Google Analytics Tutorial with 10 questions

Picture the scene: you’ve opened up a new fashion retail outlet in the trendiest shopping center in town. You have spent a small fortune on advertising and branding. You have gone to great lengths to ensure that you’re stocking all of the prestigious brands. Come opening day, your store is inundated with visitors and potential customers.

And yet, you are hardly making any sales. Could it be because you have one cashier for every hundred customers? Or possibly it is the fact that the smell of your freshly painted walls chases customers away before they complete a purchase? While it can be difficult to isolate and track the factors affecting your revenue in this fictional store, if you move it online, you will have a wealth of resources available to assist you with tracking, analyzing, and optimizing your performance.

To a marketer, the internet offers more than just new avenues of creativity. By its very nature, it allows you to track each click to your site and through your site. It takes the guesswork out of pinpointing the successful elements of a campaign, and can show you very quickly what’s not working. It all comes down to knowing where to look, what to look for, and what to do with the information you find.

Key Data Analytics Terms

A/B test

Also known as a split test, it involves testing two versions of the same page or site to see which performs better.

Click path

The journey a user takes through a website.

Conversion

Completing an action or actions that the website wants the user to take. Usually a conversion results in revenue for the brand in some way. Conversions include signing up to a newsletter or purchasing a product.

Conversion funnel

A defined path that visitors should take to reach the final objective.

Cookie

A text file sent by a server to a web browser and then sent back unchanged by the browser each time it accesses that server. Cookies are used for authenticating, tracking, and maintaining specific information about users, such as site preferences or the contents of their electronic shopping carts.

Count

Raw figures captured for data analysis.

Event

A step a visitor takes in the conversion process.

Goal

The defined action that visitors should perform on a website, or the purpose of the website.

Heat map

A data visualization tool that shows levels of activity on a web page in different colors.

JavaScript

A popular scripting language. Also used in web analytics for page tagging.

Key performance indicator (KPI)

A metric that shows whether an objective is being achieved.

Log file

A text file created on the server each time a click takes place, capturing all activity on the website.

Metric

A defined unit of measurement.

Multivariate test

Testing combinations of versions of the website to see which combination performs better.

Objective

A desired outcome of a digital marketing campaign.

Page tag

A piece of JavaScript code embedded on a web page and executed by the browser.

Ratio

An interpretation of data captured, usually one metric divided by another.

Referrer

The URL that originally generated the request for the current page.

Segmentation

Filtering visitors into distinct groups based on characteristics in order to analyze visits.

Target

A specific numerical benchmark.

Visitor

An individual visiting a website that is not a search engine spider or a script.

Resources