i'm very excited have all of you guys here we will be together as excited as one can ever be at eight o seven about google analytics a couple of notes before we jump in here so make sure to take a lot of notes with with google analytics probably more than any of the other workshops that we do who go into linux is hard it's hard to teach it's hard to figure out it's probably the most technically detailed workshop that we do so take really good notes but be aware that the power point may not be that helpful  definitely ask questions if i show you something and i go too fast or doesn't make sense i want to hear from you i believe today is the first day of school so in the spirit of the first day of school for any of you with kids i saw a lot of people on bus stops which is probably exciting for infants appearing and no one that's a teacher so what what we're going to do to date and so it's a little bit challenging but we're going to try to toggle between what we're doing up here with your eyes up here and then what you're i'm your laptop on your own or with the person next to you so you are all adults i will allow you to be adults i know that teaching college classes it's challenging if you're a student to do both sometimes try your best to flip back and forth don't get super lost because you're distracted doing something that we weren't talking about so we have basically three goals today we want to get ready for google analytics this is a one on one class so we're going to talk a little bit about do you even have google analytics if you have it is it set up correctly what do you want to know we're going to talk about the basics will give you basically a tour of some of the core components of your google analytics account and then we'll will dive into how you can take things to the next level just a little bit with things like google analytics goals or campaign tracking and again we're going to move methodically and slow through this because we want you to i want you to be able to get this before you go so my name is tim haines i'm with an agency called symposia that does marketing and advertising in holland in g r we are here today thanks to the west coast chamber and make sure advantage and to davenport gave us a roof over our head so thank you to all of them for putting this together this is the last one of the summer so if you've been com congratulations you know want to have to hear me talk which might be a relief so let's prepare the food right prep cook what do we need to do to get set up how many of you are set up successfully with google analytics ok all right so look around those are the people you can ask later right how do they do it on a serious now how many of you that are set up successfully did it yourself good ok so those are the two that you really want to find the rest of you is probably already set up when you got into your job or a developer did it or someone just told you this is the password and you don't know where it came from so lucky google analytics be used for could be used to answer a lot of different questions that you or your marketing team might have so who is visiting my site are our moms visiting my site o dads our old people our young people what pages on my site are most popular so we're working with the quiet very recently and they had spent a lot of time with a web page and see creating a page that was supposed to do a specific thing and they were ruling excited about it and guess what their users after looking at google analytics were not their users didn't care about the page am i making money now if you're in the nonprofit world this is going to be stated of a little bit differently but all of us are all two million some way shape or form usually trying to make money how can i improve my say so maybe you're considering you know we've got that contractor who can do a little bit of work or maybe you yourself know how to play around with your word price ita little bit how could you improve your site and then of course one of our big questions is where's traffic coming from i'm spending five hours a week on facebook is that where my traffic comes from or is it coming from somewhere  lots of other questions of course but those are just a couple that you might ask yourself so imagine you are selling your house in grand rapids michigan where the market is booming you want to make that thirty thousand dollars and then go live in hawaii so people coming to your site is really not as relevant as you might think so i could send ten thousand people to your open house but you won't be very excited unless one of them buys the house so we're trying to decide are we sending the right people and are they doing the things that we want them to do or are they doing the things that we think that they want to do so if you're if you're working out of the mindset of oh we had a good month last month because we had we had lots of hits we had lots and lots of hits no one cares about hits they don't matter that's not a purchase it's not a conversion it's not money and we're going to come back to that so if you don't have an account you're going to need to get one we are not going to go manually through the process of creating an account today because that in of itself could be another hour now we want to focus more on how to use google analytics but just as a kind of a brief fly over a couple notes here if you have an account and you don't know how to get into it google analytics is one of those things that can almost be overstated it's just a line of code that goes on your site and worst case scenario you can always create a brand new account now we don't want to do that because we don't have historical data and we don't know what's been happening for the last two years five years except drop but in the worst possible scenario that's always an option you want to plan for whatever scenario specific to you you're going to set up your google analytics account differently if you have one site then if you have seven sites you want to kind of have an organizational system in your mind you also want to have a plan for how to access and this is without doubt the most confusing and most often annoying component of google analytics some of you just this morning already playing the game of i have to log into this  if you're not accessing it from a company account you might switch it over so that you are so right now we're on the user management tab and i'm going to i'm going to toggle over and show you exactly where that so if i go into admin once i'm logged into an analytics account under admin there's a whole bunch of goodies or not to look at them all but one of them is user management and if you don't see don't have admin level you won't be able to do one of the key things we want to accomplish later today which is to create goals inside of google analytics so one of the frustrating things often about google analytics is that your permissions are your management level man it matters a lot and it matters a lot you may have been given the master key by someone who didn't know that it was the master key awesome keep it but it's also very possible if you worked with another agency or if you're a marketing assistant or you're helping someone else that you don't have the right for missions to do it you're going to want to do if you don't see this if you get a little notification that looks like this you do not have sufficient permissions that means that you don't have the right access will does anybody see that all right so make you don't have the right access level you don't have the right access of a mortgage that is not uncommon there are a whole bunch of scenarios that could play out here it could be that you created the account and then you gave yourself access to it so you're going to have to dig around at some point and find the original logon and that will have the right access level it could also be that someone else gave this to you and they didn't give you the right level probably they didn't even know that there were differences so they just click the button and it could also be that an agency set this up and agencies were great but we're also not perfect and we do some things that aren't always best practices and as an agency i might of if i were a newspaper company that rainier google ad words i might have set this up in a way where you don't get to have  because i don't want you to for whatever reason that might be bottom line you need to figure this out before you're going to be able complex what we're talking about  today oh you graduations morgan has already succeeded she does have access now right so anyone other than you in your immediate supervisor should be something other than adamant so if you flip over here and you look at this one account permissions you can manage users at it collaborate read in analyze manage users as the highest that it is what you want to make sure that you at least have collaborated in analyze you're not going to do too much here so if anyone under needs you maybe the intern from hope that just went back to school then you haven't heard from them in a week because they're busy moving and if anyone beneath you has them managed users option selected that's back that means they have control of things that they shouldn't if you don't want them to be able to say oh well i don't like her i'm going to delete or and a lot of times those things don't happen facetiously people just don't realize that it's all intertwined right i've been removed from things and then i called and they said i removed you from want to know i did that and of course if you are trying to add someone else in your company this is where you go to add people assuming you have the right permissions to do so a little hint here so this is my main dashboard i'll go back to that admin tab a little hint here for those of you who r t knew about that tab it's always interesting to check on the change history this is where you can track as an admin everything else that's ever happened so you could see if someone set something up as someone changed your permissions so you can see all the stuff that happened last time people use this fake account people created by two goals which is great any questions about that i don't wanna like pounded into the pavement but it's important that you least understand what it means only the leadership team ideally and pro and probably realistically or agency or whoever's doing your ad words are going to have to have some sort of admin level they're going to be set to have at it but as far as who can be below them i'm sure it's a party why don't all have analyzed and collaborate but two or three is usually all that you really need to sri maybe four and one of the misconceptions here and something you'll get back if if you ask someone can i have full access they'll often reply and they'll say well we want to really you know we want to protect the google analytics account that's that's  baloney there is nothing that you can really do and you know that is going to damage anything there's nothing you can do in here that can't be undone there's nothing you're going to do in here that's going to break your website so if anyone ever says oh i can't give you full access because i don't want you to break anything tell them no thanks for that excuse ok onwards and upwards so you have a tracking code that is how you install it on your site for those of you that are trying to you that is in that admin section this is where you go to a developer or you go to google depending on your strategy for implementation this script goes on your website and another comment then again