Digital analytics and key concepts - Google Analytics Tutorial

- [Instructor] What is digital analytics? Well, analytics is all about measuring your business goals, understanding your performance, and finding ways to optimize and improve that performance, and the critical part, here, is the idea of continuous improvement. We are not just here to look at pretty pie charts for the sake of fancy reports. We wanna do something about it. Digital analytics is also a process. We first perform the measurement, we apply analysis, and we learn from what we see, and then we take action. Our site is constantly changing, our marketing is changing, and the digital tools, themselves, are changing, and we need to make sure our analysis process doesn't become stale, but rather evolves and keeps up with those changes in order to ensure our site is always performing at its best. Now, before we jump right into the Google Analytics tool, it's important that we first go over some key definitions to know within the digital analytics sphere. Understanding these concepts will really give you a head start in knowing how to manipulate and interpret the data available to not only Google Analytics, but really any analytics tool. The first two concepts you're gonna be hearing about a lot in this course are metrics and dimensions. They even have their own video, where we walk through examples, but I want to introduce them, here, as a baseline. These two variables make up all of the data populated in the analytics reports. Now, metrics are the quantitative numbers that are measuring data in counts, ratios, percentages, and the like. Dimensions are the qualitative categories that describe the data in segments or breakouts. Now, when we think about digital analytics, it's pretty obvious we're talking about the relationship between us, the online business entity, and the consumer, who's visiting our site, mobile application, or whatever other digital experience we provide. When it comes to the basic concepts of a digital experience, the first step is getting those real-life individuals onto our site, and generating page views. A page view is quite literally a view on a page within our site. The number of page views acts as a count for every time a visitor loads that page. Once a user's viewing a page, they're free to interact with whatever content's on there that they please, we call these distinct actions hits. There are different types of hits we can measure in analytics. One is a page view. This is a page tracking hit as the visitors interact with the page simply by loading it. Another is an event tracking hit, which is made up of any general on-site activity you choose, such as clicking a button, or even scrolling down on a page. There are also eCommerce tracking hits that are specific for eCommerce events, like product clicks, or adding to a cart, or checking out. A group of hits within a given time frame make up a session. In Google Analytics, a session is whatever interactions that are taking place between when the visitor enters your site and when they exit. We used to call this a site visit. Now, and exit can either be where you hit the x on the browser, and you leave a site, or if the user doesn't interact with the site for 30 minutes, it will expire. So after 30 minutes of non-interaction, the session times out, and that's the end of the session. However, if a user leaves your site, but then returns within 30 minutes, they're still counted as part of that original session. Next, we have the user, and these are the people visiting your site. In Google Analytics, a user is specifically identified by a client ID. These are stored in browser cookies. Analytics is able to see multiple sessions from the same user if they return to your site on that same browser, that same devices, those will be multiple sessions, and of course, multiple hits, but all back to that same user. A group of users who share a similar dimension, or fall under the same category, can make up a segment. Segments can be divided by things like physical location, the type of device that's being used, the traffic source the user's coming from, basically any way that we can differentiate those users, we can create a segment for that. Now, this is also a really important concept to understand, so we're gonna discuss this in a dedicated video, later in the chapter. Now, I mentioned how analytics is all about measuring your business objectives. When a user completes an action you wanted them to take, we call that a conversion. This conversion data's sent over to Google, and you can look at those more closely to understand how the user behaving, and if they're behaving the way you want them to. Defining your goals, and what it means to convert, is unique to each business. A goal can be when a user completes one, or a set of, events, which we defined earlier as anything on the site, or on the page, like a button click. Now, if a user completes a purchase on your eCommerce Website, that specific event of completing the order, we can set that as a goal, and we can track that in Google Analytics. Now, where a user comes from is also important when you're considering your digital performance. We wanna know who's sending us our traffic, and this source is where the user traffic originated from, and the medium is the avenue that traffic took to get from the source to your site. For example, let's say a user was scrolling through Twitter, and clicked on a post that linked to your site. The source of the traffic would be Twitter, that's the who, and the medium they took was site was the social, that's the how. These sources and mediums are really relevant when we're thinking about how we acquire our visitors. We'll discuss this later on. And lastly, when a user enters your site, and they do end up converting, you probably wanna know where they came from, and what they did on the site to cause that conversion. Analytics defines this process as attribution, and it's all about assigning value to those touch points it took to get up to the conversion. With attribution, we can analyze which traffic sources deliver users that are more likely to reach our goals, and which parts of your sites can help in that goal completion. This is a really important topic to consider, and although we won't be going into super detail in this course, attribution is definitely a real buzzword in the analytics world, and something we wanna know about. All right. We went over these terms a bit quickly, but don't worry, it won't be the last time you'll be hearing about things like metrics and dimensions and segments. Even if you couldn't quite get the concept of, say, tracking events, here, we're gonna go over those in detail in a video, and I just want you to have the basic concept, here, so it's not a new term for you. And without further ado, let's jump in and start learning.