Google Analytics Beginner Tutorial – How Google Analytics Works

Written by onlineacademy

August 8, 2022

Google Analytics Beginner Tutorial

In this beginner training for Google Analytics, we will go through an intro to Google Analytics, how it works, how to get started, and how you can use it to track your website traffic and marketing efforts. This is a perfect beginner intro to Google Analytics if you are not familiar with how to use it yet.

 

 

 

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Video Transcript:

 

so in this video we’ll go through a intro to google analytics talk about how google analytics works the basic setup for google analytics and how to track all of your website traffic and conversions goals all the different things that are possible with google analytics it’s a very popular free tool that google provides uh this is going to be a basic beginner level just how does google analytics work from a very high level just an introduction so you get a better idea uh of if it’s the right tracking system for you to track your website traffic to track uh if you’re running paid ads things like that or seo it’s good to know just what the results are you have to have tracking on your website google analytics tracking is a very good option it has a lot of different details on website traffic so we’ll just go through again this is an intro on google analytics for beginners we’ll show you how it works and go ahead and get started now

okay in this next video we’ll be going through an intro to google analytics i just wanted to do a quick intro and talk more about how it works we’ll go through the setup and the more complicated things inside of google analytics but this first video is just going to be a very basic intro so you understand more uh how it works so let’s go into a little bit more about how it works first off just if you’re not familiar with it at all google analytics tracks all of your website traffic so it can track how many people made a purchase on your website how many people filled out the form uh and other important actions that you want to track so this is going to be critical to have this tracking set up before you launch uh really any ad campaign i mean google ads facebook seo offline whatever you’re doing you want to know if that marketing or if that advertising is actually producing results now there are third-party tools that uh or even even more robust than google analytics but google analytics is free it connects to pretty much every other system uh it’s just it’s the most common one by far if you do have some third-party software they’ll have instructions on on how to set it up and get the tracking code on there but most people tend to use google analytics especially since it’s free so this training video is actually going to be a sample from our actual training program so you can get a better idea of what’s in here what we offer some of these are more beginner lessons

 

and they’ll go into more advanced so if you need more advanced training we do have a link below in the description that will give you access to discounts and different things like that from our advanced training and all of our different programs that’s going to be a link down in the description below and also setting up all these different uh the important actions you want to track if somebody made a purchase that’s very important or if someone filled out the form maybe to schedule a demo or they downloaded a white paper or they scheduled a call booked a consultation just became a lead pretty much if you’re doing lead generation that can be tracked on the website other smaller things you want to track maybe they subscribe to the newsletter they watched a video uh something like that or they added to the cart uh just different actions you want to know what people are doing when they get to your website and more importantly you want to track your roi or your advertising dollars turning into phone calls uh new clients new sales more leads more traffic to your restaurant to your in-person store just are you actually getting anything out of your marketing and your advertising dollars and you need something like google analytics or other advanced tracking software to know what’s happening on your website and what’s happening with your marketing also very important it tracks how people found your website so it can sort out did somebody do a google search and just click on maybe your your google my business you know where they looked at uh if you’re a local business they looked on that then went to your website uh did they click on an ad was it from a facebook post was it from youtube was it from a podcast listing was it from your email newsletter just how did they get there that way you know at least how much traffic is coming from each source and then each source which one’s purchasing which one’s filling out the form is the email newsletter working are the google ads working or the facebook post working you track how people found the website and did they complete an action did they turn into a conversion it also tracks what people did when they were on your website

so of course you know if they made a purchase or filled out the form but how many pages did they go to which specific pages get the most traffic for example if you added a blog you most likely want to know is the blog even getting any traffic and is the blog the first entry point and then later turns into a purchase so maybe they start by reading a blog article and then jump over and book a phone call or a consultation or a demo or something like that but the the entry point the way they found your company was a blog post and of course if you’re doing ads it’s extremely important because you’re paying for the ads you want to know after they click on an ad do they make a conversion so they filled out the form they called you they purchased so you can calculate an roi but uh it also goes to all different levels if you’re doing a newsletter blog post uh a big social media push or offline if you’re doing mailers or something like that you want to know are people completing any actions are you getting leads are you getting sales where people are coming from and what they’re doing once they get to your website and google analytics can track all of that

also you can track phone calls and other offline actions when you connect to third-party tools phone calls that one there’s a little bit of tracking on google my business if if they’re on a mobile phone and they see your listing and just click call there is some tracking there google ads does track if they click on the phone number on the ad they didn’t meaning they didn’t click on the link and go to your website they clicked on the phone number on the ad but third party tracking for phone calls is critical because there is software to when you click on it it’ll switch the number to a dynamic tracking number that looks similar you can do a local number an 800 number whatever you want to do but it’ll switch it instantly to a different number so you know did it come from google ads did it come from facebook it tracks all of the phone calls when people are on your website so that’s critical because most software can only track if they clicked on a phone number somewhere else you you if you’re wanting to track phone calls you need third party software to connect to google analytics so you know where the phone calls came from when they call the phone number listed on your website it’s similar with if you have a crm and you have a client that became a lead uh maybe six weeks later they became a customer you want to know the total order value how many leads turn into customers there’s there’s all kinds of third-party tools that can take a lot more data and push it all the way back to google analytics so you can know how many leads came through and how many leads turned into customers different things like that google analytics can connect to these tools and the other tools will have a walkthrough of how to connect it to google analytics

