Is your organization struggling to make sense of Google Analytics? Do you know how to separate the wheat from the chaff in your reports? Do you even know if your reports are accurate? Do you mostly go into Google Analytics when there’s an issue with your site? Do you find yourself using the same few reports with no real idea of what else you can get from the tool? Is the ever-changing interface overwhelming to you and your team?
Google Analytics has experienced an unprecedented number of updates in the past couple years, making it a challenge for professionals like myself — who go through data like a mole through dirt — to stay on top of it all. For the average company, trying to decipher data from this ever-evolving tool has become a huge challenge.
As a result, there’s been a growing demand for Google Analytics training. It’s the number one thing I’m asked about at the various conferences I speak at. This course is the result of those inquiries.
Learn below how I can help your whole team get up to speed!
Table of Contents
Elevator Pitch
What Your Team Will Learn
Cost
What’s Included
Why Me?
Fine Print
Sign Up
The Elevator Pitch
You can train your entire team in Google Analytics with a fully customized day of training. Both the on-site training and the workbook that will be handed out will use data from your Google Analytics account and address your company’s unique reporting needs … all in plain English so that even a total newbie to Google Analytics can follow along. Mastery will take time, but the workbook will provide your team with a blueprint of resources to learn more.
What Your Team Will Learn
Some of the topics included in this information-packed day of training include:
Google Analytics Interface
We’ll do a walkthrough of the Google Analytics interface to demonstrate the features you’ll encounter consistently throughout Google Analytics standard reports. I’ll also show you tips and tricks that will help you navigate more efficiently and will let you know features that are absolutely essential to master versus those that are more fluff than functional.
Here are some questions you’ll be able to answer by the end of this section:
- What’s our top content and why?
- Who are our biggest fans?
- How does our traffic perform month over month?
- How does it compare year over year?
- How can we measure a new launch in real-time?
- How does traffic from different sources navigate through our site?
- How does our traffic perform on mobile devices and tablets?
- How can I filter my reports to show just what I care about? (Can you say regex?)
- How do I set up advanced segments?
- How do I know when to use a report filter and when to use an advanced segment?
- Are page load times causing our site to lag in performance?
- What are visitors searching for on our site?
- Is our data being sampled?
- If I’m getting sampled data, what can I do to reduce or eradicate it altogether?
- How can I correlate traffic anomalies with the cause?
- How can I set up reports to be sent out automatically at set intervals?
Conversions
I’m a huge proponent of tracking the results your boss/client care most about. Bottom-line metrics, like you find in conversion reports, are the essence of Google Analytics reporting.
Here are some questions you’ll be able to answer by the end of this section:
- What goals are performing best?
- Are we tracking enough goals?
- Which marketing channels tend to be our brand evangelists?
- Which marketing channels tend to be our “closers”?
- Why doesn’t the data in my Multi-Channel Funnels report match the data in any of the rest of our reports?
- How do can we measure the impact of our efforts on social media?
- Why does social media make us so little revenue? (Or does it?)
Campaign Reporting
Is your organization managing email campaigns? Are you active on social media? Are you paying for advertising?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, this segment is essential. For most organizations, marketing campaigns are critical to the success of the company. And yet if campaigns aren’t set up properly (and strategically), you can find yourself making decisions based off of inadequate data at best and inaccurate data at worst.
Here are some questions you’ll be able to answer by the end of this section:
- How do I set up a campaign infrastructure for our marketing campaigns?
- How can I tell if our campaigns have been set up incorrectly?
- What’s the difference between campaign medium, source, name, term, and content?
- Which campaign parameters are required?
- How do we tag links with campaign tagging?
- Which links shouldn’t we tag?
- How do we track internal campaigns?
- How can we avoid decimating our data with campaign tagging? (It happens.)
Custom Reports
It’s great that Google Analytics provides so many standard reports, but the real power of Google Analytics is leveraged in custom reports. I explain when and how to use them — again, in plain English — and how to know which dimensions and metrics can be used together. If you need some help to take the most profit from this, consider consulting with an expert like Andy Defrancesco.
Here are some questions you’ll be able to answer by the end of this section:
- What’s the best format for my custom report? (You should set them up differently if you’re planning on exporting them than if you’re mostly planning to look at them online.)