because i know a lot of you here are oh very cool i don't need to know this you might have more than one code on your site it's not uncommon for a site to have two three we run into sites where there are three different marketing people in the last couple years and there are three different google analytics accounts that is bad news because they will conflict with each other it's kind of like having norton anti virus and a coffee trying to protect your computer will confuse each other at some point you won't you don't want to have multiple google analytics accounts so this is another thing where you need to check and make sure there is only one of these scripts and if you are an advanced user you can do view source on your home page you can go look at the headers section and you could just see how many scripts do i have another way that you can track google analytics really conveniently for those of you who are using the best browser in the world which is of course chrome you'll see i have a little plugin here it's called page analytics by google just go to the chrome storage is google it and it is free you add this to your chrome account and it will actually check automatically whenever i'm on a site that i own and it'll say this is what you want to know that google analytics is tracking here's the latest information on that page oh and also by the way you have two accounts and set of one or you have seven accounts and set of one so if i go to my site right now because i have that installed it should pull up the allegedly gray and it says yes reconnect and that will actually let me do all sorts of neat things some of the things that we talk about later will come back to that so again we don't want to be that went over the had but that's how you install it and if you already have it make sure you only have one how many of you use cars a contact militant right there are all of these third party tools this is actually for a square space site so if you usually look maybe you have a square space site and you have a pretty little dashboard where you usually work from you often see external services plug in your google account number this will allow you to integrate google analytics with a whole bunch of different things the more you integrate google analytics with your external services the more you will be able to find out about all of the marketing that you're doing so if i have an i'm going to integrate it there i'm going to put it in the sales force i'm going to put it in my c r m i'm going to put it in any program that i'm using i'm going to navigate and i'm going to look for was there a place to connect google analytics you want to literally make a list of everything that you own that you pay a subscription for and you want to go check and i connected to that so i think if you're inside a mail chip it's pretty easy to find as it is in many places  here we are on square space if we are to log in there it's going to be usually listed under third party or external sometimes it'll say analytics but bottom line it's pretty easy to do it's pretty easy to find and you just need that it's called you a number which is universal analytics that's the number that you're going to plug and so here i am on squarespace site and it should be right here under analytics or settings and i don't actually remember so i have to poke around for a second and i believe it is under settings so this is where i can connect google analytics right connected accounts not bad so make sure you take the time to go through a checklist and integrate that and if you forget what that you a number is it's right in your admin panel and it's right on your property settings it'll show up here and you can write that down you can put it above your desk that's something that you'll often get asked for what's your you a number or what's your google analytics tracking i automatically connect a google analytics account to your site that's what it looks like inside a mail chimp it's in the integrations directory that's what it looks like in another tool called unbalance where it would refer to it as adding a script so sometimes instead of it saying connect a third party tool it'll say do you want to add a script because technically google analytics is using a script to insert itself into your website and if you don't order script is that doesn't matter as long as you know the word script you'll be ok ok so quick little look around here top is right you go from reporting to admin and there's two other tabs that we're not as worried about number two over here on the top right that's where you switch back and forth between your counts most commonly if you don't have access or if you're not looking at the right account it's because you're logged into the wrong g mail happens to me every day and then we're really going to spend the bulk of our time here on the left hand side so again if we flip over the live view so that we can make sense of all the out i'm going to click on home so if you have a bunch of sites they'll all be listed here we're going to look at our site so that it's safe to share data customization we're not going to really go into today admin is where we just were we're going to spend most of our time on reporting and then we're going to spend most of our energy here on the left hand side so whenever we're talking about the left hand side this is where we are so this breaks up into four different categories that mostly kind of makes sense google organizes this left hand side into your audience whenever we're looking at your audience ravi asli talking about things like demos men something did he look at a blog did he leave right away did he stay for a while we're going to talk about last but not least to conversions that is what did they buy what did they do what did they download what did they fill out so those are four big words audience acquisition behavior and conversion there's a couple of tiny things for those of you who have been listening for the last five minutes and i've ok i've already got all the site up you want to go check the site up on a couple of different tabs here we want to make sure that e commerce is actually on it's not on by default if you don't have e commerce then you don't need to turn it on right but if you're selling a book if you're selling eleven are if you're selling something that i can buy directly from your site you want to make sure that  evil and that is over here and you'll find often as you're kind of clicking through these different things are not actually turned on so you might click on one of these different options and you might get a well that's not turned on yet and you want to fix that demographic so when we go look at acquisition and audience demographics isn't on by default so you want to make sure that that tab is switched so if at any point when we're looking at your audience and you look at yours and you say i don't have that it's probably because demographics isn't turned on again and web developers are really kind people they're awesome  what they do but when they set this up for you they're not always thinking about how you're going to use it down the road they're thinking about is it that is it isn't working sure sure so demographics if we go right here you might click on one of these and you might get something say no doubt we were doing that sorry about that and then you would just you would have a picture of that button if that were the case and you would just turn it  so before we dive into some of the more detailed stuff it's really critical that you understand how vastly confusing google analytics glossary of terms is and here's a great example visitors is not the same as visits which is also not the same as visitor sessions who what does that mean so in this example a visitor i came to your si visits how many times did i come to your site and visitor sessions would be how many times in any given moment did i come to your site so a visitor session would say well morgan came to the site three times on monday that was all one session and then on tuesday she came back at four o'clock at night four times that was another session and then she came back on friday so even though she went to the site a bunch of times there were just three visitor sessions  not necessarily usually it's actually within like i have to a half hour to an hour depending on a couple of variables but a session is anything within a closely united frame of time right it's kind of that idea of i can go to starbucks and i get a refill i can be in there for a couple hours that would be one starbucks session but if i come back at ten o'clock at night and i try to get a refill they're going to give me a dirty look i might sneak it in because i'm dutch and i want to you know that's only fifty cents but those are two different sessions even if i got multiple refills each time and it's really critical that you know the difference between words because they can paint an unrealistic picture if you don't understand the difference so you might look at your website and you're going to what we've got a thousand visitors a thousand visits whoa oh but we only have twenty sessions well that's a different story than we thought we were reading and what we're going to do to help with that is i'm actually going to give you a link to that entire g and that is the best way unless you're a memorizer of things i often will when i'm diving into google analytics have a glossary up in a tab and toggle over to remind myself what does that mean consider yourself pretty good and you are really excited because you had so many visits and then you find out that they were actually all you so unless you add what's called a filter to google analytics and to most tracking tools online like on balance dot com you are going to be tracking your own data this is a problem if you are just a really excited marketer like mean you've refreshed a million times it's also a problem if you're at a company where everyone i'm here in your entire company is visiting your site for various internal reasons right maybe you have your internet backed onto the back end of your site so you want to set up a filter view if it's you yourself and maybe one other person this isn't going to be too hard you need ip addresses so we're back in the settings here we'll go to admin and there are filters right here so this is where i could add different filters so this is where you would put in your ip addresses if you're in i t this is where you put in a range of ip addresses this is where you get rid of every want to your company just block them out a through z we're not going to track them this will never be perfect but it will least help make things more accurate right if you're like and you kind of shoot this in the foot because there's no way to stop it but it will least help so you want to add filters to your data bottom line or you will have incredibly student information please yeah so if you if you're working like with six specific people you could just add in six individual ip is again it could be perfect because if you're like me even if you don't have a v p n you move around a lot so you're at do your office you've got another so it's a cat and mouse game but you want to do your best to succeed at it  good question though keep asking questions so three takeaways here setting things up can be trickier than you not really think maybe or ten minutes ago you thought you had it all figured out and now you  don't to be certain that you have the highest admin level possible or appropriate for you that should be one of the top two tiers and then three on a very serious note good