Basic Google Analytics Terminologies used Everyday

What are the basic Google analytics terminologies used every day?

Do you know what they mean?

In this article, we are going to look at everyday Google Analytics terminologies that you will come across as you study GA data to improve your marketing campaign...

But first...

Why do I need Google Analytics?

• · It gives you an idea of how your content is performing.

• · With it data you are able to determine what might be the cause of the content failure or the success

• · From analyzing the data. You will be able to re-strategize

• · Take action of your strategy

• · And lastly measure your new reports with the last one to see if there are improvements.

And the circle goes on like this until you hit the jackpot.

Basic Google Analytics Terminologies used Everyday

• Web Property Identity: After registering your website on Google Analytics, you will be given a user identity known as Web Property ID. It is a tracking code specifically meant for the registered website. It is through this tracking code that Analytics is able to track your website activity. It normally looks like this UA-0000000-01. This tracking code should be fixed to your website for analytics to identify it. Analytics will provide you with a JavaScript code that you will fix in the head tag of your website.

• JavaScript: JavaScript plays a very important role in GA. It is what makes analytics function and thus must be turned on - on every of your website page to allow it to communicate with visitors cookies. Without JavaScript, GA cannot function.

• DashBoard: Dashboard can easily be set up. It helps you quickly review a number of reports on a single page. You can customize them as you want and set up an automatic notification for it. It comes in handy when you want to compare two reports for strategic reasons.

• Overview: Each analytic page or section on GA gives a high-level overview report for quick basic checks.

• Goals: Define goals in GA to create conversation. It is easy to set up and it helps measure conversation rates.

• Key Performance Indicator (KPIs): To be more successful as a business, you will need not only to measure sales and leads but also actions that smell success for you. You will need to define your KPIs and keep a close eye on them regularly.

• Hits: Hit is the common term for any interaction that sends data to analytics. Page tracking is a most common hit followed by event tracking.

• Acquisition: Acquisition tells you where your visitors are coming from; search engines, social media, referrals etc. acquisition reports tells reveals to you were your traffic is mostly generated from.

• Behaviour: This report reveals to you the behaviour of your visitors. Don’t be fooled it doesn’t tell you how your visitors behave in the physical body sense but rather what type of your content they are attracted to. From this data, you can know what your visitor wants and drive your marketing towards that direction.

• Conversation: Conversation tells you if your visitors are taking action. It gives you data about the site performance against the goals. Such goals might include subscribers, leads and sales.

• Event Tracking: Event tracking helps you track actions such as clicks, video views, time spent on a page or video in specific areas, and tabs on the page. It continues to track actions even when visitors don’t hop on a new page.

• In-page Analytics: Though not a perfect report, it, however, comes handy. In-page analytics shows the percentage of visitors who clicked on link or buttons in specific pages.

• Landing Page Report: Landing page reports shows you what page visitors first arrive on when they visit your website and which source directed them there.

• Mobile: Mobile reports informs you about how many of your visitors are using mobile devices to access your website.

• All Pages: The “All pages” report gives you on inside behaviour and how every page URL on your website is performing. With this info, you can determine the performance of your content on each page.

• Views: Views give you by default five ways to see your website performing data. If you toggle the button on the right, you get access to views percentage, performance, comparison and pivot views.

• Referrals: Referrals give you information on who is directing the visitor to your site. It helps you assess the quantity and quality of your visitors from your referral sources. It is found under Acquisition.

• Time on Page: this helps you measure how customers engage on your site and how much time they spend on a particular page.

• Queries: (Found under Acquisition sub section Search Engine Optimization) shows keywords ranking, impression, clicks and click through rate (CTR).

Now that you know the basic google analytics terminologies. Let us look at how we can get the best from Google Analytics Data

How to get the best of Google Analytics Data

• Notes: Make notes on analytics. This can be done by adding annotations to your timeline to indicate marketing events such as email sent and website update. These note will help you analyse the effect of your marketing campaign. However, while you take notes and analyses reports, remember that if no action is taking to help in your strategy all your report analyses effort will amount to zero.

• Exclude Bots and Spiders: To make your reports more accurate you will need to stop traffics from robots such as GoogleBot. To do this go to view settings in your admin section, Scroll down until you see Bot Filtering and check the box in front of it.

• Exclude Yourself: Apart from excluding GoogleBot from your traffic, you will also want to exclude your behaviour and traffic from your side. To do this create a filter in the admin section and add the IP address of your network.

• Secondary Dimension: Use this to add a report to another report as a second column for easy cross-reference relevant metrics from each report.