Data driven marketing
If you run a website, you have probably already heard of data-driven marketing. In this discipline, data that is collected digitally is analyzed in order to draw conclusions about the use of a website, app or other digital product. The aim is to derive the right marketing measures to improve the digital product in order to achieve corporate goals. An example: You operate an informative website about your company and want to reach more new customers. You can use the data collected to split visitors to the website into new and returning visitors and analyze the behaviour of new visitors: Which pages are frequently visited, which are not? Where are there obstacles to first customer contact? And so on. Other examples will be mentioned in the course of this article.
Google Analytics has been on the market since 2005 and, unlike other analysis tools that existed at the time, is free of charge. Although there is a paid version (Google 360 Suite), you can also gain very good insights with the free version. Although Analytics is used a lot, we see time and again that website operators are overwhelmed by the wealth of information Analytics provides and the interpretation of the data. There is also often a lack of knowledge about suitable configurations. In this article, we would therefore like to show you 5 quick tips to help you work with Google Analytics.
Tip 1: Filter out internal company traffic
The internal company traffic that takes place through the interaction of your employees on the website distorts the traffic figures in your Analytics report. You can avoid this by creating a data view in which you exclude the IP address(es) of your company. You can create a new data view by clicking on "Administration" in your account and clicking on the "Select view" drop-down field in the "Data view" panel. There you will find the item "Create new data view".
In the next step, select whether it is a website or a mobile app. Then enter the name of the data view (in this case "Without internal traffic") and select the country for which this view should apply. Then click on "Create data view".
Then click on "Filter" in the data view panel and create a new filter. Assign a meaningful name such as "Exclude internal IP". The filter type is predefined. Select "Exclude", "Access via IP addresses" and "Are equal" or a regular expression. Then enter the IP address of your company or the regular expression.
Google has also written detailed instructions on this. If you are wondering why you should not filter all traffic for this property but create a separate data view for it, remember that filters are destructive and all data that does not pass the filter will be lost. Therefore, you should always keep a data view that collects all data without filters.
Use internal traffic for data driven marketing
Another interesting option here is to create a data view in which only internal traffic is counted. If your company website is to be used by your employees for their work (e.g. retrieving product information, customer support), you can see here how your employees interact with the website and check whether there are any usability problems because certain areas of the website are not being used at all. Fixing these problems can increase the effectiveness of your employees' work.
Tip 2: Exclude brand keywords
Large and well-known companies in particular have the problem that Internet users "search" for the company name via Google in order to reach the company's website. However, these "searches" should actually count as direct visits. This is why it is possible to exclude search terms for a property by going to "Administration" and clicking on "Exclude search terms" in the "Property" panel under "Tacking information" and then on "+ New search term".
All you have to do is enter the desired keyword and save it. You can exclude several keywords, e.g. also variants of the company name. You can find keywords in the Search Console or in tools such as SISTRIX that are searched for or for which your website ranks. You can also exclude the brand keywords listed there.
This filter means that all search queries on Google with this keyword no longer count as "organic traffic" but as"direct traffic". You should definitely create a new property for such filters at property level in order to be able to access unfiltered data.
Tip 3: Working with segments
Segments are data views for which one or more conditions apply, e.g. only female visitors or only sessions in which 3 pages were visited. In Google Analytics, you can create segments for the"scope" of "users", "sessions" or "hits". You can now use a segment to filter certain data. You can do this using so-called dimensions such as age and measurement values such as the age range 25-34. Other dimensions and associated measurement values would be the browser and Chrome or the device type and desktop. This allows you to filter visitors and sessions on your website quickly and easily. In your reports, you can add segments by clicking "Add segment" at the top.
Using system segments
There are already some ready-made segments such as "Organic access" or "Direct access". To display all predefined segments, click on "System" in the list on the left.
You can select up to 4 segments at the same time . Selected segments can be found by clicking on "Selected". This makes it easier to change segments. If you use individual segments frequently, we recommend marking them with an asterisk.