dictionary you're going to need one any questions or comments on getting set up prepping our food before we start to talk about how to make our dinner or breakfast i guess it should be  ok i will take your silence as it is and we will discuss how to actually start measuring some things the meat in the potatoes as my mom might say so your audience you're my audience are better or worse sorry about that but your audience is what we're going to start with first first of all when you live here inside of you analytics report you have already probably seen this beautiful graph of user sessions and such over time yeah i look how pretty that is so if i go to home and then i get into my si here i am wrong reporting this is what we're looking at this little graph this graph is something that could be really fun to show your marketing supervisor but that often has very little meaning attached unless you dive down deeper so what does it say so far on my site in the last thirty days i have had seventy eight sessions not exactly exhilarating and i we're not driving millions of people to our site we're not going viral yet all of those sessions i've had seventy eight users which means that it's safe to assume what each user had one session so these numbers will not always match they might not match for you if you are a site that people come back to a lot they will probably be wildly different i could see that i had one hundred thirteen page views so that's more than my sessions because you might have come to the site and you might have looked at the homepage then you might have gone on to the about us then you might have read about some workshops those are each a different page view and then i could see the average pages per  session this is an interesting piece of data are people going to one two three well i am at the american standard for how many children my generation will have where we're at one point four five so one and a half pages per person i'd like to see it a little bit higher but for my site that's not bad because they're kind of a business card site we don't have a lot of content that we're hoping people are going to digest on the page you can see the average session duration and what do you think about that zero someone tell me what that means someone give me a guess as to why there's a zero there i know your name's now if you seize a lead that doesn't make sense it may be because something's going wrong or it may be because of the insight up incorrectly a lot of different dates could be going on mike yes here is that the average session duration is so short it's getting average and then rounded down and displaying something that's not really true but is the best that they could give me and you may have a very short sighted duration that is not always a bad thing one of the dangers as you learn more about who had a linux is anything that makes a blanket statement we all have different sites we have different audiences so we need to think about what do we what are we actually hoping people will do on our site how much time will they actually spend right maybe i'm a church website and i have a really short page duration but it's not a bad thing because it means people are going to my site they're fighting exactly the answer to the question and they're leaving ok it's at ten o'clock tomorrow not eleven o'clock i'm long so on the stats it's going to show up as oh wow oh really short time on that page but that's not necessarily a bad thing so we're going to come back to that but i just want to pause and point out that you need to think critically same thing for balance three so balance right says you loaded the page and then you left one way that you could think about bounce rate is if you're on your mobile phone that ad comes up as you're pulling your tetris came where your candy king game and i don't want to see that i didn't mean to click on it i'm outta here that could be a b if you're on a one page site if you have one of those newer fancier one page sites just scrolls and scrolls and scrolls we know that that's going to show up in correctly and  and muffins thank you got it ladies thank you very much so brooking colleen can give them hugs later so if i have a one page site my bounce rate is going to show up in correctly because google's going to say well they only looked at one page and then they laughed really quickly while that's not really accurate so there's another time where i have to think critically about the data for me this is a little bit high i'm not happy about it but again it's always important to think relative to other pieces of information so i was actually on alexa dot com where you can look up pages that are similar to yours that are really big so maybe i want to look up pepsi dot com and alexa is the closest thing to being able to look at other people's google analytics accounts without their permission or guidance to give me a whole bunch of information and i'm not going to give it a tauriel on this right now but look even pepsi and this was my point even pepsi has a balanced rate of fifty four point four percent according to lots of dot com so we have to take everything with a grain of salt bounce rate in of itself is not necessarily a terrible thing you are never going to have a five percent bounce rate that is not going to happen that's not how people use the internet so again make sure you know what it is you're looking at ok so that's a quick overview of that graph you're going to notice that you toggle between new and and returning visitors and you could pull up on the right hand side you can zoom in on a time period so maybe you last year you did no marketing you just ran one campaign during the month of july you could make it so you look at the whole year is there a spike in traffic and you can also click on this little goodie that says compare and it's going to say the blue is the last thirty days the orange is the thirty days before that so did i do better or did i do worse than the month before so i had a pause i i'm going to get two colors now and at first glance i did better during july than i did during june and neither of them were very exciting right sometimes this could be depressing to look at and that's ok and because i didn't really do any advertising in the previous month these charts look dramatic and this happens on all sorts of analytics you go to your facebook page and will say you are up seventeen thousand percent and you will go wow what did we do well it's not super accurate because it's comparing to something that doesn't really help that much but on the same page now i could see how many of those people were new and how many of those people were returning so again different sites different goals if you are on a church you're trying to get all of commination each but you especially probably want people to return you want to teach people likely that this is a resource you can go to come back every sunday download a sermon excited or a if you are selling something that maybe is a b to be product and you're pushing to the phone you're going to be perhaps more concerned about how many new visitors said we have because once i sell them maybe they're not going to come back to our site too much so we looked at that you might also be interested in if you go down below you can see what language people are speaking you can zoom in on all sorts of demographics country city what browser are they using you get all sorts of really interesting information here so i could find out for example that most of the people i work with are awesome and they use chrome and i can also find out that most of them live in the city of i don't have a filter set up and i use a v p n works tells people i'm from different countries depending on the day because it does and therefore this data doesn't make sense because i did filter myself hopefully yours says like grand rapids or something more meaningful and if you have a million people from bangladesh and you don't sell things in bangladesh you can assume that that is probably spam google records all the traffic just like google gives you all your email and sometimes that means you get spam which again will skew your data and confuse things but it is exciting to be able to see that servers stuff so let's keep going down the line here where people reaching you out we just looked at city you can also learn more about who you are reaching in so if i go back over here and i click on overview of demographics so now i am off of the main page and i do mean in this is sad i don't have any data here but hopefully you do so for example yours might look like this so eighteen to twenty four twenty five to thirty five so am i reaching the age group that i think i am you might think your target audience is a baby boomer and you might go to your site and realize oh  seems to be using our site what does that mean you could break it down by gender are more males or females or is it in your site and then on any of those you can even diving deeper so i can click from overview on to age and i can actually learn how many people from an age group had a session where new users what was their bounce rate how many pages did they go to so in this example twenty five to thirty four they're the ones going to the most pages on the site they're going to two point seven six pages on average that's exciting and it looks like i've got a lot of work here to do with the baby boomers the fifty five to sixty four year olds are doing as well on my site they're spending less time so over here i've got three away down here i've just got twenty i've got over twenty five vastly different just by age groups so we talked a little bit about terms as far as visits visitors visitors session is another thing that people often get tripped up on is the difference between average average session duration and time is i went to starbucks and i got three drinks and i was there for four hours that was a session duration of time on pages how long was i just looking at that one item in the window at starbucks so very different numbers they tell me different things one is more detail than the other so don't get misled by lackluster data and i don't like reading verbatim at all ever but for just this one site i want to get detailed so it is really important take into consideration the exit and balance rate of a page when analyzing the average time on a page to determine whether or not the content meets the needs of the user so what that saying is if you've got a lot people visiting a page and then you've got a really short duration or a lot of people that are just exit ing it could call it underline capitalize it could indicate that that page doesn't have the content that user wishes it would and this is where we can start to find out more about is our site do lean and showing the things that it needs to do and show bingo absolutely yeah and i know in the content world it's really hard you know i know you mentioned you're a writer cynthia the younger generation if you're writing for them we are impatient we're quick or scammers and often the people deciding what the marketing will look like are older than us so if you're advertising to milan eels and you think that they're going to read a seven page blog good luck if you could if you could get a millennia was attention for that long then you have something secret happening and we need to package it and sell it so we can also find out in the audience tab what are your website visitors interested in this is called google's a score or sometimes i think of it as the affinity index so this page and i'll show you where it is just a sec this