Lesson 1 of Google Analytics – Notes
I’ll be going through each and every YouTube video on the Conversion University channel writing notes down on here. It’ll help me remember what I need to know when I eventually do the test! 🙂 These are my current notes along with Conversion University’s video underneath for the first lesson:
Notes
What does Google Analytics do?
- Informed decisions to improve your site’s content
- Monitor conversions
- Measure keywords
- Ad performance
- Track a wide variety of metrics
- Revenue
- Average order value
- E-commerce conversion rates
Provides answers to difficult questions
- How are visitors using my site?
- How can I make my marketing campaigns more effective and accountable?
- Am I creating effective content?
- Where and why are visitors abandoning the shopping cart?
- How do I improve site interaction?
A few features
- Map Overlay
- Where is traffic coming from?
- AdWords integration
- Are PPC campaigns performing?
- Internal Site Search
- Tracking how people use search on your site
- Bench-marking
- Do your site’s metrics perform or not perform in comparison to the industry your site is in?
- Funnel Visualisation
- Optimise your checkout, view conversion rate and click-paths.
How it works
- When a visitor accesses a web page, a request is made to display the page. (POST & GET functions)
- Once the page is served the Google Analytics JavaScript code is activated. It calls the track_page_view method.
- The Google Analytics first-party cookies are read or written. Then the web page sends an invisible .gif containing that information to Google’s secure servers. That information is then captured and processed for use on the Google Analytics site. (Report data)
- Data is reported regularly throughout the day, so you’ll be able to see this data in your reports.
What will stop/change Analytics tracking system
- If people block first party cookies.
- If someone deletes their cookies they will be counted as a new visitor when they access the website again.
- If someone disables JavaScript then they won’t be tracked.
- If there is another JavaScript element being executed and it fails or causes an error to occur before the Google Analytics JavaScript code then the tracking code will not function and will then not track new visitors.
What won’t stop Analytics from tracking
- If people block third party cookies
- If people access your website via a cached page they will still be counted as a visitor so as long as they are connected to the internet.
Data confidentiality
- Google Analytics does not collect or report on personally identifiable information.
- Google does not share Analytics data with any 3rd parties.
- Google staff may access your data with your permission.
- You may elect to share data from your site to improve Google products and you also have the option to not allow any sharing of data with Google. You can also share data anonymously with Google.
- If you do not allow access to your data to Google then you will not be able to use the “Benchmarking” feature or other features.
- Google does not share this data with any third party entities.
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