some other things to keep in mind a lot of people don’t realize with google analytics it even says this in their help articles the data with conversions or website traffic it can be delayed up to 48 hours so if you want to instantly see how much traffic you had or where where a lead came from from an hour ago it usually doesn’t have it that quickly and also if you’re using multiple tracking um software your website traffic data will look slightly different when you jump from google analytics data to other tracking platforms this is completely normal none of them are broken necessarily they’re just programmed completely different ways so google analytics might say you had a hundred website visits from facebook and then you have different software that says it was 97 visits and then google ads says it was 102. it’s going to be slightly off uh and for the most part it doesn’t matter it’s just going to be a slight variation there really isn’t perfect tracking software that exists especially now when people you know maybe they uh they first found you on their mobile phone and then they went home on their laptop and then they looked on a different device and then their computer at work and then on their phone again and then back to their laptop to complete the purchase so there’s there’s so many different touch points now and someone might click on an ad multiple times and then bookmark you and then forward the link to their email or save it so it can get choppy for any system even google analytics to know exactly what the customer journey was and uh what was the first touch point and the last touch point but they’re fairly accurate accurate enough to make decisions on on where to put your marketing and advertising dollars just understand that it it’s going to be just a little bit off and that’s normal especially when you jump from one tracking platform to another

so to get everything set up it’s actually very simple the tracking code is provided from google analytics uh no matter what version of google analytics you’re using one of the older ones or if you want to do the latest one they provide you with the code and you just add the tracking code to your website that it has um the instructions on there uh or whatever website you’re using it’s it’s right here the website traffic or tracking you’ll cut and paste this code you don’t have to know how to program you just cut and paste it and you put it in the head of the code there’s wordpress plugins that do this if you use shopify if you use squarespace whatever you’re using to build your website there’ll be a section to put in tracking code which is this right here or a lot of website builders just ask you for this the tracking id so you’ll cut and paste this number put it in there and it automatically connects the two so it’s very simple no matter what type of website builder you’re using you’ll just cut and paste

also if you’re a little more advanced and you know how to use google tag manager it’s the same thing google analytics connects to google tag manager to send data between the two

and here’s just a sample screenshot when you go into different traffic sources this is just a source and medium meaning where they came from and what specific type of medium it was this is just something what an example i mean there’s a lot of different ways to divide the data but this is a common one a source medium report so the source is google and this is organic meaning they clicked on a google result that’s not an ad whereas down here there’s google cpc as in cost per click so that would be a paid ad so you can see google organic if you’re doing seo efforts uh users 2000 new users sessions meaning one person can come to the site multiple times bounce rate if it’s a really high bounce rate they left the site very quickly if it’s lower they didn’t they stayed on the site meaning they didn’t bounce off of the site after clicking on it immediately pages per session that’s usually on only a couple you don’t see 10 or 20 uh in here and then average session duration i mean for the internet a minute or two is a very long time 30 seconds isn’t too bad for going on the going on your site and looking around and this is an overall average some people may have spent 10 minutes some might be 5 seconds goal conversion rate per traffic source how many clicks how many conversions and then goal completions so we have another video on how to set up goals but this is uh you know they made a phone call a purchase they filled out a form whatever your goal is set up as here’s how many people completed it so uh i mean

 

there’s a lot more advanced google analytics training out there we just wanted to give you an intro if you wanted a deep dive to know everything everything about google analytics inside and out and be an expert you’d want google analytics specific training and there’s entire training courses on it we just wanted to give you enough info to where no matter what position you’re in you can have a basic understanding of google analytics and track your different marketing efforts so google organic this would be seo how many leads how much traffic google cpc this is your google ads how many leads how much traffic how long do they stay on the site um here’s bing ads or microsoft ads is it’s now called offline or they went directly to it if you’re different referral sites or you have an email newsletter you can just quickly see how much traffic is it quality traffic do they stay on the site a while do they go to multiple pages and again the most important are there any goals did they fill out the form did they call you did they buy something these are critical most importantly the goal completions but also just a little bit more insight on your traffic to just get a a high level view on how everything’s doing especially if you’re different doing different multiple or a different marketing sources if you’re doing some seo some emails some facebook some google ads different things like that you can just kind of glance at them and look at all the different sources compared to one another so google analytics can be very useful if you want to kind of get out of the google ads platform or facebook ads platform just take a look at all your traffic in general and see how it’s doing and get a little bit more insight than your ad platform will show you it’s also critical for tracking to have all this set up so you know uh are your marketing and advertising dollars actually getting any kind of results are you getting more leads more business uh more sales it’s critical to have this tracking set up before you launch all your marketing efforts alright everyone thanks so much for watching our ppc ads training video uh if you want more videos go ahead and hit the subscribe button like this video if you found it useful and any questions post them in the comments down below we also have additional training in the description so thanks so much for watching and we’ll see you in the next video

 

 

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