page brokes things up into the affinity category and the in market segment in the beginning google said i care about what you're looking for and social media said i care about who you are and what you're interested in that is merging google is doing a better and better job at not only telling us who you are what age you are where you came from but what you're interested in do you like cars do you like cats do you like dogs this is a really important marketers so where was that if i go over here and i click on interests and i click got overview you should and you can see now i am i'm working off of screenshots but you should have data here so i'm under interest which is ultimately under audience the audience interest affinity categories and in market segments and that is what they look like so in this example i'm reaching people who really seem to love movies i'm interested in reaching people who like t v i'm interested in people are looking for employment and looking for travel well all this makes sense because this is pulled off of a travel blog this could inform my social media content so maybe you're sitting here today and are also in charge of the facebook page and you're thinking about man i need to come back to that other class this could be used to make that decision if there are a lot of historical data right as i can be useful if i just turn the so on but if this were the last three years i might say i don't know why but my people were movies so we're going to start doing more content that involves movies we're going to talk about  yeah well someone has to ask cynthia and my answer is always the same they know everything they know everything there is nothing that google doesn't know about you that is why the f b i they just call google and then google answers their questions and that's a whole nother ethical conversation but they know everything about you you have to remember that google knows you across multiple if not dozens of properties if you're doing g g mail coude say probably know that they all belong to you there is no escaping google or facebook so really exciting over here because i can use this as a reference point for content and then when my my superiors says oh we don't want to write about movies that's not cool you can say well according to google analytics our audience loves movies so either a you're wrong or b we're sending the wrong people to our site and we need to fix that over here in market segment so this is obviously kind of looking at what they would associate themselves with this is obviously coming more at you know what industry are we talking about what are what are these people trying to accomplish so apparently some people are going to this travel blog because they want dating services maybe match dot com some of them here or something who know again though i can make decisions on content based on this i could say well if people are really interested in travel on health i'm going to start talking about peer michigan and what i did and letting ten last weekend  the red flags flew so this is where google and social start to intertwine and that's an important point lots of important points but if you think of google and social as two different tracks so maybe over here you've got social maybe over here you've got google they should really start to inform each other you should be able to use them to help understand interests keywords and targeting of all kinds so again if i click back a couple of pages and i see that my users are twenty five to thirty five when i go to write a facebook add i could decide hey i want that facebook ad to target those same users so all of these are going to start to overlap on those two different tracks one should inform the other as much as possible unless it's wrong so here's another really critical question how in gauged are your users and again remember you have to kind of super bowl you have to step back do you want your users to be engaged do you may be on a site that is what i would call a brochure site so you're a dentist office you want people to come to your site learn about when you're open sign up for an appointment and then leave that is a brochure website you're just trying to get some information out there you're not trying to necessarily engage people pinterest is a site that is focused on engagement right we want you to come get addicted stay up til we make a wedding board for your daughter whatever it might be we want you to be engaged so short is not necessarily bad it goes back to your goals but if i click through and just so you can follow along over here so now i am on i did so i skipped through behavior i'm over on technology so we've got all sorts of information here i'm looking at engagement right there which is still under the big audience for so i can decide how engaged are my users most people are only here for about ten seconds that isn't a bad thing maybe i just wanted them to get a phone number right there are instances where a sixty second engagement would actually be a bad thing if your primary goal is to help people call you or get quick information and it was taking them three minutes to do that well then your site isn't very good so short is not necessarily bad you can also dive in and look at what are they using so maybe you're sitting here today and you are trying to convince someone that they need to redesign your site and spend money because it's not mobile friendly you can decide whether or not you're right because under the mobile tab which is up a little bit so cylinder audience know i'm on mobile quick on that click on overview could see exactly where people are coming from for me it's just the desktop and the tablet for you there's probably a mobile phone listed on here too if you have enough data to generate that so in this scenario mobile is fifty six point thirty five percent so if my site is not mobile friendly if i can't see it on my phone fifty six percent of people that come to look at it are going to hate it and leave so another way to say that is fifty six percent of the marketing money that i spend is going to be lit on fire i might as well as take that money whited on fire because that's what's going to happen desktop and tablet often i just kind of take tablet and i combine it with mobile because although google separates side out if it looks bad on your phone it likely doesn't look great on your tablet either so another way to think of this is tablet which is six percent plus that so sixty one percent of people that come to the site are going to hate it if it's not mobile friendly if you leave here and you do nothing else just look at that it could be the most beneficial thing you do that said i have i have eaten my own words many a time so i have been in conversations or i sa really think we should read you your site make it mobile friendly and then we pull it up and ninety five percent of the people are using it from their desktop but i guess you can keep it never mind so again you should be informed by data a little bit more about bouncing right maybe you have one of those kids who has lots of energy or they have a cool teacher and they use one of those balls so a balance can only occur if the visitor views just one page in a session so i came in the starbucks but i only looked at one poster on the wall and then i left so high down straight becomes a worrying sign when you want a visitor to take further action and we're going to say that a bunch of different ways a couple different times it's only if you want them to take further action about bounce rate get super concerning under fifteen percent very suspicious that to that take everything with a grain of salt added to you so if it's under fifteen percent no it's not something funky is going on something's not tracking correctly that is just not true although stranger things have happened right so we're going to get into the sandbox as it were i'm going to pass out a worksheet you be just like it's your first day of school you can decide if you want to work by yourself and be a solo flyer or do you want to be a team player you can partner up with someone next to you usually i make people partner up i'm going to do that today but i'll wait until later maybe so i want you to try to answer these seven questions that i don't want you to go fast because that would defeat the purpose if you get to a question that you can't answer i want you to tell me so we can decide why you can't answer it so there are seven questions on here important i haven't done that on purpose i want you to use the tool and to start finding things out on your own and you are only going to do this is where your listening skills come in handy ways so i hears from like really good whispered questions to each other in conversation that's exactly what i'm hoping for have thousands of visitors from facebook but why would we were we don't do that much with it and we're in the manufacturing space so sometimes this data is hopefully most tied it's going to jive with your understanding of  in and that was tricky of me because i asked you intentionally so questions about that the thing that we haven't looked at yet so that was tricky of me but so we're going to we're going to cover see and i might not know that i'm at a guess and maybe they're in their car maybe they're moving around maybe they're in the shop are they younger or are they older maybe that is stuff and and i like that one of the one of the things we have to keep in mind too you know google analytics can be kind of like the bible in that we can pull out of it what we want  so we always have to be aware of our assumptions and how they're impacting the things that we're looking at so our morgan in calif see and hannah are they all right when they're thinking about well this makes sense based on what we know they probably are but you want to least be aware of i am viewing this data within the context of a previously created assumption because sometimes our some patients are wrong does he think it's happening for a reason that it's not one other person gary how are you what was your average person looking like old young  off line and said our interests not only align with our content but they align with dense i like that that seem so not maybe not a ton of surprises there the younger you know sometimes will hypothesize  situation that there's a younger audience because they're looking for a job so maybe you have an unexpectedly high amount of twenty five year olds because they're all trying to see if you have a need positions open which makes each our team really excited and the sales team go that's not what we want ok so let's keep going forward motion i don't want to lose you guys let's talk about acquisition so you've got them to your site where do they come from who's the daddy who's a bad joke there and i'll just fly past it if you missed it that's ok so acquisition as you were finding now when you when you started to explore the overview here is just called top channels that is right under the acquisition tab on the left hand side there so acquisition if i click on overview here i am i'm looking at all of my channels and again i've got this broken down by two different time frame so it looks even more interesting and i could see exactly how many people are coming from these different channels what the heck did the channels me we'll give you said just basic definitions here display display advertising if you're not sure that you're doing it you're probably  not people like dead easy z m all really good people some of the things that they sell are known as display advertisements these are the banner