I was a self-taught Google Analytics user. I thought I was getting by OK. But, since working with professional analysts, I’ve seen how my data wasn’t as complete or accurate as I thought I was. And with bad data, it’s easy to tell the wrong story. Now, I’m here to level you up, and share best practices for setting up your Google Analytics accounts. In this talk, we will: - provide recommendations on best practices for setting up your views, filters, and goals - explain the connection between users, sessions and pageviews - look at the power of Search Console for unlocking SEO insights - outline strategies for UTM link generation and recording - demystify (and devalue) bounce rates - show how to improve the accuracy of your referral traffic - point to how GTM can be used to unleash features like video tracking, heatmapping, and more - Demonstrate how you can debug GA tracking in real-time and more! Attendees will walk away with a handy and concise 3-page guide to take them from basecamp to summit. VIDEO: https://youtu.be/zklhTO0tLWs

1. Analytics 201
Drupal North 2019
Andrew Mallis
CEO
mallis@kalamuna.com | @andrew_mallis

2. 20% of the queries
on Google are voice
searches

3. 22% of voice queries are
for local content

4. 52% of all internet
traffic comes from
bots, while only 48%
comes from humans

5. About Kalamuna

6. We make
your mission
our mission

9. Based in Oakland

10. and Toronto

11. We share our knowledge
freely and actively in our
community of practice

13. We build community
as event organizers

15. We foster community
interactions founded in
meaning and service
#drupal4good

18. Why invest in analytics?

19. Understand how and
what to measure to
deliver better outcomes

20. Empower stakeholders
to control their destiny
with data-driven
decisions

21. Satisfy a desire to make
measurable
improvements to how
much good are we doing

22. Logging to GA does not
make me an analyst

23. Vadim Tchernine
Senior Analyst

24. Examples

25. Click, move, scroll Heat Maps

26. Session recording

27. Page Analytics (plugin)

28. Geocoded density map

29. User Surveys
How often do you visit the website?

30. Live Data Dashboards

31. Analytics help you understand what
works and what doesn’t, so you can
adjust your approach to your
audience and have a greater impact.

32. 101

33. Analytics is the discovery,
interpretation, and communication
of meaningful patterns in data.

34. Digital analytics encompasses the
collection, measurement, analysis,
visualisation and interpretation of
digital data illustrating user
behaviour on websites, mobile sites
and mobile applications.

35. Why do you have a
website?

36. 102

37. Users, Sessions, Pageviews

38. https://databox.com/basic-google-analytics-concepts-explained-visiting-shopping-mall

40. Understanding time on your site
■ The quality of your content can be measured using several metrics.
One of them is time spent on site.
■ The longer you’re in the mall, the more likely you are to buy more stuff

41. 201

42. Session
■ Begins when user visits a page with the tracking code
■ Each session is unique to a browser on a device
■ Typically ENDS after 30 minutes of inactivity
■ If visiting the site once an hour, a new session starts each time.
■ Google Analytics has no way to measure duration for the last page
visited within the session

43. Session Duration
Looks at the total time spent across the entire session.
It includes exits on the last page, so it is considered a less
reliable metric since the last page will always have a value of 0.

44. Sessions only demonstrate traffic to
your site, but not user intent once
they’ve reached it.
Goals in GA help measure campaign
success. You can either create them
yourself or import them from the
Solutions Gallery.

45. Goals

46. Goals

47. Funnel Visualization

48. Enhanced eCommerce Reports

49. Segment
Customizable subsets of visitors based on user, session, or page info.
■ Mobile Traffic
■ Single Session Users
■ Female users 35-44 in California
■ Users that performed a certain activity
■ Can be added to any report and work retroactively

50. Bounce Rate

51. Bounce Rate
■ A Bounce = a single page session
■ Bounce Rate is the the % of sessions that only saw 1 page
■ There is NO relationship to time spent
■ Sometimes visitors find what they want and Bounce. Success.
■ Most time-based metrics within GA, such as Average Session Duration,
only include users who DID NOT bounce. If your Bounce Rate is 70%,
that number is calculated using only 30% your overall traffic.