Create new segments
If you cannot answer your analysis question with the system segments, you also have the option of creating a new segment here. To do this, click on "+ NEW SEGMENT" at the top left. There are various filters that you can use to narrow down your visitor segment.
Here you can see an example of the demographic characteristic "Location" with the dimension "Continent" and the value "Europe". This shows on the right-hand side in the "Summary" that users located in Europe account for 70.41% of all users and 71.38% of all sessions for the selected time period. In the "Technology" section, for example, you will find dimensions such as operating system or browser, and in the e-commerce section you will find all the filters that are important for your online store. However, you can work even more granularly by clicking on "Conditions" on the left and entering one or more conditions there.
Here you can see that 38.34% of all users who use Windows bounce from the website. You could compare this with iOS or Linux and look for reasons if there are big differences. a third option is to segment by"sequences". This gives you only the data from the sessions in which the users have carried out the sequence of interactions you have defined.
Segments can also be saved so that they can be reused later. To do this, enter a segment name in the top left-hand corner and then click on "Save".
Importing segments
Google Analytics offers to share configurations. This includes user-defined segments, dimensions, measured values and even reports or dashboards. Of course, the data is not transferred, but replaced by your own data. This can save you a lot of time. To find all shared segments, click on "Import from gallery" at the top.
The pop-up that opens shows all available configurations. There are filters on the left to narrow down the results. If you like a result, click on it and then on "Import" at the top.
Then set the data views for which you want to make the configuration available and change the name if necessary.
In "Administration" you will find the segment in "Data views" --> "Segments". You can edit it there if necessary.
Tip 4: Working with secondary dimensions
A report in Google Analytics always consists of dimensions and measurement values. A simple example: The "Channel" acquisition report shows all channels through which visitors reached a website. With the secondary dimension "Source/Medium", you can then also see exactly where the visitors came from.
Secondary dimensions help you to carry out more granular analyses and understand user behavior even better. It is also interesting to know which devices and browsers your visitors use or whether a target page performs better via direct access than via organic traffic.
Tip 5: Understand user engagement with event tracking
Google Analytics "only" offers the basics of analysis and is in itself quite superficial. To really understand what the users of your website are doing, you should measure the interactions. This includes PDF downloads but also the use of your navigation. The easiest way to track events is with Google Tag Manager (GTM). Here you can create so-called tags, which are triggered by user interaction and then track this in Google Analytics. The particular advantage of this method is that you do not have to change the code of your website every time you want to track a new event. We have previously reported on the basics of the Google Tag Manager. In Analytics, you can find the report in "Behavior" in "Events". Here you can see all the tags created in GTM as events.
Meaningful events
Depending on the type of website you have, different events will be of interest to your company. There tends to be less interaction on purely informational sites than on store sites, which is why event tracking with GTM is particularly useful for such sites. Here are a few examples:
- Interaction with the navigation: Are certain elements not clicked at all?
- Interaction with the sidebar: Are certain areas uninteresting for visitors?
- Clicks on buttons or links: Could the call-to-action be improved or are links too invisible?
- Visits to special pages such as the contact page: How many of my visitors tend to want to get in touch?
- Scroll depth for blog articles: Particularly useful if your bounce rate is very high despite good content. Because if a user finds a page via the search engine and then does not visit another page, this counts as a bounce, without taking into account whether the user has read the page.
- Submission of forms: Are there any barriers to submitting forms, if applicable?
- Downloads: Are PDFs, for example, interesting for my target group?
- Playing and pausing videos: How do my visitors interact with my videos?
- Evaluation of articles: Measurable interaction
- etc.
However, there are also events that do not directly affect the user but can contribute to the technical optimization of the website. These include JavaScript errors, very long loading times or other events that lead to a poor user experience. They can be uncovered with analytics.
There will certainly be other events that are of interest to your company. Therefore, it's worth searching for "Google Tag Manager" and the event you're looking for in a search engine, as it may well be that someone has already written this tag and you can use it for your website, such as this article on tracking scroll depth.
We hope these 5 quick tips for working with Google Analytics will help you get even more out of your analytics!
