Google Analytics - Working with Segments

Hi Learners,

While working with website data, it is essential to understand the value of your visitors. Your website visits should eventually convert into paying customers. Well, for that to happen, a clear understanding of your audience behaviour on the site is imperative.

What are Segments in Google Analytics?
Google Analytics allows webmasters to create something known as Audience "Segments" which splits your overall traffic data into sets of audiences you prefer to set for your website. Segments could be a user using mobile device from a specific country, or a male/female within the age group of 24-29, or simply the set of users who visited your site using Android devices. The list is only limited to your imagination and your understanding of business goals of your website.

How to create Segments in Google Analytics?
Setting up Segments is simple. Just follow through the steps below

1. From the admin section of your Analytics dashboard, select the preferred Property & View.

2. Click on "Segments" under Personal Tools & Assets & click on +New Segment button in Red box.

                               
3. Alternatively, you can also import segments by clicking on template gallery. These are already created by contributors of Google Analytics.

4.Start by giving your segment a definitive name and then selecting the parameters from the left side list to come as close as possible to track the visitor type you have in mind.

5.Once done, click on "Save" button and you should be able to see the goal in the list

Things to know while working with segments

• You can create a maximum of 1000 segments per property and 100 segments per view.
• Your segment will only show data from the time you created the segment (It generally takes a few hours to reflect in the reports)
• Creating segments can help in creating "Audiences" at a later stage.

Hope you found this post useful. Do let me know what you think of it. Leave your views in the comments box below & share this post to people who would like to learn more about Google Analytics.

Thanks for reading. Happy learning.

See you soon!

Mitul

Google Analytics - Setting Goals for your website

Hi Learners,

In our previous posts, we focussed on how to work around the Google Analytics account structure to suite your business needs, then we went through the steps of creating views & filters for your website. The next important setup for you as a marketer is setting up "Goals" on Google Analytics.

What are "Goals" in Google Analytics?

If you want visitors on your website to take certain important actions, like fill up a form, subscribe to a newsletter or interact with your Live Chat App on the website, you definitely want a way to keep track on how many visitors actually ended up meeting your website Goals. By setting up Google Analytics Goals, you are doing just that.

Steps to Setup Goals on Google Analytics

Step 1 - Visit Admin section on your GA dashboard and select the property.
Step 2 - From the View drop-down, choose the view you want to set the Goal for. Then click on Goals under that view.

Step 3 - Click on the Red button that says "+New Goal"

Step 4- Identify your Goal type (Revenue, Acquisition, Enquiry, Engagement) Analytics provides many options as templates under these headers. You can also choose to set up a "custom" Goal option to setup your own Goal. (In this case we want to see how many visitors spend more than 2 mins on our website.

Step 5 - Click on "continue" and give your goal a name (something that defines the nature of your Goal. For this goals its "2 mins +", Choose the Goal type from the list, in this case "duration" and hit continue.

Step 6 - Fill the goal details from the assigned toggle boxes to set the duration as 2 mins
Step 7 - Verify the Goal (Google gives you an estimate of goal performance, based on your past data.
Step 8 - Click on Save and Finish.

Goals are the cornerstone of data that you see on your website. You can create upto 20 Goals for every view in Google Analytics.

Hope the above steps were easy for you to follow. Do leave your comments and opinions on this blog. In our next blog we will learn about setting Audience segments that will help you understand your site audience better.

Happy learning.

Mitul

Google Analytics - Applying filters to a new website.

Hi Learners,

In my previous blog, we went through the Google Analytics structure and assigning permissions to work with your Google Analytics dashboard. Views can only be as good as the filters used to differentiate them. Working effectively with Views & filters sets the tone for collecting the right data set & eventually the right perspective to your website challenges.

As a proven practice its a great idea to have / create four levels of Views

1. Raw data View - which reflects ALL the data collected by Google Analytics without any segmentation.
2. Test View - This is created so you can test filters before applying to the final data for your website. This shows on the Real-time data
3. Master View - Typically the view you refer to for seeing the actual traffic behaviour on your website.
4. Custom Views - These could be any number of segmented views that you would like to independently see for your website. This was elaborately explained in the previous blog.

Working with Filters

Filters add dimensions to your data. Google Analytics allows you to work with loads of pre-defined and common filters to help you slice through your data within Views. This is typically the first step to distinguish your primary data set.

Excluding Internal IPs

Step 1 - Pick "Test View" from the View drop-down
Step 2 - Click on "Filters" to add filters to this view

Step 3 - Click on Red button which reads "+Filter"

Step 4 - Name filter as "Exclude Internal IP"
Step 5 - Click on "Filter Type" (ensure pre-defined is selected) and pick "Exclude" from the drop-down
Step 6 - From the Source / destination drop-down, select "IP address" & from the next drop-down select "That are equal to"
Step 7 - Add your device IP address in the box specified OR Google "what is my IP address", it will show your public IP in the search results. Copy - Paste your Public IP in the box provided.
Step 8  - Click Save

After completing the above process, you have only created the filter in your Test View (View created to test your filters & goals). To see if the filter is working fine, Follow the below steps

Step 1 - Click on the Home icon on your left main menu ensuring you are on the "Test View"
Step 2 - Click on "Real Time" and then "Overview" in the left menu
Step 3 - Look for the Traffic source, you should see the volume of traffic from your internal IP reducing over a period of 30 mins.

Once you have verified that the filter is working effectively, you can add this filter to your Master View. Follow the below steps to accomplish this.

Step 1 - Click on the Admin or the Setting wheel icon on your dashboard.
Step 2 - Select the Master View from the drop-down
Step 3 - Select "Filters" from the below options

Step 4 - Click on Red button which reads "+Filter"
Step 5 - Instead of clicking on "Create new filter", this time you click on "Apply existing filter"

Step 6 - A list of filters created by you will appear in the boxes after the selection. Pick the Filter with name "Exclude Internal IP" that you previously created in the Test View" and click on "Add"
Step 7 - Then click "Save" to include this filter in the Master view.

A few things to consider while creating filters...

• While creating multiple filters, the data will pass through in the order in which the first filter was created, then the next.
• Contradicting filters will yield incomplete data

This concludes the process of creating and applying filters to views.

Hope you enjoyed the blog. Do leave your questions in the comments section and be sure to share this blog with your friends and watsapp group.

Have a great year ahead.

Mitul