GAIQ Notes

Unit 2.1

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).

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. In the online world,
there are five common business objectives:

 For ecommerce sites, an obvious objective is selling products or services.

 For lead generation sites, the goal is to collect user information for sales teams to connect
with potential leads.
 For content publishers, the goal is to encourage engagement and frequent visitation.
 For online informational or support sites, helping users find the information they need at
the right time is of primary importance.
 For branding, the main objective is to drive awareness, engagement and loyalty.
There are key actions on any website or mobile application that tie back to a business’
objectives. The actions can indicate an objective, like a purchase on an ecommerce site, has been
fully met. These are “macro” conversions. Some of the actions on a site might also be behavioral
indicators that a customer hasn’t fully reached your main objectives but is coming closer, like, in
the ecommerce example, signing up to receive an email coupon or a new product notification.
These are “micro” conversions. It’s important to measure both micro and macro conversions so
that you are equipped with more behavioral data to understand what experiences help drive the
right outcomes for your site.

Insights for 2013: Understanding Your Customers & The Full Value of Digital
Wednesday, January 09, 2013 | 10:16 AM
Labels: Business Insights
We’re just a week into 2013, and we’re undeniably living in the new multi-screen age.
Our day-to-day interactions with technology—and our expectations—have increased
dramatically. We’re no longer content to wait until later to buy shoes or schedule travel
or find a hot spot to eat. Technology lets us act now, and we expect reliable results. In
fact, we’ve become so dependent on being connected all the time that 43% of U.S.
adults would be willing to give up beer for a month if it meant they could keep accessing
the Internet on their smartphones, and 36% said they’d be willing to give up chocolate.*

What does this mean for you? Many businesses have fallen behind consumer behavior
—in a world where people look first to mobile devices and real-time streams, the digital
journey has grown more complex, and it’s become more challenging to gain a clear
picture of these interactions. As a marketer or analyst, your success depends on
adapting to this new reality. We’re working to provide tools that let you connect the dots,
so you can regain visibility into your customers’ preferences and behaviors and take
advantage of the full value of digital.

Holistic Measurement: Capture the full customer experience

Your customers are active all the time and everywhere, so you should be as well. To
truly win moments that matter across all screens and situations, you must acknowledge,
and measure, all relevant touch-points. For example, are you running related marketing
efforts across email, display, and search ads? Do you see customers performing some
tasks more frequently on smartphones while other tasks are more common on laptop?
Rather than evaluating these programs and behaviors separately, your measurement
strategy should focus on connecting the dots between these consumer moments.
Consider your overall business goals and then measure the role that each touch-point
plays in achieving those goals, keeping in mind the complementary effects of multiple
channels and devices.

Active measurement: Plan ahead and optimize throughout

Harnessing the power of location, intent and social connections is possible today, and
smart marketers are always on, always optimized—using customer signals to create
winning experiences for their brand. Active measurement is about quickly acting on the
insights you uncover as you go, but more importantly, it’s about good measurement
planning. This proactive piece is often overlooked, even by the savviest marketers and
analysts. To effectively measure, you must define expectations about how your
customer will interact with your brand before you look at the numbers. Then, question
any surprising results. Is it normal or strange for your business to have a 3% conversion
rate? Is it good or bad if event tracking shows that 3,000 people view a video on your
homepage in a single day? Are your TV spots driving viewers to your website in Real-
Time, or do you see more traffic at other times? Are you bringing together data sources
and devices holistically? Active measurement means examining real human behavior
and influences instead of reporting the same old data on clicks or bounce-rates.

Media-Agnostic Measurement: Give credit where it’s due

As technology usage has expanded, patterns of research and influence have become
more diverse (with many consumers consulting 10 or more sources before a purchase)*
—but also more identifiable. In the new digital age, it’s no longer realistic or smart to
judge campaigns solely by the final interaction using a last-click model, or to think only
about single-device or single-session interactions. Customers move fluidly across
channels and devices. To truly understand the value of your digital investments, you
have to overhaul your conversion goals to capture all the large and small behaviors that
lead to business success. Once you have visibility into the customer journey, you can
begin assigning credit with attribution models to determine your best channel and
investment mix. Next, optimize your programs and run controlled experiments to see
how you could improve your results even further. It’s an active, ongoing process.

So, make a New Year’s resolution to take a more proactive approach: consider and give
credit to all the interactions in the customer journey, and act on your measurement
 insights. Throughout 2013 we’ll be sharing practical advice to help you dive in and join
your customers in the always-on world. Good luck!

Posted by Paul Muret, Director of Engineering, Google Analytics

2.2
Segmentation allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your data. For example, you might
segment your data by marketing channel so that you can see which channel is responsible for an
increase in purchases. Drilling down to look at segments of your data helps you understand what
caused a change to your aggregated data.

Examples:

 You can segment your data by date and time, to compare how users who visit your site on
certain days of the week or certain hours of the day behave differently.
 You can segment your data by device to compare user performance on desktops, tablets
and mobile phones.
 You can segment by marketing channel to compare the difference in performance for
various marketing activities.
 You can segment by geography to determine which countries, regions or cities perform
the best.
 And you can segment by customer characteristics, like repeat customers vs. first-time
customers, to help you understand what drives users to become loyal customers.

About segments

Isolate and examine subsets of your data.

A segment is a subset of your Analytics data. For example, of your entire set of users, one
segment might be users from a particular country or city. Another segment might be users who
purchase a particular line of products or who visit a specific part of your site.

Segments let you isolate and analyze those subsets of data so you can examine and respond to
the component trends in your business. For example, if you find that users from a particular
geographic region are no longer purchasing a line of products in the same volume as they
normally have, you can see whether a competing business is offering the same types of products
at lower prices. If that turned out to be the case, you could respond by offering a loyalty discount
to those users that undercuts your competitor's prices.

You can also use segments as the basis for Remarketing Audiences. For example, you might
create a segment of users who visit your menswear pages, and then target just those users (your
 Remarketing Audience) with a remarketing campaign that is focused on the new items that you
are adding to those pages.

In this article:
 Segment types
 Segment definition and scope
 Limits
 Next steps
 Related resources

Segment types
Segments represent either subsets of sessions or subsets of users:

 Subsets of sessions: for example, all sessions originating from Campaign A; all sessions
during which a purchase occurred

 Subsets of users: for example, users who have previously purchased; users who added
items to their shopping carts, but didn’t complete a purchase
Reviewing the Google Analytics User Model first will help you conceptualize how segments
work. There are three major components to the Google Analytics user model:

 Users
 Sessions: A user arrives at and interacts with your property. All of these user interactions
are grouped into what is referred to as a session.
 Hit: During a session the user interacts with your property. Each interaction is referred to
as a hit. Example hits include pageviews, events, transactions, etc.
A single user can have multiple sessions, and each session can have multiple hits. Visually, this
is represented below:

Google Analytics user model

 Using Segments
Segments are non-destructive filters that do not change your underlying data. Once you apply a
segment, it remains active as you navigate throughout the reports, until you remove it. You can
apply up to four segments at a time, and compare results from each segment side by side in your
reports.

In addition to analyzing data with segments, you can use them to build audiences for
remarketing.

Google Analytics includes predefined segments (System Segments) that you can use as provided,
or that you can copy and edit to create new custom segments. You can also build your own
segments from scratch. In addition, you can import segments from the Analytics Solutions
Gallery, a free marketplace where Analytics users share segments and other solutions they’ve
developed.

Segment definition and scope

You define segments by creating filters based on the dimensions and metrics in your Analytics
reports; for example:

 User Type exactly matches “Returning User”

 Country/Territory exactly matches “United States”
 Ecommerce Conversion Rate > "0.2%"
In addition to the dimensions and metrics you use in filters, you also have to set the scope of the
data for a filter. There are three different scopes you can use:

 Hit: Behavior confined to a single action, for example, viewing a page or starting a video.

 Session: Behavior within a single session; for example, the goals that users completed
during a session, or the amount of revenue they generated during a session.

 User: Behavior across all sessions within the date range you’re using, up to 90 days; for
example all the goals users completed or all the revenue they generated (across all sessions)
during the date range.
You use the segment builder to define the component filters of a segment.

Limits on segments
Segments are subject to the following limits:
 Total segments
 1000 segments per account

 100 segments per user, per view

 100 segments shared across users, per view

These limits include system segments and any segments you create or import. You cannot create
or import additional segments once you reach these limits.

Segments applied to reports

You can have up to 4 segments applied to your reports at any one time.

Date ranges
With user-based segments, you can apply a maximum date range of 90 days to your reports. If
your date range is already set to more than 90 days, then when you create a user-based segment,
Analytics resets the date range to 90 days from the start date.

Segments based on the Date of First Session option are limited to maximum range of 31 days.

Data limits on user-based segments

As stated above, user-based segments have a maximum date range of 90 days. For that 90 days,
Analytics reports on only the first 1000 sessions for each user. Session counts beyond 1000 in a
90-day period are usually an indication of non-human traffic.

Multi-Channel Funnels
Do not use segments with Multi-Channel Funnel reports. Use Conversion segments instead.

AdWords cost data

AdWords cost data is not compatible with segments. If you apply a segment to an AdWords
report that includes cost data, then the cost data all have zero values.

 
2.3
A macro conversion occurs when someone completes an action that’s important to your business.
For an ecommerce business, the most important macro conversion is usually a transaction. A
micro conversion is also an important action, but it does not immediately contribute to your
bottom line. It’s usually an indicator that a user is moving towards a macro conversion. It’s
important to measure micro conversions because it helps you better understand where people are
in on the journey to conversion.
Attribution is assigning credit for a conversion. In last-click attribution, all of the value
associated with the conversion is assigned to the last marketing activity that generated the
revenue. However, there are other attribution models that can help you better understand the
value of each of your channels. For example, rather than assign all of the value to the last
channel, you might want to assign all of the value to the first channel, the one that started the
user on the customer journey. This is called first-click attribution. Or, you might assign a little bit
of value to each of the assisting channels in the customer journey.

About the default attribution models

Learn how each model assigns conversion credit.

Google Analytics provides the following default attribution models in the Model Comparison
Tool. You can also create your own custom models in the tool.

Default attribution models

 The Last Interaction model attributes 100% of the conversion value to the last

channel with which the customer interacted before buying or converting.
When it's useful: If your ads and campaigns are designed to attract people at the
moment of purchase, or your business is primarily transactional with a sales cycle that
does not involve a consideration phase, the Last Interaction model may be appropriate.
 

 The Last Non-Direct Click model ignores direct traffic and attributes 100% of the
conversion value to the last channel that the customer clicked through from before
buying or converting. Google Analytics uses this model by default when attributing
conversion value in non-Multi-Channel Funnels reports.
When it's useful:
Because the Last Non-Direct Click model is the default model used for non-Multi-
Channel Funnels reports, it provides a useful benchmark to compare with results from
other models.
In addition, if you consider direct traffic to be from customers who have already been
won through a different channel, then you may wish to filter out direct traffic and
focus on the last marketing activity before conversion.
 

 The Last AdWords Click model attributes 100% of the conversion value to the

most recent AdWords ad that the customer clicked before buying or converting.
When it's useful: If you want to identify and credit the AdWords ads that closed the
most conversions, use the Last AdWords Click model.
 

 The First Interaction model attributes 100% of the conversion value to the first

channel with which the customer interacted.
When it's useful: This model is appropriate if you run ads or campaigns to create initial
awareness. For example, if your brand is not well known, you may place a premium on
the keywords or channels that first exposed customers to the brand.
 

 The Linear model gives equal credit to each channel interaction on the way to

conversion.
When it's useful: This model is useful if your campaigns are designed to maintain
contact and awareness with the customer throughout the entire sales cycle. In this case,
each touchpoint is equally important during the consideration process.
 

 If the sales cycle involves only a short consideration phase, the Time Decay model
may be appropriate. This model is based on the concept of exponential decay and most
heavily credits the touchpoints that occurred nearest to the time of conversion. The
Time Decay model has a default half-life of 7 days, meaning that a touchpoint occurring
7 days prior to a conversion will receive 1/2 the credit of a touchpoint that occurs on the
day of conversion. Similarly, a touchpoint occuring 14 days prior will receive 1/4 the
credit of a day-of-conversion touchpoint. The exponential decay continues within your
lookback window (default of 30 days).
When it's useful: If you run one-day or two-day promotion campaigns, you may wish to
give more credit to interactions during the days of the promotion. In this case,
interactions that occurred one week before have only a small value as compared to
touchpoints near the conversion.
 
  The Position Based model allows you to create a hybrid of the Last Interaction
and First Interaction models. Instead of giving all the credit to either the first or last
interaction, you can split the credit between them. One common scenario is to assign
40% credit each to the first interaction and last interaction, and assign 20% credit to the
interactions in the middle.
When it's useful: If you most value touchpoints that introduced customers to your
brand and final touchpoints that resulted in sales, use the Position Based model.

Related resources
 Attribution modeling overview
 About the Model Comparison Tool

Overview

NEXT: TRACK YOUR MICRO CONVERSIONS.

Measure the outcomes of your advertising and marketing campaigns.

Before you can improve the effectiveness of your advertising and marketing campaigns, you'll
need to track conversions. A conversion is an activity on your site that is important to the success
of your business. For sales oriented websites, you should track:

 micro conversions, for example, signups for your email newsletter, account creations, and
other activities that often precede a purchase
 macro conversions, i.e. sales transactions
Example:
email sign-up (micro conversion) > create account (micro conversion) > purchase

 Track your micro conversions.

