Missing out crucial data by a cursory glance Google Analytics

A person examines the subjects he thinks he knows, he realizes that he does not know many things.

I attended CXL’s Google Analytics training last week, I realize in this course that I was missing a lot of things. For this reason, I wanted to prepare a Google Analytics article that contains very, very basic information. In this article, I will not provide information such as how to set up Google Analytics, only the basics.

I feel like we’re going back to prehistoric times. First, let’s start with what Google Analytics is. Let’s say you have a website and you want to learn about many topics such as what your users are doing on the site, which channels are more beneficial for you. A tool like Google Analytics is equipped to answer these questions.

By adding Google Analytics to your website, you can instantly see a lot of information, from how many people are on your site, to which page a visitor was on when he left your site.

As far as I’ve noticed, non-digital marketers look at Audience and Behaviour in Google Analytics and don’t pay that much attention to the remaining areas. This is actually a big problem, because most of the things you don’t pay attention to may actually contain very valuable information. I will talk about the problems you may experience if you look at Google Analytics blindly and some things you cannot measure.

Since each platform can only measure its own data, it may not provide correct information on the “conversion” side. For example, when someone you bring to your site with Facebook Ads buys your product with your remarketing campaign on Google 4 days later, Facebook counts it as a Facebook conversion. You too, relying on this data, think that your Facebook efforts lead to more conversions. So what happens if you look at the Acquisition -> All Traffic — Source/Medium section via Google Analytics? You’ll see that the conversion comes from Google, not Facebook. Of course, this is an example, because of the funnel you have established, Facebook has a big role here, but the real sale does not come from it, you should consider this.

Bounce rate?

When it comes to the internet site, bounce rate is a hot topic. If numbers are not evaluated in their context, they can cause you to make erroneous inferences. When you get the “conversion” you want from a user, what harm can it do to leave the site with one click?

“What’s a good bounce rate? It doesn’t matter. The number itself doesn’t matter. And you’ll learn that, surprisingly, with Google Analytics, you’ll learn that the numbers don’t matter all that much, what matters is the truth is in the trend, the powers, and the pattern.”

Bounce rate — exit page

For example, you went to Behaviour -> Site content -> All page and saw the bounce rate, but there is also the “exit page” statistic here. Here you may be surprised to see that the bounce rate is higher than the exit page. The bounce here is valid in scenarios where “Entrance”, that is, that page is “landing page”. In other words, the user entered your site through that page and the bounce rate was calculated accordingly. The exit page is a number that has nothing to do with the landing page and is related to the general statistics of that page. So it’s about the user leaving the site while on that page. If you analyze the difference here without knowing it, you can probably make a wrong decision.

A huge storage

Google Analytics is actually a huge storage area. It stores what is happening on your site and you see which areas of this storage you want to see. Of course, Google Analytics does not store every data. For example, you cannot see where a user who comes to your site clicks based on mouse movements, and in which areas of your site there is more mouse movement. To do this, you need extra software such as Hotjar.

Meaningful

You can also use extra tools to make Google Analytics make the data more meaningful. The most well-known of these is Google Tag Manager. For example, Google Analytics does not show how many times a page has been scrolled. If you divide a page -for example- into 4 parts via Google Tag Manager and give Google Analytics a measurement command for each threshold when these thresholds are passed, you can find out whether a whole page of yours has been read.

A different example: With a simple operation you will do through Google Tag Manager, you can click on a link from your site and see which link the user went to a different site. If you are an affiliate business, this will be a system where you can check the statistics of the affiliate tool. Here, of course, it is necessary to take into account the “bounce” issue. Because every user who clicks on a link that goes out of your site may not open that link in a healthy way.

Now let’s go back to those who only looked at a few places in Google Analytics and briefly describe the menu on the left.

Even if you do not make any adjustments when you enter Google Analytics, the main topics you will see are as follows: Realtime, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, Conversions. You can use these areas for different purposes, depending on the purpose and function of your website.

The realtime area gives you the opportunity to see what your users are doing on the site at that moment. You can see many things from this area, such as from which region a user on your site entered your site, where he found your site. This is one of the simplest areas of Google Analytics.

Markets you should work with companies from

Audience section shows who is a user coming to your site. The menu here is also quite simple, but I should mention what you will miss if you say “this place is simple” and don’t look at it in detail. In the Audience -> Interests section, you can see which sectors the users entering your site are interested in. For example, you are a game site and in the “affinity category” menu, you see that people who are interested in the series and movie category enter your site, and your “conversion” rates are much better than other categories. In order to increase the numbers here, you can work with sites that produce content in the series, movie category, social media accounts and attract more people from this category to your site.

The best channel to transaction

The Acquisition section allows you to measure which channels work best for you. Here you can see where a user who has passed the step you have set as “conversion” on your site came to your site. For example, if you go to Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Source/Medium and rank for example “Transaction”, you can see which channel has the most sales. Based on this data, you can increase your campaigns in that area.

In the Acquisition section, you will also see the Google Ads and Search Console sections. You can link your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts to see your ads through Google Analytics. In addition, you should make a Search Console connection to see which keywords a user comes to your site by searching for which keywords on Google.

Finally, let’s look at the Behavior. Behavior analyzes what your users are doing on your site. Here, too, I should mention a mistake you can make if you analyze by just browsing. After seeing how many clicks on each page, definitely look at the Landing Page and Exit Page areas. As a user navigates your site, you can earn more money from Adsense or if you have a connection with any publisher network. If the user who comes to your site with a search from Google leaves after getting the information from that page, it will prevent you from increasing your income. Therefore, you can analyze your pages with both landing and exit pages and optimize those pages.

This week, I’ve been explaining what’s in danger of missing out crucial data by cursory glance Google Analytics. I want to learn more about data and write more. See you!