Google analytics, Metrics and Dimensions

                                                     

                                                          GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you track your digital marketing effectiveness. That's why over 50 million websites around the world uses Google Analytics. If you are not using it, you should set it up right now

·         Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a web analytics platform that monitors website traffic, behaviors and conversions. The platform tracks page views, unique visitors, bounce rates, referral Uniform Resource Locators, average time on-site, page abandonment, new vs. returning visitors and demographic data.

.Google Analytics also lets you see what percentage of your traffic came from search engines, and this is further broken down into organic and paid search.

Organic search shows the users who came to your site by clicking on the organic links on the search engine results page (SERP); these results appear below that adverts and are determined by how well the page is optimized for search engines.

The paid search results show users who clicked on one of your paid search engine adverts; these typically appear at the top and side of the SERPs and are managed via an advertising account such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads.

.Google Analytics is a powerful tool which provides actionable data that can help you to make decisions about marketing your website. However, while the data may be easy to get hold of, that doesn’t make it easy to interpret and use, especially for new comers. To help beginners here is the compiled brief glossary of the key terms you may come across when navigating through Google Analytics.

Google Analytics puts several lines of tracking code into the code of your website. The code records various activities of your users when they visit your website, along with the attributes (such as age, gender, interests) of those users. It then sends all that information to the GA (Google Analytics) server once the user exits your website.

Next, Google Analytics aggregates the data collected from your website in multiple ways, primarily by four levels:

1. User level (related to actions by each user)

2. Session level (each individual visit)

3. Pageview level (each individual page visited)

4. Event level (button clicks, video views, etc)

 

 

METRICS AND DIMENSIONS

Every report in Analytics is made up of dimensions and metrics.

Dimensions are attributes of your data. For example, the dimension City indicates the city, for example, "Paris" or "New York", from which a session originates. The dimension Page indicates the URL of a page that is viewed.

Metrics are quantitative measurements. The metric Sessions is the total number of sessions. The metric Pages/Session is the average number of pages viewed per session.

The tables in most Analytics reports organize dimension values into rows, and metrics into columns. For example, this table shows one dimension (City) and two metrics (Sessions and Pages/Session).

DIMENSION	METRIC	METRIC
City	Sessions	Pages/Session
San Francisco	5,000	3.74
Berlin	4,000	4.55

In most Analytics reports, you can change the dimension and/or add a secondary dimension. For example, adding Browser as a secondary dimension to the above table would result in the following:

DIMENSION	DIMENSION	METRIC	METRIC
City	Browser	Sessions	Pages/Session
San Francisco	Chrome	3,000	3.5
San Francisco	Firefox	2,000	4.1
Berlin	Chrome	2,000	5.5
Berlin	Safari	1,000	2.5
Berlin	Firefox	1,000	4.7

Valid dimension-metric combinations

Not every metric can be combined with every dimension. Each dimension and metric has a scope: user-level, session-level, or hit-level. In most cases, it only makes sense to combine dimensions and metrics that share the same scope. For example, Sessions is a session-based metric so it can only be used with session-level dimensions like Source or City. It would not be logical to combine Sessions with a hit-level dimension like Page.

For a list of the valid dimension-metric pairs, use the Dimensions and Metrics Reference.

How metrics are calculated

In Analytics, user metrics are calculated in two basic ways:

• As overview totals
  where the metric is displayed as a summary statistic for your entire site, such as bounce rate or total pageviews.

• In association with one or more reporting dimensions
  where the metric value is qualified by selected dimension(s).

The following diagram illustrates these two types of calculations with a simple example. On the left side, user data is calculated as an overview metric, while the same data is calculated via the New User dimension on the right side.

In the Overview Report example, calculations for time on site are computed using the time difference between each user's Using this model, the search terms attributed to Goal 1 and the transactions are:

• Shoes—$20

• Flowers—$25

In this model, transactions or goals are attributed to the search term immediately preceding the goal or transaction.