Digital Analytics Fundamental Certificate

Awarded to Ranjan Jena

Completing any given Google AdWords Certification Exam, either Fundamental, Search, Display, Reporting or Google Analytics itself is always a proud moment to gain confidence on the subject & myself. Though been appearing for the Google AdWords exams regularly & also guiding my PPC students on, “How to prepare for the Google Adwords & Analytics Certification” from past few years, but appearing for the exam again and passing, is a moment to cherish, since every moment there are changes happening in Digital Marketing Industry.

 

If anyone interested to take this FREE Digital Analytics Fundamental Certification by Google, then here is link; https://analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com , which is in session through October 30, 2013 at 11:59 PDT.

 

Also below, I’ve shared important points around certain topics covered in Google Analytics Academic Course for everyone’s reference that could be remembered and used at time’s in your day-to-day Digital Marketing activities.

 

ANALYTICS ACADEMY

Digital Analytics, is the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from your business and the competition to drive a continual improvement of the online experience that your customers and potential customers have, which translates to your desired outcomes (both online and offline) – definition by Avinash Kaushik

 

The importance of Digital Analytics;

• Building Awareness -> Acquiring Interest -> Engaging with Potential Customers -> Driving them towards the conversion (online or offline) -> Retaining them as Customers
• Quantitative – Collecting Data
• Qualitative – Asking Why?
• One of the most important steps of Digital Analytics is determining, what your ultimate business objectives or outcomes are, and how you expect to measure those outcomes?
• It’s important to have a clear measurement strategy
• Essentially, analysis is the process of developing a hypothesis that reflects your expectations, and then figuring out, why the numbers do, or do not match those expectations?

 

Core Analysis & Techniques;

• Segmentation & Context are the two techniques that we believe are critical to good data analysis
• You can segment your data by date and time, device, marketing channels, geography, & customer characteristics (new & returning)
• Context helps you understand, if your performance is good or bad?
• There are two ways to set context: internally and externally

1. Externally context can come from Industry Benchmark data. This can help you understand, how you perform relative to other businesses similar to yours
2. Internally context helps you set expectations based on your own historical performance

 

Conversions & Conversion Attributions;

• Attribution is assigning credit for a conversion
• The most common type of attribution is called Last Click Attribution

 

Creating a Measurement Plan;

• Understand what the business objectives are?
• Strategies used to support those objectives
• Need someone, who understands what Google analytics can do?
• Need someone with technical skills, who can implement a Google Analytics tool?

 

Decide, What you need to Measure;

• Are we active on mobile?
• Are we using responsive design?
• 5 Steps in order to define your measurement plan;

Step-1: Document your business objectives

Step-2: Identify the strategy and tactics to support the objectives

Step-3: Choose the metrics that would be the KPI

Step-4: Decided, how you need to segment you Data?

Step-5: Choose what your targets would be for each of your KPIs?

 

Create your Implementation Plan;

• Standard Dimensions & Metrics – basic Page tag
• Business Outcomes – goals & e-commerce
• Clean, Accurate Data – filter & settings
• Marketing Channels – campaign tracking & Google AdWords linking
• Simplified Reporting – custom reports & dashboards

 

How Google Analytics Works?

There are four main components to the Google Analytics system;

• The Data Collection
• The Configuration
• The Data Processing
• And the Reporting…

• Activities are tracked on mobile instead of Pageviews
• Mobile “hits” from offline devices can be stored and dispatched to Google Analytics when the Mobile device reconnects to Internet
• In the web tracking scenario, a “hit” is sent every time a user views a page tagged with Google Analytics
• In the Mobile App scenario, a “hit” is sent every time a user completes an activity that has been tagged with Google Analytics
• To collect mobile application data with Google Analytics, you shouldn’t be implementing the exact same code you use for your website tracking

 

Key Metrics & Dimensions Defined;

• Dimensions describe characteristics of your Users, their Sessions and Actions
• Metrics are simply the quantitative measurements of Users, Sessions and Actions. They are numerical numbers.
• It’s important to keep in mind that all of the time-based metrics in Google Analytics rely on the stream of user activity, or hits to be calculated properly
• Bounce rate is % of session with only one-user interaction
• Time on Page & Bounce Rate activity can actually be difficult for sites that don’t load new pages frequently. For example, sites that uses AJAX or flash do not generate  a lot of pageviews

 

Creating an Google Accounts;

• If you’re tracking a mobile application, you will download a mobile software development kit or SDK.
• Tag Management Tool – It’s a fairly new technology that makes it easy to control and implement different types of Javascript tags.

 

Understanding Your Account Structure;

• Within each account you can have one or more properties that independently collect data
• Each property is assigned a Unique Tracking ID that tells Google Analytics exactly, which data should be collected, stored and reported together
• Remember, once Google Analytics processes data from your website or app, the data can never be changed

 

Setting up Basic Filters;

• Filters help to exclude data, include data or change data
• Google Analytics treats data as Case-Sensitive
• Filters are applied in the order that they appear in your configuration

 

Set up Goals & E-Commerce;

• Destination Goal is a page on your website that user see, when they take an action
• Event Goal is mainly downloading a PDF etc.,
• A Funnel is the defined process that you expect users to complete prior to conversion
• Using the Goal Flow report, you can identify where users might be having issues with an important step
• A goal conversion can only be counted once during a visit, but an e-commerce transaction can be counted multiple times during a visit
• Only add “goal value” for non-ecommerce goals, otherwise revenue will be doubled counted

 

Collecting Campaign Data;

• Marketing Channels: The traffic driving initiatives that brings customers to your site
• Google Analytics detects 3 medium without any customization; organic, referral, none (users come directly to your site by either typing your URL into a browser or clicking on a bookmark)
• How your marketing campaigns data appears in your reports impacts, how well you can measure the success of your Business?

 

Conclusions:

Start by knowing your organization’s top goals and objectives, and how it’s website reflects them. From there, develop questions for Google Analytics related to your goals and objectives – by Gianglio

Ranjan jena would love to hear your comment or feedback either through email; ranjan@emarketeducation.in or call +91-7760969452 .

 

Thanks

Ranjan Jena, PPC Adwords Trainer, Bangalore