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 report — Start 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 Funnels — assisted 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.