 Track your macro conversions.
Listen to a brief explanation of micro and macro conversions.
2.4

Creating a measurement plan

Analytics Academy lesson
Notes
 The measurement planning cycle consists of the following:
 Define your measurement plan.
1. Document your business objectives.
2. Identify the strategies and tactics to support the objectives.
3. Choose the metrics that will be the key performance indicators.
4. Decide how you’ll need to segment your data.
5. Choose what your targets will be for your key performance indicators.
 Create an implementation plan. 
After defining your business needs and documenting the technical environment of your
business, create an implementation plan that is specific to the analytics tool that you’re using.
For Google Analytics, this means defining the code snippets and specific product features that
you’ll need in order to track the data defined in your measurement plan. 
 Implement your plan.
The next step is to have the web development team, or the mobile team, actually implement
the tracking recommendations that you’ve made. Some website technologies will require
additional planning, such as:
1. Query string parameters
2. Server redirects
3. Flash and AJAX events
4. Multiple domains and subdomains
5. Responsive web design
The most common features used in a Google Analytics implementation plan for a website:
6. Implement the standard Google Analytics tracking snippet. This gives you the
bulk of the data you need.
7. Determine how to track your KPIs. You can do this using goal tracking and the
ecommerce module if you are an ecommerce business.
8. Use filters to normalize your data so that your reports are accurate and useful.
9. Use campaign tracking and AdWords linking to properly track marketing
campaigns.
10. Use custom dashboards and custom reports to simplify the reporting process.

 Maintain and refine. 

The final step of the measurement planning cycle is to maintain and refine your plan. Your
business requirements and your technical environment can change over time. Without a team
to maintain your measurement plan, your data won’t keep pace with your reporting needs.

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-marketing-and-measurement-model/

3.1
 Reading list

 Platform overview
Notes

There are four main components to the Google Analytics system: data collection,
configuration, data processing and reporting.

 Collection: You can use Google Analytics to collect user interaction data from websites,
mobile apps, and digitally connected environments like kiosks or point of sale systems. For
websites, Google Analytics uses JavaScript code to collect information. One package of
information is referred to as a “hit” or an “interaction.” A “hit” is sent every time a user views a
page tagged with Google Analytics. 
For mobile apps, you must add extra code to each "activity" you want to track. Note that since
mobile devices are not always connected to the internet, data can not always be sent to the
collection server in real time. To handle this situation, Google Analytics can store the “hits” and
dispatch them to the server when the device reconnects to the internet. 
 Processing: Once the hits from a user have been collected on Google’s servers, the next
step is data processing. This is the “transformation” step that turns your raw data to something
useful. 
 Configuration: In this step, Google Analytics applies your configuration settings, such
as filters, to the raw data. Once your data is processed, the data is stored in a database. Once the
data has been processed and inserted into the database, it can’t be changed. 
 Reporting: Typically, you will use the web interface at www.google.com/analytics to
access your data. However, it is also possibly to systematically retrieve data from your Google
Analytics account using your own application code and the Core Reporting API.

3.2

Notes

Reports in Google Analytics contain dimensions and metrics. Most commonly, you’ll see
dimensions and metrics reported in a table, with the first column containing a list of the values
for one particular dimension, and the rest of the columns displaying the corresponding metrics.

 Dimensions describe characteristics of your users, their sessions and actions.

 Metrics are the quantitative measurements of users,sessions and actions. Metrics are
numerical data.

4.1
 Creating an account

Analytics Academy lesson
Reading list
 Platform overview
 Accounts, users, properties, and views
 Real-Time reports
 About Google Tag Manager
Notes
When you first set up your Google Analytics account, you’ll be asked to choose whether you
want to track a website or a mobile application. Depending on your choice, Google Analytics
will display instructions to add the correct code to collect your data.
If you’re tracking a website, then you will receive a piece of JavaScript code that you must add
to every page of the site you want to track. It’s best to add this code to the top of the page, before
the closing head tag. If your website uses a template, then you can add the code directly to that
site template.
If you’re tracking a mobile application you will download a mobile software development kit, or
SDK, and share it with your development team. There’s an SDK for the Android platform as
well as iOS.
Once you add the code to your site, you should start to see data immediately in the Real-Time
reports.
Another way to add the Google Analytics tracking code to a site is by using a tag management
tool, such as Google Tag Manager.
Learn about Google Analytics

Platform components

Developers interact and influence processing through a rich user interface, client libraries, and
APIs that are organized into 4 main components: collection, configuration, processing, and
reporting.

Collection

collects user-interaction data.

Configuration

allows you to manage how the data is processed.

Processing

processes the user-interaction data, with the configuration data.

Reporting
 provides access to all the processed data.

Hierarchy of accounts, users, properties, and views

In this article:
   Accounts
   Properties
   Views
   Users and    permissions
 Related resources

 Accounts
An account is your access point for Analytics, and the top-most level of organization.
You need at least one account so you can have access to Analytics, and so you can identify the
properties you want to track. How you manage the relationship between accounts and properties
is up to you. You can use a one-to-one relationship of one account/one property, or you can use a
one-to-many relationship of one account/many properties. You can have multiple Analytics
accounts. If you do not have an account, sign up for one at www.google.com/analytics.

 Properties
A property is a website, mobile application, or device (e.g. a kiosk or point-of-sale device.) An
account can contain one or more properties.
 Within an Analytics account, you add the properties from which you want to collect data. When
you add a property to an account, Analytics generates the tracking code that you use to collect
data from that property. The tracking code contains a unique ID that identifies the data from that
property, and makes it easily identifiable in your reports. Analytics also creates one unfiltered
view for each property you add.

 Views
A view is your access point for reports; a defined view of data from a property. You give users
access to a view so they can see the reports based on that view's data. A property can contain one
or more views.
For example, within a property you might have:
 one view of all the data for www.example.com
 one view of only AdWords traffic to www.example.com
 one view of only traffic to a subdomain like www.sales.example.com
When you add a property to an account, Analytics creates the first view for that property. That
first view has no filters, and so includes all the data for that property. You should leave this
original view unfiltered, so that you always have a view in which you can see all the data. You
can create additional views and apply filters to them so that they each include the specific subset
of data in which you're interested.
Once you create a view, the reports for that view will show data from the creation date of the
view forward. For example, if you create a view on June 1, that view will show data from June 1
forward, but will not show any data collected prior to June 1.
If you delete a view, that specific perspective of the data is gone forever. Don't delete a view if
you think you might ever want to report on that particular perspective of the data.

 Users and    permissions

You add users to an Analytics account. You can add those users at the account, property, or view
level; and you can restrict their access at each level. When you add a user, you identify that
person by an email address that is registered in Google accounts, and you assign the
appropriate permissions. Depending on the permissions you assign, that user can manage other
users, perform administrative tasks like creating additional views and filters, and see the report
data.

Related resources
 Example account structures
 Best practices for Mobile Analytics setup
 About Real-Time

Monitor activity as it happens on your site or app.

Real-Time allows you to monitor activity as it happens on your site or app. The reports are
updated continuously and eachhit
 is reported seconds after it occurs. For example, you can see how many people are on your site
right now, which pages or events they're interacting with, and which goal conversions have
occurred.
In this article:
 See Real-Time data
 Ways to use Real-Time
 Limits and caveats
 Next steps

See Real-Time data

Real-Time is available in all Google Analytics accounts. No changes to the tracking code are
necessary.
To see Real-Time:
1. Sign in to your Google Analytics account.
2. Navigate to your view
.
3. Select the Reporting
 tab.
4. Select Real-Time.

Ways to use Real-Time

With Real-Time, you can immediately and continuously monitor the effects that new campaigns
and site changes have on your traffic. Here are a few of the ways you might use Real-Time:
 monitor whether new and changed content on your site is being viewed
 understand usage of your mobile app through event tracking
 see whether a one-day promotion is driving traffic to your site or app, and which pages
these users are viewing
 monitor the immediate effects on traffic from a blog/social network post or tweet
 verify that the tracking code is working on your site or app
 monitor goal completions as you test changes to your site

Limits and caveats

Filtered views
If your data looks incorrect in Real-Time, check which filters are being applied to the view. It's
best to use an unfiltered view when debugging tracking code implementations. Changes made to
views may take up to two hours to reflect in Real-Time.

Mobile App Tracking

Mobile hits are batched to conserve battery life, so you may notice delays. Batching typically
occurs on the order of minutes.

No data in Real-Time
If you don’t see any data in your Real-Time reports, it’s possible that there are no active users.
Real-Time reporting is sometimes temporarily suspended in views that you haven’t recently
accessed, however Real-Time is reactivated after you visit a Real-Time report in that view.
When Real-Time reporting is suspended, data collection and all other reporting services aren’t
affected.

Campaign attribution
Due to a change in the way Universal Analytics sends and stores campaign information for Real-
Time reporting, it is possible that, during a single session, a user stops being recognized as
coming from a specific campaign and is instead counted as a direct referral. As a result, you'll
see traffic and conversions incorrectly attributed to a Source of (direct). You'll only see this
in Real-Time reports; in standard reports, traffic and conversions will be attributed
correctly.
An upcoming version of Real-Time reporting will not have this issue. In the mean time,
however, you should be aware and interpret referral counts in Real-Time reporting appropriately.
To mitigate this issue, you can either force the sending of campaign information on every hit
within a session, or use standard reports (instead of Real-Time) when analyzing or reporting
referral counts.

Next steps
To learn more about the reports and how to interpret them, read Using the Real-Time reports.

4.2
 Understanding your account structure

Analytics Academy lesson
Reading list
 Platform overview
 Accounts, users, properties, and views
 About views
Notes
A Google Analytics account is simply a logical way for a business to group data from all of its
digital assets together. There are also certain configuration settings that you apply to your entire
account, like managing the users who have access.
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. Typically you create separate accounts for unique
businesses or distinct business units. Then you can create unique properties within that account
for the different websites, mobile applications, or other digital assets that belong to the business.
For each property, you have the option to create different views of your data. A view lets you
define a unique perspective of the data from a parent property. You use the configuration settings
in your account to define each view. You should have at least three views for each property.
 By default, you have one unfiltered view that is automatically generated when you
create a property. Don’t apply any settings or configurations to this view since it is the backup
for your data. Once you delete a view it’s gone forever. So having a backup view, like the
unfiltered data view, is very useful.
 You should have a master view. This view should have all of the settings needed to
transform your data into useful information.
 You should have a test view. If you need to make changes to your configuration test
them using this view first. Once you know the impact to the data you can then apply the same
change to your master view.
When you create a new view, Google Analytics does not automatically copy any of the historical
data in the original view to the new view. You’ll only have data starting from the date you
created the view.

Advanced: Structure Your Account With Roll Up Reporting And More

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 | 11:58 AM
Labels: Advanced Topics
Guest post by the team at E-Nor, a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant
For the analytics ninjas out there, you know that data accuracy is probably one of the
most challenging aspects of analytics across all solutions and platforms, and you learn
to apply best practices and establish processes to improve data collection and
reporting.

But for the rest of us, how do we help marketers, business owners, and webmasters
have confidence in their data? Analytics is all about clarity. It should help you see
actionable statistics clearly and quickly. However, when you have a website structure
with multiple domains and subdomains - which is often the case - sometimes things can
get jumbled.

For instance, you are a CMO or a Director of Marketing at the enterprise and you are
responsible for the performance and ROI of a large number of web proprieties. You look
at your analytics reports and you can't find your ecommerce data from site A, site B is
referring traffic to itself (definitely not a good thing!), and conversion data from your
marketing campaign microsite is no where to be found.

This image sums up the feeling.

No need to panic. This post aims to offer an approach to help you plan your Google
Analytics accounts setup in a structured fashion to help with clarity. I hope that by
following the approach and the technical steps, you will be able to collect and manage
all your data, make more sense of it, and most importantly, ensure what you are
reporting on, trending, dashboarding and analyzing is based on accurate data.
There are two distinct sections of this post:

 The Strategy (non-technical)

 The How (technical)

The Strategy
There are many ways to structure your Google Analytics profiles when you have
multiple domains and subdomains. But in this post I will limit myself to the one that I like
the most and I believe is the least confusing.

