How to Collect Useful Data From Google Analytics

To create truly unique and seamless websites and online products for our users, we use Google Analytics and other analysis tools to identify key areas of focus for each specific client. Luckily it isn't difficult to collect data, using the latest version of Google Analytics. In fact having all the data is not even half the job. What's truly important is gathering the right kind of data and using it to our advantage.

Getting started

Before we can start collecting data, we need to set up Google Analytics. First step is to head over to Google Analytics and sign in with our account. If you have a Google Managed email address I recommend using that as the single account for managing all Google products that apply to your site.

Once you have your account set up with Google Analytics it is very easy to create an account. You will have to create a new account if you don't have one. Accounts in Google Analytics are like groups for organising your properties. Properties are sources for data collection. For example for a mobile app project, our property would be the mobile application and in case of websites, each website corresponds to a property in Analytics.

If you're unsure about all of this, the easiest way to get started is to create an account with your business' name and then a property with the same name. As soon as you're done, you should be greeted with the Analytics Dashboard.

The last piece to the puzzle is setting up reporting from within your property, e.g.: website or application. There are numerous ways to do this for all different types of use-cases, and I won't go over them within the scope of this post. If you'd rather a professional set all of this up for you, don't hesitate to contact us!

Explore user devices

One of the most distinct and perhaps important metrics in terms of making design and branding decisions is the Devices Overview. It is not only possible to ascertain what kind of device your users are controling while they're viewing your content, but also compare how each of your other metrics is performing between mobile desktop and tablet users. You can also find out about the browser your viewers are using. This information is more useful than you might think. Read on to find out why.

The above screenshot is of the Analytics page of a niche e-commerce setup that sells electric bicycle motors in Hungary, which I've set up a couple of years ago for a client. What we can observe is that while usually mobile traffic will contribute to a little over 50% of the traffic for most e-commerce setups, in the case of our example it stays a little below. Even at this stage the majority of traffic is new sessions, while user retention is above market average, which means that the business is growing nicely. Why do we get a lower than expected mobile device share and is this a bad thing? Well actually no. Turns out it depends on the market, or more specifically on the price of an average item in the shop. The higher the average price of the products, the less people trust their mobile devices with the purchase. Fun fact: we've been seeing a decrease in this tendency over the years, so the time of large purchases on mobile devices is approaching.

In another post I explore the advantages and disadvantages of device-oriented design methodologies. If you're enjoying this post so far, you'll love

Is Mobile First Important In 2021

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So why is it useful to know what browsers our users are using to visit our website? There are actually multiple reasons, both technical and practical.

1. Users visiting from in-app browsers (Android WebView, Safari in-app) have opened our website while using an application other than their browsers, for example: GMail, Messenger or other apps.
2. If a large majority of our users come from an older browser, some features may not work for them. We have to know this, so that we can test our websites in those browsers and figure out a way to either encourage them to switch to a newer browser, or let them know that their experience is degraded.
3. We can use Google Analytics data directly to tell our development tooling what browsers we should support. If this type of thing excites you, there is a post on it coming soon. Stay tuned!
4. Some browsers may allow us to further enhance user experience, like on Android Chrome and iOS Safari users may be able to add our website as an application on their home screens.

Identify traffic sources

Another very important metric is where our users are coming from when they visit our site. In the broader sense there are two types of traffic:

1. Organic Traffic - acquired via Google Search results (non-advertised), social media or direct links from other sources
2. Paid Traffic - users arrive via an advert that costs money to the business.

It is very important to keep a healthy amount of organic traffic flowing. The easiest way to keep price per customer down is by making the most of organic traffic. The method of making the website more appealing to search engines, which causes it to rank higher in search results is called Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. There are a lot of aspects to SEO that I can't cover in a couple of paragraphs. Google Analytics is one of the most useful tools to help verify that our website is optimised for search engines.

Organic traffic comes in all shapes and sizes. One of the most effective ways to gain organic views is to be ranked high on Google Search for your relevant search terms. Another great way to increase traffic to your site is from social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn. This type of traffic is also useful because the users from these avenues tend to stay longer on the website, so in general we can observe a lower bounce rate (a bounce is a user who visits a single page and then leaves without looking at other content) and longer average session duration (time spent on website before leaving).

Conversion

Speaking of paid traffic - at some point, most businesses decide to try running an ad campaign to lure in more visitors for their websites. It's easy to start paying for adverts without doing the proper preparations in order to measure the campaign's success. When you're spending money on something you must measure if it's worthwhile. This is called Return on Investment (often referred to as ROI). To measure ROI on ad campaigns, one must be able to measure conversions.

Setting up conversion measurement deserves its own blog post, but the general concept is that you can mark events in Google Analytics as conversions in the Conversion tab. You can also send any custom event to Google Analytics and tell it to mark it as a conversion. With that knowledge here's an example of how one would measure the success of a campaign.

1. Set up event for conversion
2. Create ad campaign
3. Upon visit, identify the visitor had arrived via your ad campaign
4. When the users does something that contributes to the goal of the compaign, send an event to Google Analytics
5. Check Conversions in Google Analytics Dashboard and compare it against the money spent on the campaign
6. Profit? Profit!

There are more involved scenarios too, like measuring returning customers and their spending across sessions, but that's a topic for another post.

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