This lesson gets into some fundamentals for Google Analytics. There are many things we can do in GA (and we will discuss these in Lesson 3.3), but for now I just wanted to focus on 3 things that we all need to do right away to ensure success with Google Analytics.
What do we need to do right away?
- Send data to Google’s Servers
- Make sure our data is clean
- Define your success points
The first part requires you to have a Google Analytics account, so we walk through the signup process in our video. It also requires you to have an account structure. Remember that a Google Analytics account can have one to many web properties (unique domain names or apps you want to track) and each property can have multiple views.
We recommend always having one filtered view and one unfiltered.
Next, we talk about getting clean data for your website. The first fundamental is to make sure you don’t track yourself. You can block traffic from yourself and others from your organization by creating a filter to block internal IPs in Google Analytics. We will walk through this in our intermediate course.
Last, we need to defining website goals.
You should always start by asking the question:
What is the purpose of my website?
If you’re like most website owners, this could take all day!
Once you decide on the purpose of the website, break it down into the things that directly generate revenue (Macro Goals) and the positive activities that don’t directly produce revenue (Micro Goals).
You can have up to 20 goals in Google Analytics, and we will talk about how to set them in an upcoming lesson.
With these three fundamentals in place, we can now start to dream about the advanced analysis we can do.
Questions? Ask them below!