Google Analytics

1-day SEO Training in Google Analytics for Beginners — SGA

Google Analytics Training Course Overview

This Google Analytics training course explains how to use Google's web analytics tool to analyse data about your web site's visitors and visits — to generate and evaluate useful information on site traffic, user behaviour, and marketing performance.

This basic google analytics course is focused primarily on beginners and those who are wrestling with the sheer complexity of the tool's configuration and user interfaces.

The course covers:

  • Basic setup, — e.g. account creation, report configuration and visualisation
  • Key reports and interfaces — audience, traffic sources, content, inteligence events
  • When and how to use specific reports to draw insights about points of interest
  • How to customise data tagging, capture, reporting to track campaigns and goals

Course contents — 1 Web Analytics vs. GA

  • Defining web analytics
  • Google is not the only fruitful analytics option
  • What data are worth counting?
  • How to generate information from data
  • Conversions — goals expressed as behavioural objectives, e.g.
    • A sale, or an enquiry — by web form, online chat, phone, etc.
  • Clear behavioural objectives should:
    • Direct/constrain all design and build decisions
    • Select which data are captured and how they are analysed
  • Nominal data and averages — beware
  • Segmentation — grouping users and actions
    • E.g. by location, platform, referrer, query, etc.
    • The first practical step in any analysis
  • Trends — typically, more important than absolute or average values
  • What is Google Analytics?
  • How does it work — technically
  • Opening and configuring a Google Analytics account
  • Installing and configuring Google's tracking code

Course contents — 2 Google Analytics Reports

  • Accounts and profile configuration
  • The Google Analytics dashboard — graphing/analyzing data over time
  • Customised dashboards
  • Selecting/comparing date ranges — day, week, month, previous period, previous year
  • Annotations — note making in your data
  • Help tools
  • Data views — overview, pie/bar/line graphs, tables, and comparisons
  • Conversions — Goals, Ecommerce, Funnels
  • Filters — selecting and sorting data
  • Shared accounts, data, reports
  • Managing accounts and profiles
  • Export data — PDF, XML, CSV, Excel, etc.
  • Email reports and alerts
  • Dimensions — for segmentation, grouping, slicing data

Course contents — 3 Audience Reports

  • Using Google's own data — for benchmarking
  • Segmentation by location — country, region, city and map overlays
  • New visitors vs. returning visitors
  • Segmentation by language
  • Comparing visits, visitors, pageviews
  • Engagement — pageview averages, length of visit, bounce rate
  • Visitor loyalty vs. recency
  • Segmentation by browser — and browser features
  • Segmentation by network, ISP, network speed, hostname, etc.
  • Mobile browsers vs. others — device, featues, touch input, screen resolution

Course contents — 4 Acquisition Reports

  • Understanding traffic sources — direct, referral, search, campaigns, etc.
  • The All Traffic Sources report
  • Referrals — users coming from other sites
  • The Search Traffic reports — organic vs. paid/PPC
  • The Direct Traffic report — bookmarks, typing URLs, etc.
  • The Search Engine Optimization reports — queries, landing pages, geography
  • The Social Media Reports — value, impact, referrals, landing pages, etc.
  • The Advertising Traffic reports — Google Adwords
  • Linking AdWords to Google Analytics
  • The Adwords Reports — Adwords campaigns, Adwords keywords, Matched Search Queries, Day Parts, Destination URLs, Adwords Placements, Keyword positions

Course contents — 5 Behaviour Reports

  • Overview of the Google Analytics Content Reports — Site content, speed, site search, events, Adsense, In-page analytics
  • The All Pages, Drilldown, Landing Pages and Exit reports
  • Sorting by URL vs. page title — including anatomy of a URL
  • Using drilldown to for sub-site sorting
  • Click path analysis — e.g. traffic sources, keywords and landing pages leading to one particular page
  • Identifying and interpreting top landing and top exit pages
  • Intelligence Events and alerts — getting Google to detact/flag-up unusual activity
  • Defining custom intelligence alerts
  • The Site Search reports — usage, search terms, pages
  • Analyzing the Search Terms report and the Site Search Category report
  • Using Site Search Pages reportStart Pages and Destination Pages
  • Site search configuration

Course contents — 6 Conversions & Tracking

  • Understanding the Goals reports
  • Configuring goals
  • Understanding funnels and funnel vizualization
  • The Ecommerce Reports
  • Connecting Google Analytics to Ecommerce data
  • Ecommerce and campaign tracking
  • Ecommerce and campaign tagging
  • Planning and building a tracking strategy
  • Multi-channel Funnelsassisted conversions, top conversion paths, time lag and path length

Course Objectives

On completion of this basic SEO training course, students will be able to:

  • Understand the importance of web metrics in SEO
  • Understand how Google Analytics works, incl. biases
  • Understand Google Analytics vis. other web metrics
  • Understand Google Analytics's default UI, tools and reports
  • Create custom reports in Google Analytics
  • Use Google Analytics to quantify SEO performance
  • Use Google Analytics to enhance SEO performance
  • Use Google Analytics to understand users better
  • Use Google Analytics to enhance site performance and usability
  • Use Google Analytics to cut promotion and development costs
  • Integrate Google Analytics with ecommerce data
  • Integrate Google Analytics with other web metrics

Target Audience

  • Web developers
  • Web marketing and communications managers
  • Web marketing and communications staff

Training Pre-requisites

The only prerequisite for this course is basic web literacy of the kind covered by our basic web design course

That said, some knowledge of search engine optimisation (taught on our basic SEO course) is likely to enrich the delegate's experience of taking the course. Since SEO provides a set of goals and actions for Google analytics to measure.

Training Style

In its public form, this course is instructor-led and discussion based, rather than hands-on practical. Hands-on work is simply impossible without access to a working Analytics account and a fairly comprehensive dataset.

Private configurations can be somewhat more hands-on, if delegates have full access to a Google Analytics account with a goood dataset, and we have sufficient time and permission to prepare work around that dataset. For obvious reasons, most companies are either unwilling or unable to provide such access.

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