ads their placement maybe on the right hand side of a page if i go to like the grand rapids business journal it's at the top those do still exist and some of you younger folks that are my age or i thinking once there are still of been around out there that people are paying for  display depending on your target audience can be still really valuable it's great for braining although there are certain audiences that maybe have some banner ad blindness that's a whole nother conversation but that's what display is for the most part yeah you know it could include pop ups yeah direct my version of to your website and they clicked right on and you are out which is a bad example actually because referral is actually when someone's coming from another page so you can imagine the home and said general writes a wonderful article about your organization and at the bottom they include a link that would be a referral to your site so people are coming from other sites that link to yours or other articles that would go under the referral button  social this is going to include everything from slide share to facebook to wordpress you can although we're not going to get into i don't think today how to customize this you can customize all of these there's default way that google defines them and you could change that with a little bit of a point around organic search is used cars home in michigan oh there's the name of a car dealership i would show up as organic search people searching and being or google or whatever for something and then they end up on your site churches in the local area job opportunities keep in mind that all of these all of these can be distorted right my gramma she uses internet like this she goes to google and she googles the name of the website and then she clicks on the link and i keep trying to convince her there's a u r l bar up there but she doesn't like it she wants to use google and i share that little tidbit because she would show up as organic search even though she already knows how to get there directly so none of it's a perfect paid search again if you're not doing it it won't show up if you don't know if you're doing here probably not this is i bought an ad from google ad words or i bought a new ad from being and at the very top when you will cars on michigan there's three results that are in yellow that say advertisement in little tiny letters because of the f c c and that is paid search campaign for the f t c email i sent out a cons lost those people show up here in email these are not perfect i'll say that eighty times because they're really not perfect but they are pretty good for a good place to begin and then for each of these i can drill down so if i click on social and remember you're tracking so if i click on this it's going to load and now i'm going to be looking at a page that looks something like this now again i'm getting stats that are specific to different channels i drill down further so i could figure out what one is winning for me facebook is winning in the sea sample direct i could do the same thing so one of the most enjoyable pieces of google analytics is just clicking around although you can get lost very quickly so maybe i'm over here and i say ok tell me more about direct if i click on that just like i did for social now it's going to load it is going to show me exactly where these people are coming from and this will either make a lot of sense to me or it'll be total  jibberish this count as you probably gathers a lot of generation here i could go down the bottom and i could changes so i could see you know all one thousand people that have come directly to me and what is showing me here is that page that they went directly to a lot of you are going to just see a slash at the very top that slash infers that they just want your home page so if ninety percent of your direct traffic is just a slash that's because they just want your home page and then i can see in this example all the sub people are going to a lot of people i gave them u r l's for just a workshop so they were going right there where i gave them u r l for a specific workshop so they're going right there and again way back to the beginning we're going to get stats we're going to get the average we're going to get the percent of total we're getting in all this information in those different segments or and you may not know what attribute she has so let's talk about it at your be russian is this i am driving down i ninety six and i see a picture of a baby with your logo on it that says to go to your website i go to your website i leave i see a t v commercial i then see an ad on facebook i click on it and i buy something who gets credit that's attribution attribution is inherently f whenever people bring up the r o y conversation you have to make sure that they know attribution is inherently flawed we didn't take down the billboard fifty years ago because we couldn't prove with one hundred percent accuracy that we made a million dollars because of it so most attribute shinn focus is on what's known as last click attribution or a last click model this means that whoever i clicked on last is who gets credit so i saw it on google then i got a facebook at then i got a twitter out and i clicked on it twitter got credit but the other two are still instrumental because of frequency the other two really play a part so here's a breakdown of what most people do twenty four percent of people don't know what they do so maybe you're in that category i was for a while fifty eight percent of people most marketers are working with the last click model and then  eighteen percent if you're a if you're a larger company or if you're just more sophisticated you could be working with a sophisticated cross channel model that is actually built to track across multiple channels while harder to set up more complicated to monitor eccentric cedrick sudra that's why fewer people do it usually if someone is doing cross channel i know that there are five ten twenty million dollar companies right google is doing cross channel  i am not probably because i don't i'm not that big one way to help create a detailed understanding of attribution is to use a campaign u r l a google u r l or a campaign u r l says all the other stuff that's automatically happening is great but i don't trust it i don't want to rely on it i don't want it to be all that i have so for this one advertising campaign i'm going to make a special u r l or special campaign code that i know is certainty is doing exactly what i think it i does that mean well here is a mail chimp campaign that i was working on this morning and in my settings as i did creating this campaign it says google analytics link tracking and it says title for a campaign and then says underneath you'll see this inside of google analytics so i'm i'm doing it in mail chimp which is why integration way back at the beginning was so critical so that i could do know exactly what those people do this you are all title whatever i call it i called it e mail campaign here because i'm so fancy e mail campaign eight twenty four that is going to show up after i send out my e mail under and stay with me here all traffic no search no social no it's going to show up under campaign switches all the way down  display so this was a display advertising campaign where i used to campaign code and now i can track exactly what happened during that advertising campaign i can get data just based on those users and those visitors so on my example i think i've got a couple here i've got display i've got another one that's a search and then well on the whole that might be too small for you to see but there's one that says summer e mail blast for end of summer e mail blast that name that shows up here is driven by what i put here so that they let i put inside a mail chimp that's called a campaign title it's going to show up inside of google analytics as you would ever use this before going you know if you raise your hand that's ok you're making me feel good because we're learning stuff if you ever work with an advertising campaign you give money to someone down the street and you say send me three thousand people yada yada if they don't give you one of these you can fire them because they're not very good at what they're doing this is a basic one zero one best practice anyone using google analytics should know about and think about how and when to use a campaign you are out so another scenario just to illustrate how critical these are maybe i am doing an advertising campaign and i want to be able to track not just how many people came to the site but once they came to the site what other pages did they go to and then they so what this is doing is it's automating a process that we're going to come back to it a second you can create these on your own but it's not super straightforward so we're going to do that in a second but before we do go back to your work sheet and i want you to finish four five six and seven now that we have done  there it almost it very often starts with a third party e mail blasts not always i'm going to show you a way to do this that's a little bit more intricate but i want you to not go there quite yet that the name in conversation this is where you start thinking through how do i want to name stuff if you send out a monthly email boss your structure could be pretty simple e mail blast june email boss to why if you're doing more complicated advertising you might have to do  search advertising display advertising and one of advertising so the nemean structure yeah that gets messy really fast i keep because i'm not always perfect doing it right as i go i always just keep chichi so i'll keep a cheat sheet next to my desk and it will say campaign title and then what is that this i use this because it was july and i was trying to do a b c or d so that i can look at it later with my team and we could figure out what we were talking about corner where you start to get a little wild take all while because you have to have a certain threshold like you have to have a certain amount of people before it will show up so yeah it could be it depends on how many people visit the site so it could be a couple days it could be a couple weeks but good yes so did anybody learn anything here awesome and then you can start to drill down is that display campaign that you're spending lots of money on doing anything and on that note of doing anything we're going to look next at behavior before we do that will take just like a five minute bathroom break ok so the bell's been wrong on words and upwards  to toggle and i'm going to do i'm going to switch the order of the n to modules because i i think that it will go better if we go in the different order so we're not going to talk about ed vance measurements you've got some of the basics down but you want to make a more complicated recipe you've got all that recipe book in your you're hoping to make the full a or something and i don't know i don't cook t m does the same thing and it allows us to do it mean your way so a lot of the time many times i should say a program a third party tools is doing this for us and we don't have to actively think about it which is manual way to do this and this is just a special u r l that once i build this u r l it'll get it'll show up in that campaign tab as whatever i wanted to be so what does that look like first of all we want to improve the tracking and overcome attribution imperfections we don't want to burn our toes and we want to get more specific that's ultimately why are using these so i might build one of these and use it just for my