Digital analytics Minidegree at CXL, Week 2
A journey in Google Analytics aka Universal Analytics
This week was dedicated to Google Analytics and I think this will be the same for those 2 to come. GA beginner level is the first episode of the trilogy: beginner — intermediate — advanced. This new CXL Institute course by Chris Mercer will teach to Start using Google Analytics data to improve product, marketing, and strategy decisions. As we are in may 2021, I must tell you that I’m not talking about GA4 but Universal Analytics.
Although GA4, the new version is already out, this course on the legacy version is still useful. It allows the learner to understand what GA is used for and the possibilities that are offered to a beginner analyst. Google has made it clear in these releases that this version remains fully active with all features and configurations but no more development. However, if you are just starting to use UA, I recommend that you use both the UA and GA4 tags.
INTRODUCTION TO GA
GA is part of Google Marketing Platform, the unified analytics and advertising platform of Google. It’s the most used free digital analytical tool in the world. To simplify the approach to GA, it was built and developed with the idea of providing reports to digital media owners. These reports are organized based on the AABC Funnel (Audience — Acquisition — Behavior — Conversion). As soon as you install GA in a website, you can see an influx of data in Realtime. Any website owner can then get an idea of the traffic.
GENERAL SETUP
At this step you can create an account, property(ies) and view(s). After creating the account and the property, you can add the tracking code in the header of the website. You can find recommendations on how to add this code on YouTube or in the official documentation of the system used to build the website (WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Squarespace …). If you use GA, you can have different type of basic report: Real-time reports, Source / Medium, Campaigns, Events, Goals, Multi-Channel Funnels (MFC)…
But, is it really intended to be used in this way? My post is not dedicated to a detailed presentation of GA, there are many very well-done articles on the subject. There are also tutorials on YouTube for those who prefer this method. They will give details of the user interface so that even the most inexperienced beginner can find his way around.
What my post will be about? By deep diving into the most used analytical tool in the world, I will instead address one of the activities that Google Analytics allows to do: tracking and measuring the impact of marketing campaigns. The beginner digital analyst can already set up this tracking system.
What do I mean by “tracking and measuring” the impact of marketing campaigns in GA?
When launching a marketing campaign, one would want to know where visitors and traffic to a page are coming from. This is done by transmitting information in a particular form to GA. The standard UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) is the tool designed for this purpose.
How to track and measure the impact of marketing campaigns in GA?
- Add UTM to campaign links
With UTM we add specific information to our business that will appear later in GA. It is therefore a very powerful tool for generating reports and especially for the analyses that will be done afterwards to assess the effectiveness of the campaigns.
There are several free builders to create these links. Without being exhaustive you can use:
- Google builder
- Urchin Builder
- EpikOne Link Tagging Tool
- …
To use those Builder, simply enter the URL of the site, then fill in each of the parameters (Campaign Name or utm_campaign, Campaign Source, utm_source, Campaign Medium, utm_medium, Campaign Term, utm_term, Campaign Content, utm_content) and click generate to get the link. If you manually generate those URLs, UTM parameters can be added in any order to them. - Use UTM link in messages and campaign configurations
You may now add the built links into the marketing campaigns. Care must be taken to use only the newly optimized links so that all data collected has the same weight when analysis is done. - When to use Google Analytics UTM tags?
Once the new URL with UTM parameters is created and the campaign is launched, you can check its proper functioning in the Realtime > Traffic Sources report; the data should be recorded by GA when the URL is clicked. Using UTM tags it is possible to track campaign performance beyond the click.
Generally, marketers know how to identify a referring traffic source in Google Analytics. However, tagging URLs using UTM code takes it to another level. It also allows you to isolate referring visitors into specific campaigns to understand their preferences and behaviors.
Tagging these URLs allows you to demonstrate the value of your online marketing campaigns and the traffic generated to your site.
With the medium campaign, you will easily identify the importance of a particular channel (e.g. email, social media, blog). This data will be even more accurate if you have previously defined precise Goals (will talk about this in another post) in Google Analytics. These also show the conversion statistics for each campaign.
You can use UTM parameters in the URLs you publish on social networks. The goal is to track the amount of traffic you receive for each of these posts. You can also use tags for URLs in newsletters, ads (SEA or banners), A/B testing…
Conclusion
In view of the above, GA is really a valuable tool to collect and analyze online data. You need to configure it properly because relying on default reports to make management decisions can be suicidal for any organization. In a professional point of view, default reports are just meant to verify that the tracking code is working.
As a junior digital analyst, I’m still learning GA and practicing at the same time. During the weeks to come, I will for sure mention many other uses of GA.