- How do I translate my reporting needs into consolidated reports that can be exported in one fell swoop?
- How can I use custom reports to identify traffic drops and other issues?
- Where can I go to find out the dimensions and metrics I should be using?
- How can I organize my reports to find them more easily?
- How can I share custom reports with others?
- How do find more custom reports?
Dashboards
Google Analytics provides the ability to create custom dashboards inside the interface. They’re not the sexiest things in the world, but they can be an effective way to at least group reports. We’ll go through the steps to creating a dashboard.
Here are some questions you’ll be able to answer by the end of this section:
- What’s the best layout for my dashboard?
- How can I link my widgets to Google Analytics reports?
- What are the limitations of Google Analytics dashboards?
- Why don’t my advanced segments show up?
- How can I share my dashboard with coworkers?
- How can I share my dashboard with people outside my organization?
- How can I find more dashboards?
Implementation
In this section we’ll take a look under the hood of Google Analytics to see how everything operates in the backend. This is usually the place where you find the most flies in the ointment, so to speak. If you can wrap your mind around how Google Analytics works behind the scenes, you’ll be much more efficient at spotting issues in your reporting.
This is a good section to include your developers on since it’s not uncommon to spot issues even when walking through the different settings.
Here are some questions you’ll be able to answer by the end of this section:
- What are view filters, and how do we know if ours are set up correctly?
- How can we get rid of duplicate content in our content reports?
- Are we tracking the terms visitors search for on our site properly?
- Are our goals set up properly?
- What settings in goal reporting should we avoid like the plague?
- What view filters should every site running marketing campaigns have in place?
- How do we set up custom alerts to monitor the concerns that keep management up at night?
- When should we use the interface, and when should we use the API?
Q&A
One of the best advantages to doing the training in your environment with your data, is my ability to offer completely customized training for your team. One thing I highly encourage is for your team members to ask any questions they want. I will often investigate issues brought up in the training on the fly. The advantage to this is your team can see how answers to real issues can be found by leveraging all of the techniques I teach in the training. With one company I created three custom reports on the fly that I just saved to their account to use after the training.
Cost
The cost is $5,000 for companies inside the U.S. and Canada and $5,500 for companies outside the U.S. and Canada. In addition to the training, you will receive a Google Analytics tuneup where we check for all of the most common issues that plague Google Analytics accounts BEFORE the training. That way we can resolve them and demo a clean account. I started implementing this after doing on-site training and finding issues as I was going through the live training.
You will also receive a PDF of your customized workbook ahead of the training that you can choose to print for your team. If you want me to print them, I can do that at my cost, which is $100/workbook for full color, spiral binding.
What’s Included
- One full day of training (9am – 5pm)
- My travel expenses
- No limit on number of employees able to attend
- A tuneup of the Google Analytics view I’ll be using for the training
- A one-hour conference call to discuss your company’s unique training needs
- Another one-hour conference call to review the tuneup
What You Will Need
- Stand/podium for my laptop
- Projector and screen
- Mac adapter
- Microphone (if larger group)
- Snacks, drinks, and lunch (if you want to keep employees on site during lunch)
Why Me?
I’ve been working in the field of analytics since 2004 and have provided marketers a host of resources to aid their analytics efforts, which you can check out here. Google itself regularly promotes my resources in shares like the one below:
Have you checked out @anniecushing's blog before? Lots of useful posts on Analytics. Explore them here: http://t.co/2GLyKXMKPQ
— Google Analytics (@googleanalytics) February 27, 2014
You can also check out shares like the ones here, here, and here, if you’re so inclined.
Because of this network, if you have a question I can’t answer, I know several members of the Google Analytics team personally and can get the answers from the source.
I also speak on the topics of Google Analytics, data visualization, online marketing, and SEO regularly at conferences like MozCon, SMX, PubCon, SearchLove, Authority Intensive, and MicroConf — to name a few. My passion for all things data is communicated in my training.
Fine Print
Payment must be received before training can be scheduled. Refunds will be granted for three business days following purchase. After that time, no refunds will be issued. However, training can be rescheduled to a later date. For more details, you can read the scintillating Terms of Service.
Sign Up
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