facebook at campaign or just for home builder sometimes i make things at night and i don't remember what i did so i don't remember doing that but exciting so that's a shortcut the tell lies magic u r l builder will take you here this is actually from raven tools google has one if you just google google u r l builder they have like their default i'm giving you this one because it's prettier and just a little bit easier to use they all do the same thing it's dot com well a mean page i would start by putting that u r l in here so if i were for example microsoft and i wanted to know how many people from this campaign that ends up on x box one are happening well this is where i would i would do it so maybe i'm curious about this page there's my you are up so your u r l is where are they going to twitter this is whatever this is going to remind me later where i was coming from i want this and this especially medium to kind of  match up with mail chimp right or excuse me google analytics to many third party tools in the world so i want to when i do source i can i can kind of do whatever i want but for a campaign me i'm i want to match c p c banner e mail think back to those categories we had campaign source campaign medium term content and name all of these different formal categories are going to build a u r l that is then going to show up inside a google analytics and when i'm looking at media if i use e mail i'm going to writ e mail and then not only will it show up under my campaign terms but remember all those different sections were e mails showed up it will show up there inside of who analytics as well so the point here is i can't just do this willy nilly i can but then it's not so useful i want to use the e mail if i had generic paid search i'm going to use c p see if it's social if it's display amynias banner and if it's other paid i'm it does have to be on the internet for the codes to work you could hypothetically you wouldn't do that it's i love that question because this thinking about offline tracking you all truly probably wouldn't do that because there's a better easier way to do it i could just say i want everyone that comes from the internet from the billboard to go to our website dot com slash billboard special now that's so that's why whenever you're looking at an ad campaign you often see you know oh a podcast or my favorite culprit of this visit us swears space dot com slush pod cast one seven three and then we'll get credit that same thing can work offline right if you only use that u r l offline then you can are really desperate to trap offline and another hypothetical i'll see people that and i hate this but it's been done people create like real estate agents will have a second website wink of traffic from that other u r l they'll know came from traditional marketing i hate it because it jeopardizes your entire brand it splits your identity it confuses people but i've seen it done i would suggest if you're trying to track off lying that you worry more about the categories already exist right so won't be were for all it will be organic and it will be direct if they are coming from offline they're going to probably come through those two channels really good question though so kind of flashback to this that's what we're accomplishing here and we're trying to get it to show up right inside of  i've i'm continuing to build my u r l up here i'm sending people i want to know exactly how many people go to my workshop page i've done facebook i've got the right code in campaign medium campaigning that's for me myself and i right that's where we need to email campaign july or whatever it might be for you a lot of you it was search five seven three whatever code you had and then this i can use to you if i want to i'm not going to talk much about these is also how i use them if i take one that says facebook and i copy and paste it on to twitter and linked in and my email all the sentence wasted right now you can also get like with any tracking you can get too carried once got really excited about the idea of doing this and i had one for facebook and one for twitter and one for our our third party website i had more data than was actually useful so just because you can track it doesn't mean you need to keep that in mind eyes i would suggest starting with specific campaigns like i'm going to do one this month that tracks my e mail another one that tracks my banner ads and another one that tracks my advertising on the grand rapids business another thing you could do with this after you build a google u r l is you can go to bitterly before i explain that how many of you have used have actively clicked on something that used to google u r l before that you're aware it's an unfair question because the answer is all of you have when you when you're shopping online or you're on pinterest or you click on something and the u r l bar flashes a really long thing all of a sudden and then it goes back to normal that was a google tracking co r l i know what that was if i wanted to i could take one of these and make it short with billy and why might i do that well there's not a million scenarios where i need to because usually i'm linking long u r l so i didn't watch it had to type in what's up there that's long so billy just says hey we're going to take something that's really long and we're going to make it short and that can be useful because when you generate a you are also is going to be pretty long down here right so i might go to billy with that and i might make it short again so i might say let's create a bit leland of that and then i'm going to say create and now i've got a very short version of that same u you don't have to do that that's an unnecessary step i like to do it because i like to have a cheat sheet of all my u r l's because i know i'm incredibly detail oriented and i want to know the exact l's that i use and i don't want to write them down in the traditional format so i'll make billy links of all of them and then i'll write down the billy links so that i can remember exactly what was what thing if you have a real thing or fake thing if you have a fake thing i just want you to leave here today knowing i know how to make one and it is big dot l y slash magic u it's a fair question so so i had a saying hey tim you're a great guy can you say that again what why are we doing this so this is kind of a recap google by default will give us a lot of information that it is assume right so let's it is assume what social media traffic it is it is assumed a lot of different things one way to get because of the fact that we can talk about what take that data with a grain of salt take that data with a grain of salt one way to get specific and to dig into things deeper is to use one of these when you're doing a specific marketing or advertising campaign and it will allow you to track that data with certainty and that group of users are visitors you'll be able to track them with certainty so if we think that to where this shows up so let's imagine i made this into a special r l and then looking at google analytics if i ran a facebook campaign with just that u r l and i spent a thousand dollars when my boss says why should i give you more money i can go in here and i could say well according to my campaign tab the people that came from just that campaign they did this they see it on the site for this song they'd bought these things they visited these pages so we're doing this because it allows us to drill down and get really specific was that sense kind of it's it's it's hard to hard to grasp especially if you're just getting into ga so you've got that u r l right you maybe you just got a really long messy u r l when you're building your facebook ad or you're putting a display ad out or e or doing some sort of marketing that really meant to be a campaign you're going to use just that u r l and then you're going to be able to track all those people that are coming from that campaign another way to think of this is i took a special phone number for my at magazine ad and i put it just on that magazine ad and anyone who calls they end up at the same office that everyone else ted but i know they came from that magazine but so you realistically you might have just one of these you might have three of them you might have none of them but you want to least know what they are and how to make them and if you're using if anyone is being paid to do advertisements and you don't have one of these you should talk to th to my website from this one tweet so this is a bit early for a special u r l and let's imagine it shows up as a mary special tweet now i know exactly how many people came because of that one post on twitter maybe i paid mary one hundred dollars to send this out and i want to know what did i get out of it or maybe she was a volunteer and i want to know was it worth it so you can get to details you can have a hundred it isn't spend all your time looking at them and learn nothing you only want to use this tool on extend on links out somewhere that you don't don't go back to your site and say all this is exciting and then change a link on your home page so that it's using one of these you don't use these on your site you don't make a link on your site that is one of these that will break the internet the internet will be confused next we're going to talk about goal schools or something that everyone should have arguably so what are your goals what does that mean and how do you set them up so we're going to use these to get a high level view of what's working and what isn't working and we're also going to use them because it'll help us measure really specific stuff which is exciting so our goal in its most basic definition is google's way of saying what do you  t to track what behavior or actions do you want to trap what do you want people to do when they get to your website so a couple of examples of a goal that you might have one of my goals could be really broad it could just be i want people to visit this page so for us if we were to draw out our sales funnel at the very top of our sales funnel is the this start small page and we would say i hope that a certain amount of people visited that page that would be a goal it could also be a lot more detailed one of your goals might be how many people bought something how many people signed up for this work shop how many people registered for upcoming event how many people filled out a contact us form how many people requested a meeting you could have lots of different goals the easiest way or i think it's easiest way to create a goal inside of google analytics is to use what's called a u r l based goal whenever someone goes to that u r l we know that a goal has been accomplished and you have to think a little bit out of box to get here or a little bit out of the box what happens as soon as you submit a contact us page form you get a thank you right i want to get as far down that follower that path as i can arguably so i'm i'm pretty excited that you went to that contact us page but i'm more excited if you saw the thank you page why because you have filled it out you're actually coming right a thousand people could visit the contact us page but if only five fill it out that's what i'm more interested in what i care about so when you're thinking about goals you have to kind of decide well you have to decide a budget is what is it that you want people to do on your site and what ways can you go about deciding whether or not they've done it you can also create goals that are tiny on page so maybe i've decided that my goal is just to have people on my website for