Google Analytics. Web Skills Programme

Transcription

1 Google Analytics Web Skills Programme

2 Google - some facts Google search handles over 1 billion searches per day 7.2 billion daily page views 87.8 billion monthly worldwide searches conducted on Google sites Google s global search market share is 85% Daily visitors to Google is 620 million Google analytics is used on 57% of the top 10,000 websites 10,000 websites [ Jeff Bullas - May 2011 ]

3 What is Google Analytics? Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can be used for monitoring all aspects of your websites traffic, from referrals to search engine activity You can use it to track traffic patterns It s a free tool that can integrate with other Google programmes, such as AdSense and AdWords

4 What does Google Analytics tell me? 1. How many people are visiting your website. 2. The keywords they used to find you on search engines. 3. Which website referred them to you. 4. What page they saw first. 5. How much time they spent on your site. 6. How many pages they visited. 7. What page they left your site from. 8. The geographic location of your visitors. 9. The browser used by blog readers

5 How does it work? Google provides a unique tracking code (javascript) that is inserted into each page in your website When a visitor arrives at your website they load a page. In the process, their browser loads and runs the Google code (Javascript) That code (Javascript) collects information about the visitor The information is sent to Google A programme at Google's end then stores all the detailed observations (information) that were recorded. At some point, all those details are analysed and displayed in graphs that you can manipulate and look at.

6 How does this work on the College website? All College web pages contain the Google Analytics code The code is added automatically to every new page that is created Tracking a new page - after you first create the web page, it may take several hours for report data to appear in the analytics account. Google Analytics generally updates your reports every hour, but data can take up to 6 hours to appear in your account.

7 How do I get access to the College s statistics? To get access to the College Google Analytics area you need to: 1. Set up a Google account login using your College address. To register please go to: Peter Gillings (p.gillings@imperial.ac.uk) and he will give you access to the College Google Analytics area 3. Go to: and login.

8 So what does our report tell you? You will have access to the entire web statistics of the College website. At a top level, across our complete web presence, you will be able to see: Profile of overall visits over a time span Summary of site usage statistics Source of visitor s country Top content report

9 What do the metrics mean? Visits: The number of visits to your site during a given time period. Pageviews: The number of pages these visitors viewed. Pages/Visit: The average visit in terms of page views. Bounce Rate: The percentage of people who only visited one page on your site before they bounced somewhere else. (This can often seem deceptively high, but many people will get to your site and realise that it wasn t what they were looking for, or you may have a popular image indexed by Google s Image Search that generates a lot of drive-by traffic and skews your numbers. Alternatively, it may represent that your site is difficult to navigate or understand for new visitors.) Avg. Time on Site: The average amount of time a visitor spends at your site. % of New Visits: The percentage of new visitors to your site as compared to all visitors. Some businesses might want lots of new traffic, while others might want generate repeat visits, driving down this percentage.

10 The Google Analytics interface Three main areas: 1) Home this is your customisable area. Here you can curate your dashboard, get an overview of your alerts and manage your shortcuts 2) Standard Reporting the main analytics area made up of Audience, Advertising, Traffic source, content and conversion data. 3) Custom Reporting - create and save your own custom reports

11 Home (the dashboard) an overview

12 The Dashboard The Dashboard can give you a high level overview of what is going on with your site. Its made up of a series of widget that you can edit to display the data information that you would like to see at a glance Typically the dashboard defaults to show: 1) Visits to your site 2) Average visit duration the time spent on your site 3) Visits by traffic type where the traffic arrives from eg direct, by , organic (search engines) 4) Visits by country 5) Goal conversion rates and completed goals 6) Alerts automatic and custom

13 Standard Reporting Main Features: Audience Advertising Traffic Sources Content Conversions. Click on any of these primary menu items to drill down on your data

14 Reporting period This is an essential feature of Google Analytics Use the calendar to search for the data you want to report on Date range from: day/moth/year to: day/moth/year Compare to compare previous day/month/year results. This is a great way to show progress

15 Analysing your data Many of the reports that include a table of statistics also let you view those statistics by different dimensions Along the top of the table, you see a list of Viewing options. Each of those options is another dimension Click an option to change how statistics are displayed in the table For example, in the Location report, you can view visitor statistics by the dimensions Country/Territory, City, and Continent.

16 Audience This primary feature gives you a good, high-level overview of how your site is doing. High pages/visit, high average time on your site, and a low bounce rate give you an idea of how useful visitors are finding your site once they arrive.

17 Audience - overview This report tells you: how much traffic you have how many page views the average length of visit bounce rates the demographics of your visitors You can delve deeper depending on your needs, finding out how much new traffic you re getting.

