and you may make
modifications here like name of the property, Industry category etc.

We are not going to edit the property information, so let us go back by canceling it .

In future, if you want to access the tracking information of your property , you can just use this
tab to access the tracking information like tracking code and other related information.

I will talk about other settings of the property from time to time.

To create a new property, click on create property and the process to create new property will
begin. You can create up 50 properties under one account. As we are not going to create any new
property here, let us go back.

Next we have the view. For each of the property we can define view. A View is the access points
for the reports. By default, it is all web data. But we want to define different views like

 one view of all the data for www.example.com

 one view of only AdWords traffic to www.example.com
 one view of only traffic to a subdomain like www.sales.example.com of the website.

We can define a new view from create new view. How to create a new view I will show you in a
while.

To understand all the layers properly let me show you my personal Google analytics account.

This is my Google Analytics account which I am personally managing for consultancy purposes.

In this account I have three different accounts, demo account, my clients account and My
personal account. See under my personal account, I have so many properties actually these are
my various websites.

For each property we have different views defined means what type of information I want.

One view is for all website data which is by default and another view.
For another property , we have two views.

Similarly, for my clients account , there is one property, and This property has won that is all
website data

Same way my personal account is organized with one property and one view.

Let us go back to our original account that I am demonstrating in this module.

So, this was the basicstructure of Google Account. Remember three things Account, Property
and View.

To start with, you need one mail id only. You create multiple Accounts, Multiple properties
under each account, and multiple views under each Property. That is all!!! In the next video I
will talk about interface of GA.

PART-3

Welcome back, now we are ready to experience the power of Google Analytics by understanding
various aspects of its interface. So, without wasting much time let us start the next part of this
module.

Go to home

This is the interface of Google Analytics there are bunch of reports available and we are going
to talk about all these reports. But there is one problem and thought problem is related to the
data. We don't have sufficient data here to understand all the reports of Google Analytics as we
have just linked our website to the Google Analytics and not many activities are happening on
our websites. But we need data. From where this data will come.

Relax !!!

Thanks to the Google, Google has provided a free access to its Merchandise store website that
we can use for learning purpose.

How to access it . The process is very simple.

Visit this link ( https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/6367342) I have given the link in
the description also . This page explains the demo account for Google Analytics.

Click on Access demo account. If you are already logged to Google Analytics Account, you will
be prompted to this page . It means Domo account is created for you. You can confirm it by
going to Admin and then to Accounts See a Demo account is here as well as my original account

Under this account there is one property called Google Merchandise Store. Click on home and
we have new dashboard.

Next time when you will open your Google Analytics dashboard , this one is very important

It shows that the data given below is about which of the property. For example,The data given
below is about the property Google Merchandise Store.

If you want to change the property just click on this. Sect your account, then property, and select
view.

Now see , it shows me the data related to my newly created property that is DMMOOC. As we
don't have the data here, go back to the demo account.

This is the first page; you will come across every time when you login to your Google account.

It is not very detailed information but it will give you a bird’s eye view of what exactly is
happening in your website. You may have the basic idea about various activities related to your
website. Here, we have different types of dashboards which are customizable in nature and you
can increase or decrease the number of these dashboards. These dashboards give you the overall
health report of your website in a very Broadway. So, let's try to understand what these
dashboards are and what sort of information they are providing.

The block is about Google analytics home; First note what is the time frame of data. Presently, it
shows me the data for the last 7 days. If you want to change the time frame you can change it as
well click on it . We have Many combinations and options like today , yesterday , last 28 days
and so on . Just select the appropriate one.
Let us see what information it offers.

First we have the users,

Simply, how many users visited your website in a given time frame? In this case around 15000+
users visited the website during last seven days.

Next we have the information related to revenue and conversions rate so this is useful
information if you are an online store. This one is important called session. In layman's language
session is counted when visitor will land on your website and he will spend some specified time
with your website. How sessions are calculated I have given a detailed article on this in the
additional readings just go through it. Normally a session ends after 30 mints of inactivity on
each page. For example . When a user, say Sham, arrives on your site, Analytics starts counting
from that moment. If 30 minutes pass without any kind of interaction from Sham, the session
ends. However, every time Sham interacts with an element (like an event, social interaction, or a
new page), Analytics resets the expiration time by adding on an additional 30 minutes from the
time of that interaction. Please refer to the article for more detail

As I have said these blocks are customizable, you may set what metric you want here,.

Let show you my original account.

As we don’t have the data for last 7days , let me change it to today . Now see here

We have different metrics

Like users

Then we have the sessions

The bounce rates.

What is bounce rate?

Suppose a user lands on any page of the website, say Home page. He stays and exit from the
website without visiting another page of the website. This will be called, he bounced back from
the website and bounce rate is simply users who bounced back divided by Total users in a given
time period. Next is the session duration that means the total time spent by users on a web

To understand other blocks , let us go back to our demo account

Next we have the Real time data. It shows that present 21 users are active on the website. This
shows the page views per minute, for every minute details is there.,

As I have said this information is just indicative on the nature if you want a detailed information
you can click for detail reports as well

The next block is about

How do you acquire users?

It is simply about from the traffics is coming to my website.

First we have the traffic channel

The user may come to your website through organic search

He may come through referrals

He may come directly by typing URL of the website

He may come by paid search i.e. through ads on search engines.

Or others.

Hover the cursor to any date and it will give the number of users coming from these sources. See
on 22 sept maximum users are coming from organic search and so on.

Next we have the Source / Medium . it almost similar to traffic channel, we will talk about it in
Acquisition reports

Lastly we have the referral. You may run many referral campaigns. How many users are coming
through referrals. You can check that from here
Next we have how our active users been trending? How well we are retaining the users?

I will talk about these metrics in detail when we will discuss the behavior reports

This is something very important; this Block gives you an idea about When your users visit your
site.

It will show you the information day wise and time. You can check on a particular day at
particular time how many users are there on your site.

The shade of the blue colour represents the number of users. The light colour is less number of
users and dark colour is more number of users.

See here on Friday, between 7:00 a.m. to 2Pm maximum users were on site. And so on .

The next block is about the location. It shows from where the users are coming to your website.
Maximum number of users are from the USA followed by India and Canada.

The next block is about the devices. Maximum number of users are coming from text tops to the
website followed by mobile phone and tablet

Next we have the page details. Shows how many page views are there for each page. You can
clearly see Which page in the most visited page and the restricted page by your users. It will help
you to take the decision to modify those pages we are less number of views are there. The page
value is applicable to The E-Commerce site. We will talk about goals in a separate module

These last two blocks are related to the E-Commerce sites showing revenue and ad campaign
performance.

So , this was brief discussion about Google Analytics Interface. I hope you have bit idea about
the Google Analytics interface and various cards shown on the Home page of Google Analytics.
As I have said these cards are just an overview of what is happening in your website. There I
have given detailed information behind these cards. In the next module we will talk about
various reports on GA . Just follow me.