more than ten seconds and any time that that happens  them you did it you accomplish one of your goals so very briefly because time is short short thing what i want you to do is i want you to pick one page on your site that you think you want people to go to and want to give you a minute we're going to super fast pick one page on your website that you think you want people to go to and from there i want you to answer the question is there something specific that you want them to do on that page maybe you're writing a blog and you have a paragraph and then it says read more so you don't just want people to go to the blog page you don't just want them to click on the post you want them to click on read more because that indicates that they're going to read the whole thing you want to try to get down that path you guys are hard by kelsey page so you're most interested in the think the page because then his i filled out the contact us button but you could absolutely have a goal that was just going to the contact us page because maybe you want to answer the question how many people came and then all of the people that came how many people actually filled it out but you always my point being if you look at this graphic real quick i'm not interested in was he going to call you after the date i'm interested in did he call you did he call so that was a very morgan what's a goal for you sorry making history being go request a quote and what happens after i request a quote do i get a thank you page so hopefully you're right so by the way a good action separate all of you to do when you get home go fill out every single form on your website and find out what happens it's amazing if you think about it when we're we're looking at our sales funnel for a large portion of us our form in getting someone to fill it out as one of our top priorities it is amazing on a quick sidebar it is amazing how many times i fill out a form and nothing happens so i said there buying so how do i do this those are all good examples of goals how do i make goals there are a lot of different ways and different things that go into making goals so let's navigate over here all of these are going to show up under conversions so i've skipped behavior and now i'm under conversions and goals will show up they will also show up in all of your reports so some of you earlier you were looking at  campaign code or you were looking at how many women had come to your site and you were saying hey i've got a goal here that says that of the fifty women that came thirty of them completed a goal what does that mean it shows up everywhere and that is why it is so useful all of that other data becomes a lot more useful when i know what goals they were actually completing so in mine in the subsequent nothing too exciting how would i set these up i would go to admin and that's why we remember way back in the beginning where that was there's a little tab view that says goals i click on that and here i have three goals set up in this account i have whether or not they're recording and then it tells me from this view and many other views how many conversions i have a conversion just means that i complete that call i called into the alter did they sign up so you can go ahead in a second don't do it yet and you can explore how would you go about creating goals the most basic one and the one that we're talk about most a day is based on a you are out if they go to a u r l that i know they did what i wanted them to do so i could say well i'm going to this one i could just honestly i often just create my own but contact us is a great one custom is my favorite if you're using cust om all you have to do is give it a name and then you get to pick are we talking about a u r l a duration amount of pages per session or an event that we're going to come back to so don't think about that yet focus on destination or duration duration i could say remember how many seconds or minutes they spend on the site that would be an engagement goal i want to see how engaged they are destination is the easiest one by far so i might say contact us and then i might say destination and that it's going to ask me to put in the u r l so if the u r l i want them to go to is slash contact us that's where i put that in so whatever that happens who is going to say oh this is been done a you can tell it to you wanted to be case sensitive there's not usually a reason right off the bat why you would you can even assign a monetary value so that if you've decided every time someone contacts you it's worth one hundred dollars you can put that in year and inside of your reports later on not only will it say fifty people did that but a value of fifty thousand or five hundred or whatever it was happened because of those actions and your funnel we're going to come back to in a minute to there's a lot that goes into building is so i'm trim some of the extras and come back to them so what i want you to do again take just a minute or two and create a goal it doesn't have to be a real goal but i want you to to and then goal too is did they see the thank you page and then i might name it filled out and submitted contact form so i would have two different things that i could track so go create one so the buttons aren't working that's why you look up and smile when you succeed it will be like my signal morgan's doing a good job make sense obvious place for them to go gets more complicated yet so there are a lot of different levels of goals for the reason we started with just u r l's is because that's the five minute conversation everything else is a thirty minute conversation and  we're going to get too deep into that today but you can alternately track any of vent on your website with these tools i can track did they click on the read more button did they enlarge the picture of the cat i could find out anything i want to and i'm going to explain a little bit about that a second so you're thirty seconds your sixty seconds is up just because we want to keep cover and stuff but if you didn't go all the way through that's ok just kind of a least imagine what you are you might put here what a good goal could be  the final says do you want them to get there a specific way not all of you are going to to need this i don't usually bother with the final which is why i'm going to fly over it i don't actually always like the final but here's what this does and says i don't want them just to fill out the contact us form i want them to come to that action through a specific pathway so first i want them to visit the home page then i want them to download the white paper then i want them to contact us if they go out of order i don't want to know about it i just i want to know exactly who did it the right way i don't like that because people aren't that predictable and things aren't usually that linea i would rather just know that it was done and not always so concerned about they do it the way i thought they did but you can imagine if you just invested a ton of money into a site that is supposed to drive people down a specific stairway that you want to know did they go in that direction so that's what that is i'm just going to leave that off maybe i'll sign a value maybe i won't and then i would just sit save so these are my goals that are based on  duration they are pretty nod your head no if you disagree they're pretty straightforward right we're just asking google to tell us where people went on the site there those ones are fairly straightforward what about ones that aren't so straightforward so there's also all whole bunch of goals that google will call smart goals so if you go into your account you may see a bunch of things that are smart goals for these more basic goals  e just automatically decides hey that looks like a contact us page we're going to make that a goal for you so you may have a whole bunch of different smart goals depending on who you are so what about people who want to get more details you asked how can i track how many people clicked on read more we're not going to get into google target manager today because it is another week if you think you're overwhelmed and tired  that would really push over the edge but google tag manager says oh you are elves aren't good enough for you you want to get really detailed well google tag manager can make that happen i'll just show it to you briefly again this is intended to simply is a fly over this is using conjunction with google u r l or excuse me google analytics and what it does is it is another line of code it's another script you install on your site that makes it really easy to track specific tags on your page so in one thousand nine hundred five if i wanted to know do they click on the read more link through google analytics i had to get a developer involved and i had to do a bunch of special stuff now all i need to do is use tag manager i don't have to install a bunch of code on my site i don't have to get a developer involved too often and i can track anything i want so in this scenario i'm tracking an incredible level of detail because it's a large campaign i want to know how many people clicked on read more how many people watched the video how many people clicked on the  by now how many people clicked on the demo video i want to know things that are are less related to u r l s people visited and more related to what they did on the pages and those things are more complicated if you kind of think of that as that's that's the double diamond hill on the ski hill it's valuable but it's more complicated to do this you are either a going to be a an awesome learner and train yourself or be are going  call developer to to get some of this happening i am pretty well versed in a lot of this but about fifty percent of the time i'm working with my developer to do it and i would know how to do without that person so this is where you might have to find a freelancer or watch a lot of you tube videos or just decide not necessary and let's be honest it's not necessary for everyone great it's not necessary to go this deep with everyone but you can imagine that if you're spending ten thousand dollars a month you want to know more then what pages do they go to and do they fill out a contact for you're going to want to get a lot more detail than that so that's the fly over look at an entirely different tool that connects to google analytics that you can go play with later so three takeaways here using these u t m and using goals can be really powerful  it's worth it if you do nothing else when you go home at least just make a goal maybe got lost in the u t m that's ok but we still make a goal think about it every month when you go back to your team you could say our goal was to have people visit this page and thirty people dead it or our goal was to have people contact us and eighty people did it i will also tell you right away that these don't always work the way you wanted them to you got to test it refine it make sure it's working test it again test it test it test it just like all things in marketing this is not just plug and play don't just type it in and oh it's working now you're going to type in the goal and then you're going to have five people submit the contact form from other computers and you're going to make sure it showed up as a goal completion and number three is just a reality depending on your skill level and your ability at teaching yourself random things you may have to call developer of some so we're going to come back to emerald is a good looking guy those are and where it said it said i'm going right to protests i'm going to go back to our action