Before I go into details of the solution, and for simplification, let us assume we are
dealing with a project that has the following requirements:
 A business with 3 domains (www.a.com, www.b.com, and www.c.com)

 1 domain (a.com) links to a 3rd party shopping cart (www.mystore.com)

 2 domains (a.com and b.com) have multiple sub-domains

Here is a graphical representation of the structure:

Measurement Requirements

 Track each domain and sub-domain separately (e.g. www.a.com, news.a.com,

andblog.b.com)

 Track the rollup/overall traffic for all domains and sub-domains

 Track full e-commerce transactions

Solution

 Create a Google Analytics account for each domain (www.a.com, www.b.com,

andwww.c.com)
 Customize the tracking code to link the multiple sub-domains with their main
domains

 Link the third party shopping cart with the main domain and install Google
Analytics tracking code in all shopping pages

 Create a rollup Google Analytics account and add its code to all domains and
sub-domains

Graphical example of a well-planned Analytics Account Structure:

Now on to the technical stuff. If you don't enjoy javascript and regular expressions, you
may stop here and ask your webmaster or technical analyst to read further :-)

The How:
I will try to illustrate the technical implementation in 10 simple steps:
1- Create a unique Google Analytics account for each domain www.a.com, www.b.com,
andwww.c.com and then use the account number UA-AAAAAAAA-1 in the code in step
3 and use the accounts UA-BBBBBBBB-1 for www.b.com and UA-CCCCCCCC-
1 for www.c.com in the code in step 8.
2- Create a Google Analytics account for the a rollup account that will oversee all
domains and sub-domains (use the GA account number UA-XXXXXXXX-1 in the code
used in step 3 and 8)
3- Add the following Google Analytics tracking code to the main site (www.a.com) and
its sub-domains (blog.a.com, news.a.com, images.a.com, and media.a.com)
About the following code: We have a regular pageTracker object to track activity on
each particular subdomain and a rollupTracker to track activity across all subdomains
and the third party checkout site. (Click here to learn more about the customizations we
made to the standard Google Analytics tracking code)
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js'
type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-AAAAAAAA-1");
pageTracker._setAllowHash(false);
pageTracker._setDomainName(".a.com");
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
var rollupTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1");
rollupTracker._setAllowHash(false);
rollupTracker._setDomainName(".a.com");
rollupTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
rollupTracker._trackPageview();
}
catch(err) {}

</script>
4- Enable E-Commerce Reporting
Analytics Settings > Profile Settings > Edit Profile Information

5- Add the following code* to all shopping cart pages on the store site
(www.mystore.com)

*Make sure to add this code to the top of the pages.

<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js'
type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-AAAAAAAA-1");
pageTracker._setDomainName("none");
pageTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
pageTracker._trackPageview();
var rollupTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1");
rollupTracker._setDomainName("none");
rollupTracker._setAllowLinker(true);
rollupTracker._trackPageview();
}
catch(err) {}

</script>
6- Add the e-commerce tracking code to the confirmation page after the GATC.
Read more about "How to track e-commerce transactions?"
7- Change the links to the store site (www.mystore.com) on the main site (www.a.com)
to use _link as following:
If the current link looks like:
<a href="https://www.mystore.com">Buy Now</a>
Change it to:
<a href="https://www.mystore.com" onclick="pageTracker._link(this.href); return
false;">Buy Now</a>
8- Repeat step number 3 for domains www.b.com and www.c.com after updating the
Google Analytics account number UA-AAAAAAAA-1 and the setDomainName value.

 To view the entire code for www.b.com and its sub-domains (click here)

 To view the entire code for www.c.com (click here)

9- Create a profile for each sub-domain (only if needed)

In order to track a sub-domain (ex. blog.b.com) in its own profile, follow the following
three steps:
a- Create a filter that include only traffic from Hostname=blog.b.com

b- Create a profile and name it "Blog"

c- Apply the sub-domain filter to the new profile

10- As you might have noticed from the codes that we added so far to all pages, we
added an extra Google Analytics account to track all pageviews across domains and
sub-domains to one Google Analytics account. We call this account “rollup account”.
var rollupTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXXXX-1");
rollupTracker._trackPageview();
Since in the rollup account, we will track pages from different sites and many of these
pages might share the same naming convention, I suggest that you create an advanced
filter that adds the hostname to the page name to differentiate between pages with
same URI.
Once you apply the filter, the upcoming data will appear as following:

Note, in the example above if we didn’t apply the “Add Hostnames” filter,
all home.aspx pages will appear as one page with 2685 pageviews.

If you have been with us so far, you are now ready to conduct your analysis based on
clean and much more accurate data :)

 To review each domain by itself and for deep-dive analysis, use the domain
profiles
  To get an overview and to see how the business is doing across all sites, use
the “Rollup Account”

4.3

Setting up basic filters

Analytics Academy lesson
Reading list
 View filters
 Exclude internal traffic
Notes
You can use filters to:
 exclude data
 include data
 change how the data looks in your reports
Filters help you transform the data so it’s better aligned with your business needs.
During processing, Google Analytics applies your filters to the raw data collected from your
website or app. This transformed data is what you see in the reports for each view.
For example, you can use a filter to exclude traffic from your internal employees. The easiest
way to do this is to create a filter that excludes all of the data from the IP address for your
business. As Google Analytics processes your data it will ignore any data coming from that IP
address.
You can also use a filter to clean up your data. For example, sometimes a website will show the
same page regardless of the case of the URL uppercase, lowercase or mixed case. Since Google
Analytics treats data as case sensitive, this can result in the same page showing up multiple
times, based on case, in your reports. To prevent this separation and see the page data in
aggregate, you can set up a lowercase filter to force all of the URLs to a single case.
 4.4

Setting up Goals and Ecommerce

Analytics Academy lesson
Reading list
 Set up Goals
 Set up Funnels
 Set up Ecommerce tracking
Notes
Setting up Goals in Google Analytics is one of the most important parts of implementation. Once
you enable Goals, you get metrics like the number of conversions and the conversion rate. Goals
are the way that we map the data in Google Analytics to the key performance indicators that you
defined in your measurement plan. These metrics are always available in the Conversion section
of your standard reports. But you can also find these metrics in almost every other report in
Google Analytics. This is useful because the reports allow you to segment your conversion data.
Anytime you think of conversions, you should think about “macro conversions” and “micro
conversions.” Macro conversions are your primary business objectives. Micro conversions are
the relationship building activities that lead up to a macro conversion.
Goals are configured at the view level. That means you can create different Goals for each view.
There are four types of Goals.
 A Destination Goal is a page on your website that users see when they complete an
activity. For an account signup, this might be the “thank you for signing up” page. For a
purchase this might be the receipt page. A destination Goal triggers a conversion when a user
views the page you’ve specified. If you’re setting up a Goal for an app, you’d set up a screen
view Goal rather than a destination Goal.
 An Event Goal is triggered when a user does something specific like downloading a PDF
or starting a video. You need to have Event Tracking implemented on your website in order to
use this type of Goal.
 A Pages per Visit Goal is triggered when a user sees more or fewer pages than a
threshold that you specify.
 A Duration Goal is triggered when a user’s visit exceeds or falls below a threshold that
you set.
There is an important difference between Goal conversions and ecommerce transactions. A Goal
conversion can only be counted once during a visit, but an ecommerce transaction can be
counted multiple times during a visit. Here’s an example. Let’s say that you set one of your
Goals to be a PDF download and you define it such that any PDF download is a valid Goal
conversion. And let’s also say that the Goal is worth $5. In this case, if a user comes to your site
and downloads five PDF files during a single session, you’ll only get one conversion worth $5.
 However, if you were to track each of these downloads as a $5 ecommerce transaction, you
would see five transactions and $25 in ecommerce revenue.
As a best practice, you should only add a Goal value for nonecommerce Goals. The reason is that
Goal value is cumulative. If you add a Goal value and you track transactions with the ecommerce
tracking code, Google Analytics will add the value of the transaction to the value of the Goal.

4.5

Collecting campaign data

Analytics Academy lesson
Reading list
 Campaign tagging
 URL builder
 Link Analytics and AdWords
 Traffic source dimensions

6.3

Multi-Channel Funnels reports

Analytics Academy lesson
Reading list
 Conversions reports
 About Multi-Channel Funnels
 Customizing Channel Groupings
Notes
The Multi-Channel Funnels reports are generated from conversion paths, which contain the
sequences of visits that lead up to each conversion and transaction. By default, only interactions
within the last 30 days are included in conversion paths, but you can adjust this time period from
1 to 90 days using the “Lookback Window” selector at the top of each Multi-Channel Funnels
report.
The Assisted Conversions report summarizes the roles and contributions of your channels.
 The Assist metrics summarize the number and monetary value of sales and conversions
that a channel assisted.
 The Last Click metrics show conversions and revenue that the channel closed or
completed.
 The First Click metrics show the number and value of sales and conversions a channel
initiated.
In the Assisted Conversions report, you’ll see a ratio of assisted conversions to last click or direct
conversions for each channel. This ratio summarizes a channel’s overall role in the conversion
process.
 A value close to 0 indicates that a channel completed more sales and conversions than it
assisted or initiated.
 A value close to 1 indicates that the channel equally assisted and completed sales and
conversions.
 The more this value exceeds 1, the more the channel assisted sales and conversions.
The Top Conversion Paths report shows all of the unique sequences of channel interactions that
led to conversions, as well as the number of conversions from each path, and the value of those
conversions. The Time Lag report shows how many days pass between the first interaction and
last interaction for your users’ conversion paths. This can give you insight into the length of your
online sales cycle.
The Path Length report breaks out your conversions by the number of channel interactions
contained in your users’ conversion paths. This can tell you how many times a user typically
returns to your site before converting.

Multi-Channel Funnels reports

Analytics Academy lesson
Reading list
 Conversions reports
 About Multi-Channel Funnels
 Customizing Channel Groupings
Notes
The Multi-Channel Funnels reports are generated from conversion paths, which contain the
sequences of visits that lead up to each conversion and transaction. By default, only interactions
within the last 30 days are included in conversion paths, but you can adjust this time period from
1 to 90 days using the “Lookback Window” selector at the top of each Multi-Channel Funnels
report.
The Assisted Conversions report summarizes the roles and contributions of your channels.
 The Assist metrics summarize the number and monetary value of sales and conversions
that a channel assisted.
 The Last Click metrics show conversions and revenue that the channel closed or
completed.
 The First Click metrics show the number and value of sales and conversions a channel
initiated.
In the Assisted Conversions report, you’ll see a ratio of assisted conversions to last click or direct
conversions for each channel. This ratio summarizes a channel’s overall role in the conversion
process.
 A value close to 0 indicates that a channel completed more sales and conversions than it
assisted or initiated.
 A value close to 1 indicates that the channel equally assisted and completed sales and
conversions.
 The more this value exceeds 1, the more the channel assisted sales and conversions.
The Top Conversion Paths report shows all of the unique sequences of channel interactions that
led to conversions, as well as the number of conversions from each path, and the value of those
conversions. The Time Lag report shows how many days pass between the first interaction and
last interaction for your users’ conversion paths. This can give you insight into the length of your
online sales cycle.
The Path Length report breaks out your conversions by the number of channel interactions
contained in your users’ conversion paths. This can tell you how many times a user typically
returns to your site before converting.

Troubleshoot common tracking setup mistakes

If you have installed tracking and don't see data in your reports after 24 hours, you may
have one or more of the following issues.
In this article:
 Google Tag Manager related issues
 Google Analytics tracking code issues

Google Tag Manager related issues

 Incorrect filter settings
Incorrect filter settings can affect the data you see, and can inadvertently filter all of your data
from your reports. In most cases, this occurs when users apply multiple "Include" filters. For
details, see the article on Include and exclude filters.

 Unpublished container
Check that you published your container after adding the Google Analytics tag. Changes made
to a container do not take effect on a site until you publish the container. So, once you've
added or edited tags, you'll need to publish the container in order to make your additions and
changes live on the site.
 Tag not firing
Read Why is a tag not firing?" in the Google Tag Manager help center.

Google Analytics tracking code issues

 Using incorrect snippet and/or viewing the wrong account or view
If you track multiple websites and/or have access to multiple Analytics accounts, you might be
using the snippet from another account and/or view. Make sure you are viewing the correct
account and view. See Finding the Tracking Codefor additional information.

 Extra whitespace or characters

Be sure to copy the snippet and paste it directly onto your website using either a text editor or
an editor that preserves code formatting. Don't use a word processor to copy the snippet from
your account.  Doing so can add an extra space or change the quotation marks in the tracking
snippet, which requires precise formatting in order to work.

 Customization Errors
If you are making customizations to the tracking code, make note of the following:
 function names are case sensitive and should have correct casing
 boolean values (e.g. true or false) should not be enclosed in quotes

 Incorrect filter settings

Incorrect filter settings can affect the data you see, and can inadvertently filter all of your data
from your reports. In most cases, this occurs when users apply multiple "Include" filters. For
details, see the article on Include and exclude filters.

 Using multiple instances of the Classic Google Analytics tracking snippets

The Classic Google Analytics JavaScript library (ga.js) doesn't support multiple tracking
instances. If you have multiple tracking code snippets on your webpages, make sure you're
using a supported configuration. Learn more aboutmultiple tracking codes on web pages.

 Other scripts on your page

If you’re running other scripts on your page, make sure you’re not using any variables that
Google Analytics uses. For more information on variables that the Google Analytics tracking
code uses, visit our Developer Guides for the Universal Analytics (analytics.js) JavaScript library,
and the Classic Analytics (ga.js) library.

Jen Sorensen

Digital Marketing, Search, Social and Analytics Blog

Latest digital marketing, analysis and insight from Jens Sorensen
Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ) Exam Test Notes
by JENS SORENSEN on JULY 2, 2010
This is the second post in the series of Tips and and Tricks for passing the Google
Analytics Inidividual Qualification (GAIQ). The following notes were extracted from
the Google’s Conversion University test preparation presentation (where possible),
and are not my property. They have been reproduced below to help those during
the Google Analytics Individual Qualification (GAIQ). The following books are also a
great help to successfully passing the test:
Web Analytics 2.0 – by Avinash Kaushik
Web Analytics: An Hour a Day - by Avinash Kaushik
Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics – by Brian Clifton
Introduction to Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free, web analytics tool that is hosted by Google.

Google Analytics shows you how visitors actually find and use your site, so you’ll be able
to

• make informed site design and content decisions

• improve your site to convert more visitors into customers

• track the performance of your keywords, banner ads, and other marketing campaigns.

• and track metrics such as revenue, average order value, and ecommerce conversion
rates.

Features
Google Analytics has been designed to meet the needs of novice users as well as web
analytics experts.