52. Data Collection

53. Views
■ Only Data from point of
creation forward
■ The default View is called
“All Website Data.”
ORGANIZATION

54. Create a Minimum of 3 Views for Every Property
The Master View is your working view. It’s where you apply many different filters and
modifications to get the most accurate and actionable data.
The Test View is where you test all of your filters first. Also where traffic from staging,
localhost and other non production environment can go.
The Raw Data View is untouched by filters that alter the data collection process for
safekeeping in case something goes wrong in your working view(s).

55. Filters
■ Use them to exclude your organization from
your traffic, to ensure you are only seeing
data on your real customers
■ Remove query parameters that are polluting
your reporting
■ Once data is filtered out, you can’t get it back

56. Site Search
Ensure that you have enabled site search in each of your
views. This the most specific information about user intent
you are likely to get.
Look for the parameter after the question mark.
https://www.yoursite.edu/en/search?query=best+program

57. Sending out emails and being active
on social media, but your main
source of traffic is Direct?
UTM parameters in your links help
Google Analytics understand where
traffic is coming from and what
campaign it belongs to.

58. UTM Parameters in URLs

59. UTM Hierarchy & Strategy

60. UTM Parameters
There are five primary dimensions under your control that can be used for slicing up the traffic data. Three are
required, while the other two are optional.
1. Campaign
The name of the campaign. Your campaign typically spans across multiple platforms, including offline.
2. Medium
The marketing medium, e.g., cpc, organic, email.
3. Source
The referrer of the visits, e.g., google, facebook, bing, nytimes.
4. Content - Optional
Allows us to add granularity to the audience or content, e.g., email #4, blue banner, male segment.
5. Term - Optional
Used for paid traffic only. Keyword when used for search ads. For other ad platforms, it is typically used for identifying the
audience or the level below the campaign. For example, the ad set in Facebook.

61. UTM Best Practices
■ Use a generator service or Google Sheet to standardize UTMs
■ All characters should be lowercase
■ No spaces between words – use dashes if necessary.
■ Do not use special characters, such as &.
■ Do not create manual Google Ad UTMs
■ For social channels, its best for medium to be the broad category and say “social”, with
source being the specific network. Email already follows this convention.
■ Keep naming convention and parameters used need to be consistent, even across different
traffic sources

62. Search Console
■ Connect Search Console (Webmaster
Tools) to Google Analytics to understand
Organic Search performance, improve
SEO, and identify broken links
■ Search Console keeps data for the last 16
months. As a result, SEO reports in
Analytics also include a maximum of 16
months of data.
■ Search Console data is always 48 hours
behind

63. “Other” Channel Group
Traffic shows up as “Other” when Google Analytics sees a UTM parameter but it has not been
setup as part of the Default Channel Group. If there is no UTM at all, traffic goes to Direct.

64. GTM

65. Google Tag Manager
■ Connect 3rd party tags (adwords, facebook, crazyegg, etc)
■ Enable/disable without code pushes (go, Marketers!)
■ Tags with GTM load asynchronously
■ UI to create Tags, Triggers, and Variables
■ Track types of clicks like email, outbound links, pdfs, etc
■ Add a dataLayer to customize data captured

66. Tags
■

67. GTM

69. analytics meets powerpoint

70. Live Data Dashboards

71. Connector Gall

72. 3rd party Connectors

73. Google Data Studio alternatives

74. Google Analytics alternatives

75. Learning More

76. Google Analytics Demo Account
analytics.google.com/
analytics/web/demoAccount

77. E-Commerce Demo - dataLayer Examples
enhancedecommerce.appspot.com

78. Free tips and tricks (with links)
bit.ly/ga-tips-9

79. Thank You!

80. Andrew Mallis, CEO
Twitter @andrew_mallis
LinkedIn /andrewmallis
Email mallis@kalamuna.com