girl would she go  e with me were common to many slides in there we go so whenever you're doing this just be careful as a quick disclaimer don't compare data pieces that don't make sense like don't compare apples to oranges and be surprised that there are not working together that is just the reality of everything that we're doing so i want you to focus on trends and not luc really easy they're your first or second time in google analytics to get into google ago we had a spike on the third of november wonder what it was and twenty five minutes later you forgot what you were doing that day and you're researching to figure out what you did on the twenty fifth of november that's a fluctuation right if you invest in the stock market year mester tells you hey i know that that is going down again but we're focused on the long haul right you want to  focus on a trend not a fluctuation and make sure whoever's looking at it with you your boss is doing the same they're offering it and get caught up on what was that about that is why i often don't present someone as is unless they want me to often create my own report so make it pretty all make sure it's specific because it's really easy for someone and a high level world to go i don't know i forgot what you were talking about but what's that doing right why was there a down so make sure you you always consider the value of using google tag manager and using events if you kind of do a flashback this is where those show up so i've got some people calling me i have it  in this example so that if you click on a phone number anywhere on the site it fires a special event and i can pull up from google analytics and say twenty five people clicked on the phone number or whatever it might be and i mark that as a flashback because i want you to remember everything is connected what is happening over here is going to matter over here to here's a little tool that we use that i love it's called c y f e cipher i don't make these names up there's a million versions of these but the idea here is to to perhaps subscribe to a paid tool that tastes cool analytics and automatically helps make it prettier so we like to build client dashboards so that someone can instantly pull up and see the key components of google analytics without getting lost inside of google analytics now you can run a custom report absolutely you can play around with that feature but i often will just go to a third party tool  because i don't want to overwhelm someone or more importantly i want them to pull the high level data out really quickly so i have just a dashboard that all the only thing it displays is my goals how many people visited the site how many people were to the contact us page and how many people filled it up so no one's getting distracted by the other information that maybe isn't important so saif is i think they have like a ten dollars a month plan i mean it's pretty it's pretty inexpensive look at how people interact with your site consider a heat napkin tool there's a million of them out there hot jars is one of my favorites and what this does is it literally makes a heat map of where people's mouse goes on your site how does it do it magic i'm not sure but you'll be able to look at not just what they clicked but what they thought about clicking so now we don't even need to worry about today could the read more button because we can see did they bother scrolling down to the end of the post or did they just stay at the top of the page a lot of this and i'll pull up their site just refly because it'll be easier to see a lot of the the information you see here at first will probably be not too surprising right you're not to be surprised if they spend a lot of time hovering on your buttons and things like that but a lot of it then once you dive down becomes a lot more informational so the other than i like about this if you're thinking through like how can we improve our site hot jar will allow you to record visitors of your site so you'll be able to look at fifty people came last week what did they do what was the page that they they spent the most time m around on and again this data are you some of the you can get right from google analytics if you're looking at it correctly but there is a different layer here that that is interesting and i will often put this on a site for a couple  months before we redesign it this because it's useful for before we allow somebody else redesign ok so i'm going to wrap up with just a quick look at behavior so don't fall asleep we've got got eight more minutes in you that's all i require and i want to end with behavior it's going to be shorter because there's there's less to talk about here and by now you've been empowered with the tools to kind of play around with things and learn on your own but behavior just the simple question what are people doing on your site now you'll notice already we've been able to answer that through some other sections too but those will be a viewer is really focused on so under behavior on the right hand or excuse me on the left hand side i've got behavior flows like content what that chart is telling me is how do people navigate through my site what pages they start with and then what page did they go to and then what page should they go to and what did they do there so here i am under behavior among their behavior flow in this example the data is a little bit limited but i can see they started out the lane in page and then they went to another page these are the different pages they landed up so they went from landing page one to back to home they went from landing page to back to this page and so forth so those pages they then visit the other pages and you got a truck up here for those of your use of the test account  this example so they went from the facebook workshop page back to the home page or they went from the home page down to the facebook workshop page this is a visual way to look at some of the things we're already looking are they and this is what i can learn things like i thought they were going to go from the home page to our survey or our free assessment and almost everyone that went to the free assessment page not only did they leave it but they all went to the info graphic page so maybe i should focus over there more or maybe assessment page is just not very nice maybe i need to fix it so when you're looking at this view there will be a red little waterfall and that's a sad little waterfall that means dropoffs this is really interesting and and telling because now i can look at this and i could say well thirty one people went to my start small page and then this many people dropped off of that page they did drop off and go to another page they just looked at it and said by now again for the eighty a time i'll say i have to take that with a grain of salt because after you've looked at that page on my site you are arguably done you've looked at it you've decided that's what you're going to do you're going to go talk to someone about it before giving me a call so the fact that you dropped off isn't necessarily bad but if this were your blog posts and you were really hoping that people were going to click the action button at the bottom that said sign up for our free trial and everyone drops off who it's not converting people they're not doing what i want them to and i think we looked at that earlier saw skip that so we're not going to do this just because i want to want to be able to keep you on schedule but here's an aside for when you go home look at this and draw out your user journey is your si are people going to the right pages that you would think they would go to and are those pages working there so i might use this to find out that three thousand people go to my  leaning page fifty of them go and download the white paper or read the white paper but everybody falls off of that and then i have to decide does that mean that they're contacting me that i succeed or does that mean that my white paper stinks and then nobody cares about it or does my blog or state there's nobody caring about it and those of course are hard questions to answer but this is where data gets so exciting for me because in marketing we spend all of this time driving people to our house and we rarely it seems stop to ask the question what are they doing once we get them in the door they've you built it and they will come is not acceptable takeaways here and i know that was very brief there's a lot more that you can do in the behavior section but i want to highlight just the things that i think are are high level so there's a ton of data not all that actually matter one of the challenges of the goulet today says there's so much data you have to start to decide what matters to you you can dive into more details here just like everywhere else by clicking through the link train so i could have clicked on the  page that i ended up with on after going to the home page and then i could have found out what was going on there were those among mostly males really mostly females so that idea of it all connects carries all the way down to this section all the things i learned about the other sections are going to show up here you look at it once a month that's better than nothing is better than you were doing before this doesn't do any good if you don't look at it right all of the information that we talked about this is the r l you need to write down i will not email it to you it is symposia labs dot com slash google one zero one type that interior you are all bar write it down on your paper that is where all those links will be an entire copy of this presentation will be there too so if there's a part i want to quickly on or you missed you can grab it there just slash google one o one and all be able to tell with google analytics how many people went there if they were mostly men or women and how old they were if i decided to look which i won't so i really appreciate you guys coming  hopefully this was helpful it's a lot of information i will suggest to you as an action step that you if you want to get deeper go to lynda dot com lynda dot com which i don't make any commission from advertising is wonderful they are own now by linked in and they have like a three hour version of what i just did that would be focused just on each section so i say three hour i guess i mean like ten hours of learning probably and i had to do is go to lynda dot come if you're a library member i think you can access it for free for most libraries or you can just sign up for a free trial and be dutch or you can just subscribe it's not too expensive and they have lots of other goodies but if you type in google analytics they've got these four so all sorts of information but i will from time to time update myself by listening to these as i drive to or i don't watch them but when a dot com honestly one of the best places they've got just awesome to tauriel is for ga and then last but not least i'll just invite all of you to drinks and digital  it's drinks digital dot com also on our site somewhere so this is just a free recurring event there's one in grand rapids and one in holland where well we're going to launch one in lansing soon as well and this is just a simple initiative to get people in digital marketing and social media whether you're a blogger a videographer or an advertiser in the same room share ideas have a conversation and learn from one another very informal the next one is thursday at the speakeasy lounge drinks and apps are covered with the first round it's covered so i appreciate you guys listening to me for three hours you guys have been great and i