Some of the features include:

• Map Overlay which can help you understand how to best target campaigns by
geographic region
• AdWords Integration which makes it easy to track AdWords campaigns and allows you
to use Google Analytics from your AdWords interface

• Internal Site Search which allows you to track how people use the search box on your
site

• Benchmarking so that you can see whether your site usage metrics underperform or
outperform those of your industry vertical.

• Funnel Visualization so that you can optimize your checkout and conversion click-
paths

How GA Works?
Here’s how Google Analytics works.
When a visitor accesses a page on your site, a request is made to the webserver to
display the page.

The page is served and the Google Analytics Tracking Code JavaScript is executed.

The Google Analytics Tracking Code, which is a snippet of code that you place on each
page of your site, calls the trackPageView() method.

At this point, the Google Analytics first-party cookies are read and/or written.

The webpage then sends an invisible gif request containing all the data to the secure
Google Analytics reporting server, where the data is captured and processed.

Data is processed regularly throughout the day and you can see the results in your
reports.

What happens if?

Google Analytics uses only first-party cookies, which are considered safe and non-
intrusive by most internet users today.
Although many people block third-party cookies from being set by their web browsers,
this won’t affect Google Analytics.

Someone who blocks all cookies, however, won’t be tracked by Google Analytics since all
the data is passed to the Google Analytics servers via the first-party cookies.

Someone who deletes their cookies will still be tracked, but they’ll be identified as a new
visitor to the site and Google Analytics won’t be able to attribute their conversions to a
prior referring campaign.

People delete cookies for many reasons, one of which is to prevent personal data from
being captured or reported. But, note that Google Analytics does not report on
personally identifiable information. You’ll learn more about cookies as they relate to
Google Analytics in a later module.

A much less common scenario is that a visitor to your site has disabled JavaScript on his
or her browser. A visitor who disables JavaScript won’t be tracked since the Google
Analytics Tracking Code cannot be executed.

Cached pages are saved on a visitor’s local machine and so they’re not served by the
webserver. Google Analytics will still track visits to cached pages as long as the visitor is
connected to the internet.

JavaScript errors occur when an element of a web page’s script contains an error or fails
to execute correctly. If an error occurs before the Google Analytics Tracking Code is
executed, the visit to the page won’t be tracked. This is because the error will prevent the
remainder of the JavaScript on the page from running. Since we recommend that in
most cases you place your Google Analytics Tracking Code at the bottom of the page,
JavaScript errors are always a possible cause for data not appearing in your reports.

Google Analytics can track visits from a mobile device as long as the device is capable of
executing JavaScript and storing cookies. You can see which devices have been used to
access your site by looking at the Browsers report in the Visitor section.
In general, no reporting tool can ever be 100% accurate. You’ll get the most out of web
analytics if you focus on trends. Knowing that 20% more visitors converted following a
marketing campaign is more powerful than knowing that exactly 10 people visited your
site today.

Data Confidentiality
All data collected by Google Analytics is anonymous, including where visitors comes
from, how the visitors navigate through the site, and other actions they may perform.

No personally identifiable information is collected.

Google does not share Analytics data with any 3rd parties.

Furthermore, Google optimization, support, and sales staff may only access a client’s
data with the client’s permission. You can give permission verbally, over email or
through a support ticket that asks for help with a problem or asks a question about your
data.

You may elect to share your Google Analytics data “with other Google products”, and
Google will use the data to improve the products and services we provide you. Electing
to share your data “Anonymously with Google and others” allows you to use
benchmarking.

To provide benchmarking, Google removes all identifiable information about your

website, then combines the data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable
industries and reports them in an aggregate form.

If you select “do not share my Google Analytics data”, you will not be able to use
benchmarking and may not have access to specific ads-related features such as
Conversion Optimizer.

Again, regardless of your Data Sharing selections, Google does not share Analytics data
with any 3rd parties.
Initial Screen
Understanding the Google Analytics interface will help you find and analyze information
more effectively.

When you first login to your Google Analytics account, you’ll see a screen similar to the
one on the slide.

In this example, the user has access to three Google Analytics accounts.

Click on the name of the account you would like to access.

Analytics Settings
This takes you to the account-specific page where you manage the set-up and
configuration of your account and profiles.

You can toggle to your other Analytics accounts using the drop-down menu at the top
right of the page.

Each profile for the selected account is displayed under “Website Profiles”.

From this screen you can access reports for each profile.

You an also edit configuration settings, add filters, add or change user permissions, and
add or remove profiles altogether.

Report Interface
Click the “View Reports” link for a profile, and you’ll be taken to the dashboard for that
profile.

A sample dashboard is shown on the slide.

We’ve called out the user interface features that are available on all reports.
Your report navigation, scheduled email settings, Help links, data export options, and
the calendar.

Note that there are several places to find help information. The Help link on the top
right of the page takes you to the Google Analytics Help Center.

Also, on the left margin of the page, you’ll see a Help Resources box with links.

Dashboard
The dashboard is where you put all the summary information about your site that you
want to see at a glance.

To add a report to the dashboard, just go to the report you want to add and then click
Add to Dashboard.

On the dashboard itself, you can position the report summaries however you like and
delete the ones you don’t need.

Report Structure
In the left hand navigation, you’ll see that your reports are organized into categories:
Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, Goals, and Ecommerce.

If you don’t have an ecommerce site or don’t have ecommerce reporting enabled, you
won’t see the ecommerce section in your navigation.

To view reports, click on any of the categories and the reports available within that
category will appear.

Some reports contain additional sub-reports, like the AdWords report under Traffic
Sources.

Click the arrow to see the sub-reports.

Setting The Active Date Range

To change your date range, click the arrow next to the active date range displayed at the
upper right of all reports.

You can then use the Calendar or the Timeline to select a new date range.

The “Calendar” tab allows you to select date ranges by clicking on the day and month
within the calendar or you can type dates in the “Date Range” boxes.

The “Timeline” tab has a date slider that you can resize and move to cover any range of
dates.

You can see your site’s traffic trends in the Timeline.

Setting A Comparison Date Range

You can select a date range to compare to the current selected date range.

When using the Timeline to set a comparison date range, you’ll see two date sliders
instead of just one.

You can use a comparison date range to see how your site is performing month over
month, year over year or even from one day to another.

The date range and comparison date ranges you select will apply to all your reports and
graphs.

Graphic By Day, Week And Month

Most reports include an over-time graph at the top. You can make this graph display
data by day, week, or month.

Multi-Line Graphs
You can also compare two metrics on the same graph to see how they are correlated.

Click the arrow in the top left of the graph.

Then, click the Compare Two Metrics link and select which two metrics you want to
compare.

In this example, we’re graphing visitors versus average time on site.

Graph Roll-Overs
You can roll your mouse over the graph and see actual numbers.

Exporting Report Data

You can export data from any report. There are four formats: PDF, XML, CSV and tab-
separated.

Simply click on the Export button at the top of any report page and select the format you
want.

Email Reports
Next to the Export button, you’ll see an Email button.

Click it and you’ll see a screen with two tabs: Send Now, and Schedule.

You can schedule reports to be delivered daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly.

You also have the option to select what format to send them in, such as PDF or CSV.

The email scheduling feature provides an easy way to automatically distribute specific
report data to the people who need it.

Curriculum Links
The Overview reports in each section contain a set of Curriculum links. You can use
these links to quickly find information that you need.

In some cases, these links access reports that are not available from the left report
navigation.
Title And Breadcrumbs
You can always see where you are in a report hierarchy by looking at the title and the
breadcrumbs at the top of the report.

Look at the example on the slide.

From the title, you can see that you are in the Referring Link report and that you’re
looking at traffic from the link blogger.com/home.
From the breadcrumbs, you can see that you are in the Referring Sites report hierarchy.

You can click on any of the breadcrumb links to go back to that report.

Narratives And Scorecards

Nearly every report contains a short narrative that summarizes the traffic that’s included
in the report.

The scorecard below the narrative provides metric aggregates and averages for the
traffic.

Each box in the scorecard contains a question mark button. Clicking it opens a small
window that explains how the metric is calculated.

Report Tabs
Most reports provide tabs that show different sets of data.

The Site Usage tab shows metrics such as the number of pages viewed per visit, the
average time on site, and the bounce rate.

The Goal Conversion tab shows the conversion rates for each of your goals.

If you’ve enabled ecommerce reporting on your Profile Settings page, you’ll also see an
Ecommerce tab.
This tab shows metrics such as Ecommerce revenue, number of transactions, and
average value.

The AdWords Campaigns reports have an additional tab called Clicks. This tab contains
AdWords related metrics such as clicks, cost, revenue per click and ROI.

Quick Segmentation
You can segment table data in different ways using the Dimension pulldown menu.

So, for example, if you want to see the traffic in your keywords report broken out by
City, you just select City from the pulldown menu.

Keyword Reports
In the Keywords and Search Engines reports, you have the option to analyze just paid,
just non-paid traffic, or all search traffic.

Simply click on the links above the scorecard to make your selection.

Hourly Reporting
Some reports allow you to view results by hour.

On these reports, you can select the view you want by clicking on the clock button in the
top right corner next to “Graph By”.

Report Views
There are five different Views available in most reports. The first icon organizes your
report data into a table. This is the default view for many reports.

The second icon allows you to create a pie-chart based on any one of the metrics in the
report.

The third icon shows a bar-graph based on any metric you select.
The fourth icon is the comparison bar graph view. It allows you to quickly see whether
each entry in the table is performing above or below average.

The fifth icon allows you to instantly see a summary report with graphs for the traffic
you’re analyzing.

Sorting Data
Columns within tables can be sorted in both ascending and descending order simply by
clicking on the column heading.

The arrows next to the heading title indicate the order in which the results are listed.

A down arrow indicates descending order and an upward arrow indicates ascending
order.

Expanding Numbers Of Results Desplayed

By default, all reports with tables display ten rows.

To display more than ten rows, go to the bottom of your report and click the dropdown
menu arrow next to “Show rows”.

You can display up to 500 rows per page.

Find Box
You can use the Find box at the bottom left of your reports to narrow or refine your
results.

For example, if you are looking at the All Traffic Sources report and you want to only see
traffic from the Google domain, you can type in Google and select “containing”.

Or, to exclude all traffic from the Google domain, you would select “excluding”.

Contextual Help Resources

You can get information about any report you’re looking at by clicking one of the Help
Resources.

About this Report offers a brief description of the report.

Conversion University provides insight into how you might use and interpret the data.

Common Questions links to Help Center articles that are related to the report.

Create Context For Your Data

When analyzing your traffic, avoid focusing on just a single metric. This pageviews
result by itself isn’t actionable because you don’t know what the number really means.

But, when you look at pageviews in the context of other metrics, you start to get clearer
picture.

For example, look at the bounce rate. Half of the time that people entered the site
through this page, they left the site without looking at any other pages. This page is very
important. By comparing the pageviews to the site average, we can see that this page
accounts for over 28% of all the pageviews.

How has the performance of this page changed over time?

This page is receiving 20% fewer visits than it did last week and people are spending
10% less time on it. And last week, the bounce rate was only 24% — now it’s double that
number.

So, putting data into context can help us ask the right questions and decide on a course
of action.

Let’s look at another example.

Creating Context With Visualizations

Here we are looking at the Content by Title report.
We’re using the Compare to Site Average visualization to see which pages have
significantly higher bounce rates than the site average.

The bounce rate for the first title is nearly 20% higher than the site average. The red bar
shows that it’s performing worse than the site average.

Looking For Trends

Analyzing trends is another useful way to bring context into your analysis.

The graph on the slide shows us that pageviews peaked in May. Did visits increase or did
each visitor look at more pages?

Investigating Changes In Trends

Using the Graph Mode to compare Visits and Pageviews, we see that Visits and
Pageviews have increased proportionally.

Data Driven Decision Making

Now let’s identify which traffic sources led to the increase in traffic and revenue. We do
this by looking at the All Traffic Sources report and clicking on the Ecommerce tab.

Comparing two days of traffic, we find that — although several sources sent an
increasing number of visitors to the site — only Google organic and Google referral had a
significant impact on revenue.

Therefore, we know that although other campaigns increased overall traffic, they did not
bring in purchasers.

This kind of information can help you decide where to focus your promotion and site
content resources.

Pageview
In Google Analytics, a pageview is counted every time a page on your website loads.
So, for example, if someone comes to your site and views page A, then page B, then Page
A again, and then leaves your site — the total pageviews for the visit is 3.

Visit
A visit — or session — is a period of interaction between a web browser and a website.
Closing the browser or staying inactive for more than 30 minutes ends the visit.

For example, let’s say that a visitor is browsing the Google Store, a site that uses Google
Analytics. He gets to the second page, and then gets a phone call. He talks on the phone
for 31 minutes, during which he does not click anywhere else on the site.

After his call, he continues where he left off. Google Analytics will count this as a second
visit, or a new session.

Note that throughout these modules, the words “visit” and “session” may be used
interchangeably.

Visitor
A visitor is uniquely identified by a Google Analytics visitor cookie which assigns a
random visitor ID to the user, and combines it with the timestamp of the visitor’s first
visit.

The combination of the random visitor ID and the timestamp establish a Unique ID for
that visitor.

You’ll learn more about the visitor cookie in a subsequent module.

Pageviews, Visits, And Visitors – The Basics

Generally, the Visitors metric will be smaller than the Visits metric which in turn will be
smaller than the Pageviews metric.