18 Audience - Demographics Language - the list of top languages used on the internet browsers of the visitors. These languages are abbreviated into codes representing the names of languages. A list of all of language abbreviations: Location - geographic map detailing how many visits were from users in each country. Drill down to see visits by city, continent, and subcontinent regions

19 Audience - Behaviour New vs. returning Breakdown of new visitors to your site and returning ones. You can explore top browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions & colours Frequency & Recency number of times a visitor has been to your site. % of total visits/page views number of days since the last time your visitors have been to your site Engagement Number of seconds and pages that visitors spend on your site

20 Audience - Technology Browser and Operating System lists the type of browser your visitors are using and which operating system Network - details the host network that your visitors are using to browse your site

21 Audience - Mobile Overview how many visitors used mobile devices and how many did not. You can set these dimensions against other standard metrics. Useful to see and therefore respond to changes in the way in which your site is accessed Devices a really useful breakdown of which mobile devices your visitors are browsing your site on. Can help to decide which devices to support overtime. Can be analysed against: Model Brand Service provider Input selector eg touch screen, click wheel Operating system

22 Audience Visitor flow High level visual view of visitors journeys through your site Can be filtered by Visitor, traffic source, content and systems variables See the volume of pageviews per collection of pages

23 Traffic Sources - Overview Overview Where did your visitors come from? Search engines, other web sites or did they type your URL into their address bar? This report breaks it down and tells you your best traffic sources.

24 Traffic Sources the sources Direct Traffic Typing the web address directly into their web browser s address bar, clicking on a bookmark, or where they re directed to a page from an offline source such as a link in a PDF document. Referring Traffic The sites that visitors were on at before they arrived at your site and clicked on a link to your site, not including search engines. Search clicking on links in search engine results pages (Google, Bing, Yahoo! etc) Organic - natural search Paid a pay-per-click search ad Use with other metrics to give meaning to your results, such as, Bounce rate, average time on site - try to monitor the traffic sources that provide visitors who spend the most time on site. eg, if you notice that Twitter is sending visitors that spend a few minutes on each page, it would be worth investigating the site's Twitter presence.

25 Traffic Sources - Keywords Keywords What words did visitors use at Google and the other search engines to find your site? Throughout the traffic sources reports you can see which keywords were used to arrive at your site Understanding which keywords are used is important: when writing for Search Engine Optimisation when advertising on Google to determine which search results will display your ad.

26 Traffic Sources what do they mean? Use with other metrics to give meaning to your results, such as: Bounce rate Average time on site - try to monitor the traffic sources that provide visitors who spend the most time on site. For example, if you notice that Twitter is sending visitors that spend a few minutes on each page, it would be worth investigating the site's Twitter presence.

27 Traffic Sources campaigns After creating an AdWords or custom campaign, track its activity. Custom campaigns - useful for newsletters, events promotions, publications such as prospectuses. Use Google URL builder to create unique URLs which you can then add to your promotional material and track the traffic that is generated

28 Content - Overview What pages get the most traffic on your site? This report breaks it down for you so you can better see how people are using your site. Overview - On the content overview page, the graph represents page views rather than visits, so the numbers used should be a lot larger than on the visits graph. Pageviews and unique pageviews are both shown. The difference is that a pageview is recorded every time a page is loaded (so if a user clicks refresh, a second pageview is logged, or if a user navigates to a different page and then uses their back button, a new pageview is counted), whereas a unique pageview is only logged once per browsing session.

29 Content - site content overview What can you see? The pages on which they enter and exit your site. How often and how long they view individual pages. The extent to which they search your site for specific content. The extent to which they interact with things like slide shows or embedded videos. How frequently they click AdSense ads, and the revenue you see from those clicks. Based on this data, you can develop an understanding of how well your content addresses the purpose of your site For example, if your landing pages have a high bounce rate and visitors spend only a few seconds on those pages, you might conclude that the page content does not meet visitors' expectations, or that the page isn't designed to effectively draw visitors further into your site.

30 Content - site speed This allows you to examine how quickly your pages load in different browsers, geographic areas, etc. No setup is required and you can see your data in the Overview and Page Timings reports. Things to look at: Content which landing pages are slowest? Traffic sources which campaigns correspond to faster page loads overall? Visitor how does latency compare by visitor type or geographic region? Technology does browser, operating system or screen resolution impact latency metrics?

31 Content - can I look at data for a specific page group? Filtering a content report will allow you to get statistics about your own content Go into the Content area and choose Overview and view the full report then at the bottom of the report Filter search by the name of the page/page group you want to analyse

32 Where are people coming from/going to? Navigation summary - shows the most popular previous and next pages Entrance paths - shows you how well your landing (entrance) pages perform in guiding visitors to other pages on your site.

33 Custom Reports You create your own customised reports in the manage your customised reports section. Here you can manipulate the dimensions and metrics that you would like to analyse.

34 Using the data with other Google tools Google AdWords is one of the various tools that can be used to make the most of the data that Google collects You can link Google Analytics to AdWords You create ads and choose keywords, which are words or phrases related to your business. Your ads appear on Google - When people search on Google using one of your keywords, your ad may appear next to the search result Tracking these ads - these are linked to conversions in Google Analytics Payment for this type of advertising takes many forms but Pay per click is the most common

35 Adwords - Business School example

36 How the Business School use AdWords What? The Business School currently have an Adwords campaign running for each of their programmes. Why? To supplement organic search on Google To inform their search engine optimisation (SEO) work; - what keywords people are searching for - what keywords convert how visitors are interacting with the site etc. Next? Become less reliant on AdWords Through the increase in knowledge gained through the analysis of AdWords campaigns they hope to gain better understanding about their customers behaviour and tailor their SEO to exploit this.

37 Need more help? Getting access to the College Google Analytics area: Peter Gillings General help: Liz Swift Contact your Faculty Web Officer direct: Representing Name Business School Maurice Farmer Engineering Caroline Detchenique Medicine James Moore Natural Sciences Lucy Stagg Admin/Support Peter Gillings

38 Thank you!