For example, 1 visitor could visit a site 2 times and generate a total of 5 pageviews.
Pageviews Vs. Unique Pageviews
A pageview is defined as a view of a page that is tracked by the Google Analytics
Tracking Code.

If a visitor hits reload after reaching the page, this will be counted as an additional
pageview.

If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, an additional
pageview will also be recorded.

A unique pageview represents the number of visits during which that page was viewed–
whether one or more times. In other words, if a visitor views page A three times during
one visit, Google Analytics will count this as three pageviews and one unique pageview.

“Absolute Unique” Vs. “New vs. Returning”

The “Absolute Unique Visitors” report counts each visitor during your selected date
range only once. So, if visitor A comes to your site 5 times during the selected date range
and visitor B comes to your site just once, you will have 2 Absolute Unique Visitors.
Remember, a visitor is uniquely identified by a Google Analytics visitor cookie.

The “New vs. Returning” report classifies each visit as coming from either a new visitor
or a returning visitor. So when someone visits your site for the first time, the visit is
categorized as “Visit from a new visitor.” If the person has browsed your website before,
the visit is categorized as “Visit from a returning visitor.”

A high number of new visits suggests that you are successful at driving traffic to your
site while a high number of return visits suggests that the site content is engaging
enough for visitors to come back.

You can look at the Recency report to see how recently visitors have visited. You can
look at the Loyalty report to see how frequently they return. Both the Recency and
Loyalty reports are under Visitor Loyalty in the Visitors section.

Pageviews, Visits, And Visitors In Your report

The Pageviews metric can be found in the Visitors Overview and in the Content section
reports. Most of the other reports show Pages Viewed per Visit instead of Pageviews.

Unique Pageviews is only found in the Content section.

Almost all of the reports show Visits.

The Visitors metric — in other words the number of visitors who came to your site — is
found in the Visitors section.

Time On Page
To calculate Time on Page, Google Analytics compares the timestamps of the visited
pages.

For example, in the slide, the visitor saw page A, then page B, and then left the site.

The Time on Page for page A is calculated by subtracting the page A timestamp from the
page B timestamp.

So, the Time on Page for page A is 1 minute and 15 seconds.

In order for this calculation to take place, the Google Analytics Tracking Code must be
executed on both pages.

The Time on Page for page B is 0 seconds, because there is no subsequent timestamp
that Google Analytics can use to calculate the actual Time on Page.

Time On Site
Now, suppose the visitor continued on to a third page before exiting.

The second page now has a Time on Page of 1 minute 10 seconds.

The Time on Site is now calculated as 2 minutes and 25 seconds.

“Avg. Time On Page” VS “Avg. Time On Site”
For Average Time on Page, bounces are excluded from the calculation. In other words,
any Time on Page of 0 is excluded from the calculation.

For Average Time on Site, bounces remain a part of the calculation.

To calculate Average Time on Site, Google Analytics divides the total time for all visits
by the number of visits.

Flash Based Sites

Some sites make extensive use of Flash or other interactive technologies.

Often, these kinds of sites don’t load new pages frequently and all the user interaction
takes place on a single page.

As a result, it’s common for sites like this to have high bounce rates and low average
times on site.

If you have such a site, you may wish to set up your tracking so that virtual pageviews or
events are generated as the user performs various activities.

You can learn how to do this in the module on Event Tracking and Virtual Pageviews.

“Length Of Visit” VS “Avg. Time On Site”

The Length of Visit report categorizes visits according to the amount of time spent on
the site during the visit.

The graph allows you to visualize the entire distribution of visits instead of simply the
‘Average Time on Site’ across all visits.

You can see whether a few visits are skewing your ‘Average Time on Site’ upward or
downward.

The Length of Visit report can be found under Visitor Loyalty in the Visitors section.
Traffic Sources Reports
The reports in the Traffic Sources section show you where your traffic is coming from on
the internet.

You can compare your traffic sources against each other to find out which sources send
you the highest quality traffic.

Traffic Sources Explained

Direct Traffic represents visitors who clicked on a bookmark to arrive at your site, or
who typed the URL directly into their browser.

Referring Sites include any sites that send traffic to you. These could be banner ads or
links featured on blogs, affiliates, or any site that links to your site.

Search Engine traffic represents visitors who click on a search results link in Google,
Yahoo, or any other search engine.

Search Engine traffic can be organic — in other words, free search results — or paid.

Paid search engine traffic is pay per click or cost per click traffic that you purchase from
a search engine — for example on Google AdWords.

Understanding which search engines send you qualified traffic can help you select the
search engines on which you want to advertise.

What Makes A Good Source Of Traffic?

Looking at the highest traffic drivers is a start, but it doesn’t tell you whether the traffic
was qualified.

In other words, did the traffic help you achieve the goals you’ve set for your site?

One easy indicator of quality is Bounce Rate — the percentage of visits in which the
person left without viewing any other pages.
In the slide, although blogger.com sent the most traffic, it has an 88% bounce rate. A
bounce rate this high suggests that the site isn’t relevant to what the visitor is looking for
By clicking the “compare to site average” icon and selecting a comparison metric, you
can see which sources outperform and underperform the site average.

So here, for example, if we select Bounce Rate as our comparison metric. we can see that
the two most popular sources of traffic underperform the site average.

One note about bounce rate, if your site is a blog, bounce rate may not be relevant. With
blogs, it’s common for people to look at a single page and then leave.

All Traffic Sources

The All Traffic Sources report lists all of the sources sending traffic to your site —
including referrals, search engine traffic, and direct traffic

This report is particularly helpful because you can identify your top performing sources,
regardless of whether they are search engines or sites.

For example, in the report, we see that blogger.com referred more traffic than any other
source. It has a medium of referral because it is a referral from a site.
The second most popular source of traffic was direct. Direct traffic always has a medium
of (none).

Free Google search engine traffic was the fourth largest referrer.

The medium of organic tells us that this traffic came from clicks on unpaid search
engine results.

The medium of cpc on this entry — for cost per click — tells us that this traffic came
from paid search results.

You may sometimes see _referrals_ from google.com. These can come from Google
Groups posts or static pages on other Google sites.
Revenue And Conversion Drivers
If you have goals or ecommerce set up on your site, you have a much wider range of
metrics with which to assess performance.

Click on the Goal Conversion or Ecommerce tabs to view which sources are driving
conversions and purchases.

Keywords Report
The Keywords report is very useful for understanding what visitors were expecting to
find on your site.

Keywords with a high bounce rate tell you where you failed to meet that expectation.

You can isolate your paid search engine traffic by clicking the Paid link.

By doing this, you’ll limit the report to just showing your AdWords traffic and paid
traffic from other search engines.

If you have paid keywords with a high bounce rate, you should evaluate whether your
landing pages are relevant enough and you might also want to consider whether you
should continue to buy those keywords.

Remember, you can use the Goal Conversion and Ecommerce tabs to compare the
performance of keywords in terms of conversions and revenue.

For example, in the slide example, the ‘google kids’ phrase has a 86% bounce rate. Let’s
find out what landing page is being used.

We start by clicking on the ‘google kids’ entry in the table.

Keyword Drilldown
This takes us to the Keyword report for ‘google kids’.

To find out which landing page is being used for this keyword, we’ll select Landing Page
from the Dimension pulldown menu.
Keyword Drilldown
We can now see which landing page is being used and evaluate it’s relevance to the
keyword.

This report can be particularly helpful if multiple landing pages are being used.

You can find out which landing pages are responsible for the poor performance and
send the keyword traffic to the most effective landing page. Be sure to also check the
bounce rates for organic, non-paid keywords. This information can offer insights into
how to best focus your search engine optimization efforts.

Campaign Attribution
As long as you have defined goals and track ecommerce transactions, you can use the
metrics on the Goal Conversion and Ecommerce tabs to assess the performance of any
campaign.

By default, Google Analytics attributes a conversion or sale to the campaign that most
recently preceded the conversion or sale.

For example, if a visitor clicks on an AdWords ad (Campaign 1 in the first session) and
then later returns via a referral to purchase something (Referrer 1 in the second
session), the referral will get credit for the sale.

However, if instead the visitor returns directly, then the AdWords ad (Campaign 1) will
still get credit for the sale.

To prevent a specific referral or campaign from overriding a prior campaign, simply

append “utm_nooverride=1” to all referring campaign links as shown in the slide. This
ensures that the conversion is always attributed to the original referrer (or first
campaign the user clicked on).

Therefore, in the example above, the original campaign will continue to get credit for the
conversion.
If a visitor returns via a link without the utm_nooverride, as in the third example, that
campaign will get credit for the sale since it overwrites all previous referring campaigns.

Top Content, Content By Title, Content Drilldown

The first three reports listed in the Content section all show the same information, but
each report organizes it differently.

The Top Content report lists each page that received traffic.

The Content by Title report groups your pages according to Title tag. You can click on a
title to see the pages that share that title.

The Content Drilldown report groups pages according to directory. You can click on a
directory to see the pages in the directory.

Why Am I Seeing “/” In My Reports?

Pages in your Content reports are represented by their “request URIs”, which is the part
of the URL after the domain name.

So, a forward slash represents your home page.

When you create your profile, you should specify the name of your homepage as the
Default page.

That way, instead of having forward slash show up in your reports, you’ll see your
homepage URI instead.

Top Landing Pages

The Top Landing Pages report lists all of the pages through which people entered your
site.

You can use this report to monitor the number of bounces and the bounce rate for each
landing page.
Bounce rate is good indicator of landing page relevance and effectiveness.

You can lower bounce rates by tailoring each landing page to its associated ads and
referral links.

The more relevant the page, the less likely a visitor will be to bounce.

Navigation Summary
Navigation Analysis reports can help you understand how people move through your
site.

The reports are listed on the Content Overview page.

They’re also available from a pulldown menu when you drill down to a page detail
report.

The first of these — Navigation Summary — can help you see how people arrived at a
specific page and where they went afterwards.

Navigation Summary
Here’s the Navigation Summary report.

Percent Entrances shows how frequently the page was a landing page.

Percent Previous Pages shows how frequently visitors came to the page after viewing
another page on the site.

Percent Exits shows how frequently visits ended on this page.

Percent Next Pages shows how frequently visitors continued on to another page on the
site.

The list of pages that were viewed immediately before the page or pages is shown in the
left column.
The list of pages that were viewed immediately after the page or pages is shown in the
right column.

Why Are “Previous Page” And “Next Page” The Same?

Sometimes the Previous Page, the Next Page, and the page you are analyzing are all the
same page. This can be caused by visitors hitting the refresh button multiple times and
generating “self-referring” hits.

It can also be caused, for example, if the page has graphics that the visitor can click to
enlarge.

Here’s what happens. The visitor views the page and Google Analytics registers a
pageview. Then the visitor clicks on a graphic and views the enlarged graphic file.

This does not result in a pageview because the enlarged graphic file doesn’t have the
Google Analytics Tracking Code. The visitor then clicks the back button, which registers
another pageview.

If there are many images on the page, it’s possible that the visitor will click on each
graphic.

This scenario will cause the Previous, current, and Next page to all be identical.

Entrance Path Reports

The Entrance Paths report is a powerful tool for analyzing navigation paths.

For example, let’s say that you want to find out whether people clicked the Purchase
button on your landing page and actually completed the purchase.

To find out, go to the Top Landing Pages report and click the landing page you want to
analyze.

Once you are on the Content Detail report for the page, click the Entrance Paths link as
shown in the slide.
Analyzing A Landing Page Using Entrance Paths
You’ll now see the Entrance Paths report for your landing page.

In the middle column, you’ll see all the possible clicks people made on the page. Choose
the link that represents the Purchase page.

In the right hand column, you’ll now see all the pages visitors went to after the Purchase
page. By looking at this list, you’ll be able to see how many visits ended up on the
Purchase Completion page.

This report can show you if the landing page is doing the job you designed it for.

Additional Content Reports And Drill-Down

You can use the “Analyze” drop-down menu to view additional reports such as Entrance
Sources and Entrance Keywords.

The “Content” drop down menu allows you to select — or search for — specific pages to
analyze.

Analytics Account
If you have access to multiple Analytics accounts, you can access each account from the
My Analytics Account drop-down list.

For example, if other administrators have added you to their accounts, you’ll see a list of
those accounts in the drop down.

Creating A New Account

The last option in the drop-down is “Create New Account” – this is how you would
create a new analytics account under the login that you are currently using.

So, when should you create a new account? If you manage the analytics services for
several websites which belong to different organizations, you’ll generally want to create
a new account for each organization. We’ll discuss this best practice in a few minutes.
You are permitted to create up to 25 analytics accounts per Google username. However,
you can be added as an administrator to an unlimited number of accounts.

If you’re using Analytics from your AdWords account, you won’t see this drop-down.
You’ll only see it if you are signed in from google.com/analytics.
User Manager
To give other users access to your Google Analytics account, you use the User Manager,
which you can access here from the Analytics Settings page. Inside the User Manager,
you can view all of the users who currently have access to your account.

“Administrators” And “Users”

There are two types of Google Analytics users. “Administrators” have access to all
reports and they can also modify Analytics settings.

So, Administrators can create profiles, filters, and goals, and they can add users.

Users only have read access to your reports and they can’t modify analytics settings.
Also, “Users” can be restricted to viewing only specific profiles.

Add/Delete Users And Edit User Info

You use the User Manager to add new users, remove users, and edit user information.

Adding A New User

After clicking “Add Users” a screen that looks like this will appear. Enter the user
information in the form.

In order for you to add a new user, they must have a Google Account.

If they don’t have a Google Account, ask them to create one at google.com/accounts. Use
the access type dropdown to select the level of access you want to give the new user.
You can either grant read-only access to certain reports or you can make them an
administrator. Remember that administrators can view all reports and modify account
settings.
Granting Access To A User
If you select the “View Reports Only”, the interface will show you a list of all profiles
associated with your account.

Select the profiles you would like this user to have access to and click the “Add” button
to apply your changes.

Modifying Access
To edit the access settings for an existing user, go to the User Manager and click Edit
next to the user. You can change their Access Type, and you can add or remove access to
specific profiles.

Select the profiles you would like to remove report access to and click on the “Remove”
button.

Managing Access And Accounts

Remember that an administrator has full administrative access to all profiles within the
account.

If you manage the analytics services for several websites which belong to different
organizations, the best practice is to create a separate Analytics account for each
organization.

Otherwise, if you were to group all the websites of all the different organizations into a
single account, any Administrators you created on the account would have access to all
the reports for all the websites.

Not only would the administrators be able to see the reports of other organizations,
they’d also be able to change analytics settings on profiles that don’t belong to them.

This raises the potential for an Administrator to accidentally edit — or even delete —
another organization’s settings and data.

Changing Your E-mail Login Address

If you want to change your e-mail login, create a new Google account. Add your new
login as an administrator to your Google Analytics account.

Profiles
On your Analytics Settings page, you can see a list of the profiles that belong to the
account you’ve selected. You’ll generally have a separate profile for every domain that
you track.

You might also have profiles that correspond to subdomains. Or you might set up a
profile that only includes data for a filtered subset of traffic of one of your domains.

Profiles are very flexible — they are basically just a set of rules that define what data is to
be included in the reports.

Using Profiles
Here are some typical examples of profiles you might set up:

You might have a profile that only contains traffic data for a specific subdomain.

You might have a profile that tracks only a certain part of a site or that only tracks a
certain kind of traffic.

And you might have profiles each of which has a separate set of reports. You could give
some users access to one of these profiles and other users access to another profile.

The result would be that each user would only see reports that apply to them.

Profiles
A profile consists of settings that define the reports that you see. These include user
access, goals, and filter settings.

When you create a profile, you have the option of creating a profile for a new domain or
an existing domain.
Here is a schematic showing an Analytics account with three profiles. The first two
profiles are tracking domain A, and the third profile is tracking domain B.

Notice the tracking code number for each profile. The longer number, represented by
Xs, is the Google Analytics account number–all three profiles have the same account
number.

Next you see that Profiles 1 and 2 each have a “dash 1”, while Profile 3 has a “dash 2.”
This smaller number is the property number.

Profiles 1 and 2 are tracking the same domain and have the same property number. They
can be referred to as “duplicate profiles.”

Profile 3 is tracking a different domain, and has a different property number.

Now you may wonder, why would I create duplicate profiles?

You might want to apply filters to your duplicate profile so that it contains a subset of
data. So, for example, you might filter the data in Profile 2 so that it only includes
AdWords visitors to

domain A. In addition, you might want to give certain users access only to Profile 2. This
has the effect of only allowing these users to see AdWords traffic to domain A.

Adding A New Profile

You’ll need to be an Administrator to add a new profile.

To add a new profile, go to the Analytics Settings page and click the Add Website Profile
link. Then, in the screen that appears, select the Add a profile for a new domain.

Enter the URL for the web property and click Finish.

Edit Profile
To edit a profile, click the “Edit” settings link for the profile on the Analytics Settings
page. You must be an Administrator in order to edit a profile.

Using the edit link next to “Main Website Profile information,” you can configure
various profile settings such as the default page, e-commerce reporting, and site search
tracking.

You can also configure the profile to exclude query string parameters such as session
IDs from the URLs that appear in the report interface.

Removing Profiles
To remove a profile, you can simply click the Delete link next to the profile on the
Analytics Settings page. You’ll need to be an Administrator to do this.

Be careful that you are deleting the correct profile, because you won’t be able to recover
the historical data for the profile once it’s been deleted.

Analyzing All Marketing Campaigns

Google Analytics allows you to track and analyze all of your marketing campaigns —
including paid search campaigns, banner ads, emails and other programs.

How To Track Your Campaigns

There are two ways to track your campaigns.

For AdWords campaigns, you can enable keyword autotagging which allows Google
Analytics to automatically populate your reports with click, cost, and other data for
every keyword you buy.

In order to enable autotagging, you’ll need to link your AdWords and Google Analytics
accounts; we’ll look at this in more detail in the next slide.

The second way to track campaigns is to manually tag links. So, for example, you could
tag the links in an email message with campaign-identifying information. You may also
choose to manually tag AdWords links if you do not wish to enable autotagging.
The tags are campaign variables that you append to the end of your URLs.

Linking AdWords To Analytics

By linking Google Analytics to your AdWords account, you can get advanced reporting
that measures performance and ROI for your AdWords campaigns.

Within AdWords, click the Analytics tab to link your accounts. The AdWords login that
you’re using will need administrator privileges in Analytics in order to link the accounts.

If you don’t already have an Analytics account, you can click the Analytics tab and create
one.

By default, “Destination URL Autotagging” and “Apply Cost Data” will be selected when
you link your accounts. We recommend that you leave both options selected.

The, “Destination URL Autotagging” option allows you to differentiate your paid ads
from organic search listings and referrals.

You can choose to tag your AdWords keywords manually if you decide not to take
advantage of this feature.

However, note that if you manually tag your AdWords campaigns, you won’t see Ad
Group data in your reports.

The, “Apply Cost Data” option imports cost data into your AdWords reports so that you
can see metrics such as clicks, impressions and ROI in your Analytics reports.

By leaving both options selected, you get the AdWords performance data you need to
analyze and optimize your AdWords campaigns.

When you apply cost data from AdWords to Analytics – by default, every profile within
that Analytics account will receive ALL AdWords data.

Be aware that you can only link one Analytics account to one AdWords account.
For administration purposes, you will want to create a new Analytics account for each
associated AdWords account.

Note that once you have linked an Analytics and AdWords account – the time zone in
Google Analytics will automatically take that of the AdWords Account (if they are
different).

Why Autotagging?
Autotagging your links is important because it helps Analytics differentiate the traffic
coming from Google paid listings, outlined in green on the slide, and traffic coming from
Google organic listings, which are outlined in red.

If autotagging is not enabled, your Analytics reports will show that the clicks from the
sponsored listings and the organic listings are both coming from the same source:
google organic.

By default, Analytics considers them both to be from Google organic search results.

So, enabling autotagging allows you to see which referrals to your site came from your
paid Google campaigns and which ones came from Google organic search results.

How Does Autotagging Work?

Autotagging works by adding a unique id, or g-c-l-i-d, to the end of your destination
URLs.

This unique id allows Analytics to track and display click details in your reports.

It is important to note that 3rd party redirects and encoded URLs can prevent
autotagging from working properly.

You should test these cases by adding a unique parameter to the end of your URL — for
example you could add ?test=test.
Test to make sure that the parameter is carried through to your destination page and
that the link doesn’t break.

Notice that the first query parameter is always preceded with a question mark.
Consequent values are separated using ampersands.

How To Enable Autotagging

To enable autotagging, go to the “My Account” tab within your AdWords interface.

Under “Account Preferences” you’ll see the “Tracking” option. Make sure that this reads
“yes”. If it says “no”, click the edit link, check the box for “Destination URL
Autotagging”, and click “Save Changes”.

When linking your AdWords account to Analytics for the first time, you’ll be prompted
to automatically select “Destination URL Autotagging” and “Cost Data Import”.

If you want to change your autotagging settings later, you can do so by editing your
AdWords account preferences.

Importing Cost Data From AdWords

To import cost data into your Analytics account, go to the “Analytics” tab within your
AdWords interface.

Under “Profile Settings”, select “Edit Profile Information”. At the bottom of the screen
you’ll see an “Apply Cost Data” checkbox.

Make sure that this box is checked.

Currently, it’s only possible to import cost data from AdWords.

Make sure both your AdWords and Analytics accounts are set to the same currency so
that ROI data is accurately calculated.

View AdWords Data In Your Reports

Applying cost data to your Analytics account allows you to view your AdWords click,
cost, and impression data in your Google Analytics reports.

This data is found on the “Clicks” tab of your AdWords Campaigns reports.

Data Discrepancies: Expected Behavior

You may notice differences between the data in your Google Analytics and AdWords
reports. There are several reasons for these differences.

First, AdWords tracks clicks, while Analytics tracks visits. Second, some visitors who
click on your AdWords ads may have JavaScript, cookies, or images turned off.

As a result, Analytics won’t report these visits, but AdWords will report the click.

You’ll also see differences between Analytics and AdWords if the Google Analytics
Tracking Code on your landing page doesn’t execute.

In this case, AdWords will report the click but Analytics will not record the visit.

Invalid clicks may also cause reporting differences because while Google AdWords
automatically filters invalid clicks from your reports, Google Analytics will still report
the visits.

Finally, keep in mind that AdWords data is uploaded once a day to Analytics so the
results for each may be temporarily out of sync. Stay on the lookout for these common
issues.

Make sure that your landing pages contain the Google Analytics Tracking Code. If they
don’t, campaign information will not be passed to Analytics, but clicks will register in
AdWords.

If you have disabled autotagging, make sure that you manually tag your Destination
URLs with campaign tracking variables. Otherwise, visits will be marked as Google
Organic instead of Google CPC.
Finally, be aware that campaign data can be lost if your site uses redirects. As a result,
Analytics won’t show the visits as coming from AdWords, but your AdWords report will
still report the clicks.

Tracking Online Marketing

Google Analytics automatically tracks all of the referrals and search queries that send
traffic to your website.

However, if you are running paid advertising campaigns, you should add tags to the
destination URL of your ads.

Adding a tag allows you to attach information about the campaign that will show up in
your Analytics reports.

Again, adding tags is not necessary in AdWords if you have enabled autotagging.

If you have not enabled autotagging, you can add tags, but keep in mind that even if you
add your own tags, you won’t see any Ad Group information from AdWords.

Manual URL Tagging

There are five variables you can use when tagging URLs. To tag a URL, you add a
question mark to the end of the URL, followed by your tag, as shown in the slide.

The variables and values are listed as pairs separated by an equals sign. Each variable-
value pair is separated by an ampersand.

Let’s look at each variable.

You should use utm_source to identify the specific website or publication that is sending
the traffic.

Use utm_medium to identify the kind of advertising medium — for example, cpc for cost
per click, or email for an email newsletter.
Use utm_campaign to identify the name of the campaign — for example, this could be
the product name or it might be a slogan.

You should always use these three variables when tagging a link. You can use them in
any order you want.

If you’re manually tagging paid keyword campaigns, you should also use utm_term to
specify the keyword.

And, you can differentiate versions of a link — for example, if you have two call-to-action
links within the same email message, you can use utm_content to differentiate them so
that you can tell which version is most effective.
Example 1: Tag VS NoTag
To illustrate, let’s look at a two versions of a link to mysite.com, both placed
onyoursite.com .
The first link in the slide does not have a tag. Traffic from this link will show up in your
reports as a referral from yoursite.com. There won’t be any campaign information.

The second link has a tag. Traffic from this link will show up with a source of yoursite,
and it will show as a banner, instead of a referral.

Also, you’ll see this traffic reflected under summerpromo in your Campaigns report,
whereas traffic from the first link will be grouped under (not set).

Example 2: Paid Keywords (PPC)

Let’s look at a destination URL from an AdWords ad.

In the first example, no tag has been provided and autotagging is disabled. In this case,
you won’t see this traffic in your AdWords reports.

The second example shows how to manually tag an AdWords link. This traffic will show
up in your AdWords reports, but there will be no Ad Group information.
You must specify cpc as your medium and google as your source in order to see this
traffic in your AdWords reports. You should also specify cpc as your medium when
tagging paid search campaigns from other search engines.

The third example shows what an AdWords autotagged URL might look like once
AdWords has appended the g-c-l-i-d variable to the end of the URL.

This traffic will show up in your AdWords reports and you’ll see complete Campaign, Ad
Group, and keyword information.

Where Is The Campaign Information Reflected?

Let’s look at where information from each of the tags shows up in your reports.

Source
You can see all the sources in the All Traffic Sources report. This report will include not
only all the sources you tagged, but also sources like “direct” and website names.

Medium
You can see also see traffic by medium in the All Traffic Sources report. In addition to all
the mediums you tagged, you’ll also see mediums such as “referral” and “organic”.

Campaign
Campaigns will appear in the Campaigns report. You’ll also see manually tagged
AdWords campaigns in the AdWords Campaigns report.

In order for a campaign to show up in AdWords Campaigns, you’ll need to have tagged
the associated links with a medium of cpc and a source of google.

Term
Terms that you’ve used will show up in the Keywords report and — for any links that
were tagged with a medium of cpc and a source of google — also in the AdWords
Keywords report.
You access the AdWords Keywords report by drilling down from the AdWords
Campaigns report.

Note that the AdWords keyword that *triggered* the ad will display in your Analytics
report, rather than the original search query entered by the user.

For example, if your paid keyword is “shoes” and a visitor arrives at your site by
searching for “men’s shoes,” the AdWords keyword report will only display “shoes” since
the broad match or phrase is not captured.

Content
Your content tags will show up in the Ad Versions report, along with the ad headlines
from autotagged AdWords traffic.

You can also segment on any of these variables.

For example, to see all of the campaigns in California from which you received traffic,
you could to to the Map Overlay report, drill down to California, and segment by
Campaign.

The URL Builder

You can use the URL Builder in the Google Analytics Help Center to construct your
URLs.

You enter in the destination URL and the values for each campaign variable. You should
always use source, medium and campaign name.

The URL Builder can be found via the link displayed here on the slide, or you can search
for “URL Builder” in the Analytics Help Center.

The URL builder can only construct one URL at a time, so you probably won’t want to
use it to construct every URL for every campaign.

Generating URLs
If you have a large number of URLs to tag, you can use spreadsheets to automate the
process.

Generate a sample URL in the URL Builder and create a simple spreadsheet formula.

Spreadsheets can make it much easier to generate thousands of tagged URLs.

Best Practices For Tagging Links

Stick to these best practices when tagging your advertising campaigns.

If you’ve enabled autotagging, don’t manually tag your AdWords destination URLs.

Second, for each campaign, use the URL Builder to create a template URL. Then, copy
and paste from the template to create the rest of the URLs for the campaign.

Third, use consistent names and spellings for all your campaign values so that they are
recorded consistently within your Analytics reports

Finally, use only the campaign variables you need. You should always use source,
medium, and campaign name, but term and content are optional.

AdWords Campaigns Report

AdWords-related reports are listed under AdWords in the Traffic Sources section.

The AdWords Campaigns report, which is the first one listed, contains performance
metrics for your AdWords keyword ads. This report is actually the top level of a
hierarchy of reports.

By clicking one of of the Campaigns in the table, you drill down to the Ad Groups report
which lists all of the Ad Groups in that Campaign.

Click one the Ad Groups and you drill down to the AdWords Keywords report which lists
all of the keywords in that Ad Group.
Clicks Tab
The AdWords Campaigns reports are unique in that they provide an extra tab labeled
Clicks. The Click metrics are extremely useful for optimizing AdWords spending.

Let’s look at the first three.

Visits is the number of visits your site received from AdWords keyword campaigns.

Impressions is the number of times your ads were displayed.

Clicks shows the number of clicks for which you paid and which your ads received.

It’s normal for Visits and Clicks to show different numbers. In this case, we have fewer
Clicks than Visits. The reason is that some visitors clicked on the ad, and then later,
during a different session, returned directly to the site through a bookmark. The referral
information from the original visit was retained, so some clicks resulted in multiple
visits.

If you have fewer Visits than Clicks, you may not have the Google Analytics Tracking
Code correctly installed on all your landing pages. It’s also possible that some visitors
clicked away from your website or stopped that landing page from loading before the
tracking code was executed. Also, your visitors must have JavaScript, images, and
cookies enabled in their browsers in order to be tracked. However, AdWords will still be
able to register clicks from these visitors.

How Many Times Were Ads Displayed And Clicked?

Impressions, Clicks, Cost, and CTR — or Click Through Rate — all relate to how many
times your ads were displayed and how frequently people clicked on them.

These metrics can help you understand how visible and compelling your ads are to
searchers on these keywords.

For example, if you want a higher clickthrough rate, you might consider bidding for a
higher position or rewriting your ad so that it is more relevant to the searcher.
If you are getting all zeros in the cost column, make sure you’ve linked to your AdWords
account and that you’ve enabled autotagging.

Which Keywords Are Profitable?

Revenue per Click, Return on Investment, and Margin can help you assess keyword
profitability.

For example, ROI is useful because it provides a single-metric comparison of how much
you spent versus how much you made.

An ROI of 0% means that you earned in revenue the same amount of money you spent.

An ROI of 100% means that you spent, say $5, and made $10.

In other words, you spent X and received 2X in revenue.

It’s not uncommon to get 500% or even 1000% ROI. High ROIs simply indicate that
your Revenue is many times greater than your Cost.

If your RPC numbers are all 0 and your ROI numbers are all -100%, it’s because you
have 0 Revenue.

Make sure that you’ve set goal values or that you’ve enabled e-commerce tracking.

ROI And Short Date Ranges

Before you delete or pause negative ROI keywords, consider how much you’ve spent and
whether you have enough data yet to make a decision.

In particular, watch out for short date ranges. It’s generally not a good idea to make
keyword changes on the basis of a few days worth of data.

Consider return customers — those that find the site via an AdWords ad and then return
later to buy again. You’ll miss repeat conversions if you set too short of a date range.
Also, it may take days or longer for many of visitors to become customers. So, set a date
range that is at least as long as your expected sales cycle.

How Does Ad Position Affect Performance?

If you want to see how ad position affected keyword performance, you can use the
Keyword Positions report to find out.

The keywords are listed on the left and you can use the dropdown menu above the list to
sort them.

Then, select the keyword you want to analyze and you’ll see how it performed in each ad
position for the metric you select.

For example, in the slide, we’re comparing ad positions based on pages viewed per visit.

The Side 1 position for this keyword referred visitors who looked at an average of
between 20 and 21 pages, and the Side 8 position referred visitors who looked at an
average of between 17 and 18 pages.

TV Campaigns
You can upload your TV ad—a video file—to your AdWords account and start a
campaign on nationwide TV.

You specify the time of day and week, audience demographic, and type of program you’d
like to target.

Once you’ve set up your TV campaign, you can track it using the TV Campaigns report.

You can drill down into specific TV campaigns and see the impressions delivered,
number of ad airings, cost and CPM alongside your metrics like visits, time on site, and
conversions.

For example, this screenshot shows website visits plotted against impressions delivered
— the number of active TVs tuned to your commercial.
Looking at your web traffic metrics alongside your TV campaign metrics can help you
optimize your TV campaigns.

Audio Campaigns
With Google Audio Ads, you can buy and manage both local and national radio
campaigns on over 1600 radio stations — all from your AdWords account.

Once your Audio Ads campaigns are running, you can use the Audio Campaigns report
to track them.

You can drill down into specific Audio campaigns and also Audio DMA’s — Designated
Market Areas.

You can see the impressions delivered, number of ad airings, cost and CPM alongside
metrics like visits, time on site, and conversions.

You can conduct a before and after campaign analysis to see incremental lift and assess
whether certain campaigns or markets are impacting better than others.

This screenshot shows website visits plotted against impressions delivered.

By looking at website metrics alongside your Audio s, you can learn what is working best
and optimize your campaigns accordingly.

How Well Does Each Ad Perform?

Although it’s not listed under AdWords, The Ad Versions report can help you optimize
your keyword ads.

Assuming that you’ve enabled autotagging, you’ll see an entry in the table for each of
your ad headlines.

You can compare site usage, goal conversions, and ecommerce performance for each ad
— although there is no Clicks tab, so you won’t be able to see metrics like ROI and
clickthrough rate.
A limitation of this report is that it can only differentiate ads based on the headline. But
if each of your ads has a distinct headline, you’ll see an entry for each ad.

Also, note that if you’ve any tagged links with the utm_content variable, you’ll see traffic
from those links in this report as well.

Goals
Defining site goals and tracking goal conversions is one of the best ways to assess how
well your site meets its business objectives. You should always try to define at least one
goal for a website.

So what is a goal? A goal can be any activity on your website that’s important to the
success of your business.

For example, an account signup is a goal. A request for a sales call is another example of
a goal.

To define a goal in Google Analytics, you specify the page that visitors see once they have
completed the activity.

For an account sign-up, you might set the “Thank You for signing up” page as a goal.

Goals In Reports
Each time that a visitor sees the page you defined as a goal, a conversion is recorded.

You can see total conversions and conversion rates for each of your goals in your
reports.
Funnels
For each goal that you define, you can also define a funnel. A funnel is the set of steps ,
or pages, that you expect visitors to visit on their way to complete the conversion.

A sales checkout process is a good example of a funnel. And the page where the visitor
enters credit card information is an example of one of the funnel steps.
So, the goal page signals the end of the activity — such as a “thank you” or
“confirmation” page — and the funnel steps are the pages that visitors encounter on
their way to the goal.

Why Define Funnels?

Defining a funnel is valuable because it allows you to see where visitors enter and exit
the conversion process.

For example, if you notice that many of your visitors never go further than the “Enter
shipping information” page, you might focus on redesigning that page so that it’s
simpler.

Knowing which steps in the process lose would-be customers allows you to eliminate
bottlenecks and create a more efficient conversion path.

Setting Up Goals
To set up a goal, first go the Analytics Settings page and edit the the profile for which
you want to configure a goal.

Goal And Funnel Set-Up

Once you are on the Profile Settings page, look for the “Conversion Goals and Funnel”
section.

Select a goal and click Edit. You can create up to 4 goals for each profile.

Entering Goal And Funnel Information

Next, enter the URL of the goal page. You don’t have to enter the entire URL. You can
simply enter the request URI – that’s what comes after the domain or hostname.

So, if the complete URL is www.googlestore.com/confirmation.php, you only need to

enter /confirmation.php.
Make sure that the URL you enter corresponds to a page that the visitor will only see
once they complete the conversion activity. So, pick something like the Thank You page
or a confirmation page for your goal.
You can also enter a name for the Goal — here we’ve entered “Completed Order”. This
name will appear in your conversion reports.

Defining a funnel is optional. To define your funnel steps, you add the URLs of the pages
leading up to the goal URL. Just as with goals, you don’t have to enter the entire URL of
a funnel step — just the request URI is fine.

Provide a name for each step in the funnel — here we’ve entered “Select gift card “ for
Step 1. The names you enter will appear in your reports.

Next, we’ll talk about the Match Type setting.

Goal URL Match Types

The match type defines how Google Analytics identifies a goal or funnel step. You have
three choices for the Match Type option.

“Head Match” is the default. It indicates that the URL of the page visited must match
what you enter for the Goal URL, but if there is any additional data at the end of their
URL then the goal will still be counted. For example, some websites append a product
ID or a visitor ID or some other parameter to the end of the URL. Head Match will
ignore these.

Here’s another example, illustrated on this slide: If you want every page in a
subdirectory to be counted as a goal, then you could enter the subdirectory as the goal
and select Head Match.

“Exact Match” means that the URL of the page visited must exactly match what you
enter for the Goal URL. In contrast to Head Match, which can be used to match every
page in a subdirectory, Exact Match can only be used to match one single page. Also
notice that Exact Match does not match the second pageview, “/offer1/signup.html?
query=hats” because of the extra query parameter at the end.

“Regular Expression Match” gives you the most flexibility. For example, if you want to
count any sign-up page as a goal, and sign-up pages can occur in various subdirectories,
you can create a regular expression that will match any sign-up page in any
subdirectory. Regular Expressions will be covered in a later module.

When you use Regular Expression Match, the value you enter as the goal URL as well as
each of the funnel steps will be read as a Regular Expression.

Remember that regardless of which option you choose, Google Analytics is only
matching Request URIs. In other words, the domain name is ignored.

”Case Sensitive” Settings

Check “Case Sensitive” if you want the URLs you entered into your goal and funnel to
exactly match the capitalization of visited URLs.

Goal Value
The “Goal Value” field allows you to specify a monetary value for goal. You should only
do this for non-ecommerce goals.

By setting a goal value, you make it possible for Google Analytics to calculate metrics
like average per-visit-value and ROI. These metrics will help you measure the monetary
value of a non-ecommerce site.

Just think about how much each goal conversion is worth to your business. So, for
example, if your sales team can close sales on 10% of the people who request to be
contacted via your site, and your average transaction is $500, you might assign $50 or
10% of $500 to your “Contact Me” goal.

Again, to avoid inflating revenue results, you should only provide values for non-
ecommerce goals.

Goal Conversions VS Transactions

There is an important difference between goal conversions and e-commerce
transactions.
A goal conversion can only happen once during a visit, but an e-commerce transaction
can occur multiple times during a visit.

Let’s say that you set one of your goals to be a PDF download and you define it such that
any PDF download is a valid goal conversion. And let’s say that the goal is worth $5.

In this case, if a visitor comes to your site and downloads 5 PDF files during a single
session, you’ll only get one conversion worth $5. However, if you were to track each of
these downloads as a $5 e-commerce transaction, you would see 5 transactions and $25
in e-commerce revenue. You’ll learn how to set up ecommerce tracking and how to track
PDF downloads in later modules.

Profiles And Goal Tracking

You can have up to 4 goals for each profile. If you want to track additional goals, just set
up duplicate profiles.

Filters And Goal Settings

If you are using a filter that manipulates the Request URI, make sure that your goal is
defined so that it reflects the changed Request URI field.

For example, in the slide, we have a profile that defines /thankyou.html as a goal. But
we have another profile with a filter that appends the hostname to the Request URI.

So, for this profile, we need to change the goal definition accordingly.

Funnel Reporting
If you define a funnel for a goal, Google Analytics populates the Funnel Visualization
report, shown here in the slide.

On the left, you can see how visitors enter your funnel. On the right, you can see where
they leave the funnel and where they go.

The middle shows you how visitors progress through the funnel — how many of them
continue on to each step.
In this example, we can see that there were 9,283 entrances at the top of the funnel and
187 completed orders, at the bottom of the funnel. This report is very useful for
identifying the pages from which visitors abandon your conversion funnel.

Reverse Goal Path Reporting

Here’s another report in the Goals section. It’s the Reverse Goal Path report. You can see
this data even if you haven’t defined a funnel. It lists the navigation paths that visitors
took to arrive at a goal page and shows you the number of conversions that resulted
from each path.

In this example, we can see that 96 of the conversions — or about 15% of them —
resulted from the first navigation path that’s shown.

This is a great report for identifying funnels that you hadn’t considered before and it can
give you great ideas for designing a more effective site.

Funnel Visualization Report

If you define a funnel for a goal, Google Analytics populates the Funnel Visualization
report, shown here in the slide.

On the left, you can see how visitors enter your funnel. On the right, you can see where
they leave the funnel and where they go. The middle shows you how visitors progress
through the funnel, how many of them continue on to each step.

In this example, we can see that there were 9,283 entrances at the top of the funnel and
187 completed orders at the bottom of the funnel.

This report is very useful for identifying the pages from which visitors abandon your
conversion funnel.

Finding The Report And Selecting A Goal

To find the Funnel Visualization report, look in the Goals section.
Once you are in the report, you can select the goal you want to analyze from the Select
Goal drop-down menu.

Funnel Entrance Pages

The boxes along the left side of the funnel show the pages from which visitors entered
the funnel.

(entrance) shows the number of times that the funnel page was a landing page.

In this example, 11,514 visitors came to the View Product Categories page from the home
page.

Funnel Exit Pages

The boxes on the right show where visitors went when they abandoned the funnel.

For each step, you can see the pages that visitors went to.

(exit) means that the person not only abandoned the funnel but also left your site. In
this example, there were 1,423 funnel exits from the View Product Categories page that
went to the software.asp page.

Progressing Through The Funnel

In this example, only 29% of visits to the View Shopping Cart page actually proceeded to
the login page.

The remaining 2,418 times, the person either left the funnel for another page or left the
site entirely.

This data is valuable because you can use it to see what pages of your site may need to be
altered.

For instance, in this example, you might want to improve the design of the the “View
Shopping Cart” page so that more visitors log in and continue.
You can also see that only 41% of visits to the Login page continue on to the Place Order
page. So, the Login page may also need improvements.

Understanding The Numbers

Let’s look at all the numbers in the report.

Here is the number of funnel entrances to the first step of the funnel.

Here is the number of funnel abandonments that occurred from this step.

Here is the number and percentage of funnel entrances that continued on to the next
step.

Here is the number of funnel entrances to the second step of the funnel.

Here is the number of visits to the second funnel step. It includes those who proceeded
from the first step and those who entered the funnel at this step.

Here is the number and percentage of visits to the second funnel step that continued on
to the next step.

Filters
Google Analytics filters provide you with an extremely flexible way of defining what data
is included in your reports and how it appears.

You can use them to customize your reports so that data that you deem useful is
highlighted in interesting ways. Filters can also help you clean up your data so that it is
easier to read.

There are two types of filters in Google Analytics – predefined filters and custom filters.

You can use the Filter manager to create new filters, to edit their settings, and to delete
them.
To apply filters to a profile, you edit the profile.

How Do Filters Work?

Filters process your raw traffic data based on the filter specifications. The filtered data is
then sent to the respective profile.

Once data has been passed through a filter, Google cannot re-process the raw data.

That’s why we always recommend that you maintain one unfiltered profile so that you
always have access to all of your data.

How To Set-Up Filters?

Filters process your raw traffic data based on the filter specifications. The filtered data is
then sent to the respective profile.

Once data has been passed through a filter, Google cannot re-process the raw data.

That’s why we always recommend that you maintain one unfiltered profile so that you
always have access to all of your data.
Predefined Filters
Google Analytics provides three commonly used predefined filters — you’ll see these
filters under the “Filter Type” drop-down when you are creating your filters.

The first filter called “Exclude all traffic from a domain” excludes traffic from the
domain that you specify in the Domain field directly below the Filter Type dropdown. If
you apply this filter, Google Analytics will apply a reverse lookup with each visitor’s IP
address to determine if the visitor is coming in from a domain that should be filtered
out. Domains usually represent the ISP of your visitor although larger companies
generally have their IP addresses mapped to their domain name.

The second filter, “Exclude all traffic from an IP address”, removes traffic from
addresses entered into the IP address field. This filter is generally used to exclude your
internal company traffic.
The third filter, “Include only traffic to a subdirectory”, causes your profile to only report
traffic to a specified directory on your site. This is typically used on a profile that is
created to track one part of a website.

Best Practices For Filters

As a best practice, we recommend that you create a filter to exclude your internal
company traffic from your reports.

To do this you can use the predefined filter type called “Exclude all traffic from an IP
address”. You will need to enter your IP address or range of addresses into the ‘IP
address” field.

Creating Custom Filters

In addition to the three pre-defined filters that Analytics offers, you can also create
custom filters for your profiles.

Custom filters offer you greater control over what data appears in your profiles.

To create a custom filter, select “Custom filter” from the “Filter Type” drop-down.
Additional fields will appear when you choose this option.

Custom Filters
Each custom filter has three main parts.

The first part of a custom filter is “Filter Types”. There are six filter types available and
each one serves a specific purpose. We’ll look at these in a minute.

The second part is the “Filter Field”. There are numerous fields you can use to create
your filter. Examples of some commonly used fields are the “Request URI” and “Visitor
Country” fields.

The complete list of fields can be found through the link shown here or you can search
for “filter fields” in the Analytics Help Center.
The third part of a custom filter is the “Filter Pattern”. This is the text string that is used
to attempt to match pageview data. The pattern that you provide is applied to the field
and, if it matches any part of the field, it returns a positive result and causes an action to
occur. You’ll need to use POSIX Regular Expressions to create the filter pattern. Learn
more in the module on Regular Expressions.

Filter Types
Here’s a chart that describes the filter types.

Exclude and Include filters are the most common types. They allow you to segment your
data in many different ways. They’re frequently used to filter out or filter in traffic from
a particular state or country.

Lowercase and Uppercase filters do not require a filter pattern, only a filter field.
Lowercase and Uppercase filters are very useful for consolidating line items in a report.
Let’s say, for example, that you see multiple entries in your reports for a keyword or a
URL, and the only difference between the multiple entries is that sometimes the URL or
keyword appears with a different combination of uppercase and lowercase letters. You
can use the Lowercase and Uppercase filters to consolidate these multiple entries into a
single entry.

Search and Replace filters replace one piece of data with another. They are often used to
replace long URL strings with a shorter string that is easier to read and identify in your
reports.

You can use Advanced filters to remove unnecessary data, replace one field with
another, or combine elements from multiple filter fields. For example, a best practice
when tracking multiple subdomains in a single profile is to append the subdomain name
to the page names. You can do this by creating an advanced filter that appends
Hostname to Request URI.

Let’s look at an example of a Search and Replace filter.

Example: Search And Replace Filter

Here’s an example of how you might use a Search and Replace filter.

Let’s say that your website uses category IDs as an organizational structure. So, in your
Top Content reports, you’d see a list of Request URIs that indicate the different pages on
your site.

The page “/category.asp?catid=5” is actually the Google Store Wearables page. You
could make the Top Content report more meaningful by replacing “catid=5” with a
descriptive word, like “Wearables”.

Here’s what the Search and Replace filter might look like. This particular filter would
overwrite the entire Request URI with “Wearables.”

This is a simplified example to give you an idea of how you can use filters.

Filters And Profiles

You can track and segment multiple sites from the same Analytics account, using the
same JavaScript code. And, once you’ve defined a filter, you can apply it to a single
profile or across several profiles.

So, for example, in the slide, the graphic shows a single Analytics account with two
profiles.

Filter 1 has been applied to both profiles.

Filter 2 has been applied only to Profile 2.

By setting up multiple profiles and applying filters creatively to each of them, you have a
great deal of reporting and analysis flexibility.

Again, you use the Filter manager to create and manage filters. To apply filters to a
profile, you edit the profile.

Customize data Views

You can also use profiles and filters together to create customized data views.

Let’s say that you want to have two different views of your data — one view includes only
traffic to a subdomain and the other view only includes customers from a specific
geographic region.

To do this, you’d set up Profile 2 and Profile 3 as shown here in the chart.

Or, for example, you might want to set up a profile that only inlcudes Google AdWords
traffic. We’ll look at how to do this in the next slide. Remember, you always want to
maintain a profile that contains all of your data. That’s Profile 1 in the chart.

How To Include Only Google AdWords Traffic?

To set up a profile that includes only Google AdWords traffic, you need to apply the two
Custom Include filters shown in the slide.

In filter one, you’ll filter on campaign source for a pattern of google.

In filter two, you’ll filter on campaign medium for a pattern of cpc.

You can apply these two filters in any order.

Tracking Subdomains
Let’s look at how you can use profiles and filters to track subdomains.

If your subdomains are totally separate businesses, and you have no need for reports
that include cumulative traffic to both, then you could simply create a unique profile for
each subdomain.

To do this, you’d install the “dash 1” version of your tracking code on your Subdomain A
pages, and the “dash 2” version of your tracking code on your Subdomain B pages.
But what if you want to analyze the traffic aggregated across both subdomains? In this
case, you could set up at 3 duplicate profiles. Then, you’d apply an Include filter to two
of the profiles.

Profile 1 includes all traffic to both subdomains.

Profile 2 only includes traffic to subdomain A.

Profile 3 only includes traffic to subdomain B.

In this scenario, you’d install identical tracking code on every page of the site regardless
of subdomain.

Best Practices For Filters And Profiles

When setting up profiles and filters for your Analytics account, you should always create
one unfiltered profile that can be a back-up in case your filters do not function as
planned or you need more data than you originally thought.

Remember, once your raw data has passed through filters, Google cannot go back and
reprocess the data. So, maintaining an unfiltered profile provides you with a backup.

Best Practices For Include And Exclude Filters

You can apply multiple include and exclude filters to a single profile, but keep in mind
that when more than one filter is applied, the filters will be executed in the same order
that they are listed in your Profile Settings.

In other words, the output from one filter is then used as the input for the next filter.

The example shown here illustrates that if you want to include only users from
California and Texas, you cannot create two separate include filters because they will
cancel each other out. The solution is to create one filter that uses a regular expression
to indicate that the Visitor Region should be California or Texas.

One AdWords Account, Multiple URLs

If you drive traffic from AdWords to multiple sites, each of which is tracked in a separate
Analytics profile, you’ll need to apply a filter to each site’s profile.

Because, when you apply cost data from an AdWords account, data from the entire
account is applied to each profile – Google Analytics doesn’t automatically match
campaigns to specific profiles. To illustrate what would happen if you don’t apply a
filter, let’s imagine that you have two sites and you spend $50 to drive traffic to each of
them.

Without a filter, the Clicks tab on each profile would include $100 worth of cost data
instead of just the $50 you spent for that site.

So, for each profile that should include a subset of your AdWords data, you’ll need to
create a custom include filter.

Filters For Cost Sources

In your profile settings, select “edit filter”.

Create a custom filter and select the Include filter type.

For the filter field, select “Campaign Target URL”. This field only applies to Google
AdWords data.

Use a regular expression to create the filter pattern based on the AdWords destination
URL that is applicable to this profile.

Once you’ve saved this filter, only AdWords data for this profile will be displayed in the
reports.

Regular Expressions (RegEx)

A regular expression is a set of characters and metacharacters that are used to match
text in a specified pattern.

You can use regular expressions to configure flexible goals and powerful filters.
For example, if you want to create a filter that filters out a range of IP addresses, you’ll
need to enter a string that describes the range of the IP addresses that you want
excluded from your traffic.

Let’s start off by looking at each metacharacter.

Metacharacters are characters that have special meanings in regular expressions.

Dot.
Use the dot as a wildcard to match any single character.

The operative word here is “single”, as the regex would NOT match Act 10, Scene 3. The
dot only allows one character, and the number ten contains two characters — a 1 and a
0.

How would you write a regular expression that would match “Act 10, Scene 3”?

You could use two dots.

To make your regex more flexible, and match EITHER “Act 1, Scene 3” or “Act 10, Scene
3”, you could use a quantifier like the + sign.

But we’ll talk about repetition a bit later in this module.

Backslash /
Backslashes allow you to use special characters, such as the dot, as though they were
literal characters.

Enter the backslash immediately before each metacharacter you would like to escape.

“U.S. Holiday” written this way with periods after the U and the S would match a
number of unintended strings, including UPS. Holiday, U.Sb Holiday, and U3Sg
Holiday.
Remember that the dot is a special character that matches with any single character, so
if you want to treat a dot like a regular dot, you have to escape it with the backslash.

You’ll use backslashes a lot, because dots are used so frequently in precisely the strings
you are trying to match, like URLs and IP addresses.

For example, if you are creating a filter to exclude an IP address, remember to escape
the dots.

Character Sets And Ranges []

Use square brackets to enclose all of the characters you want as match possibilities. So,
in the slide, you’re trying to match the string U.S. Holiday, regardless of whether the U
and the S are capitalized.

However, the expression won’t match U.S. Holiday unless periods are used after both
the U and the S. The expression also requires that the H is capitalized.

There is a regex you can write to match all of these variations. The question mark used
here is another “quantifier”, like the ‘+’ sign mentioned earlier.

Again, we’ll talk about repetition in the next slide.

You can either individually list all the characters you want to match, as we did in the
first example, or you can specify a range.

Use a hyphen inside a character set to specify a range. So instead of typing square
bracket 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9, you can type square bracket 0 dash 9.

And, you can negate a match using a caret after the opening square bracket.

Typing square bracket caret zero dash nine will exclude all numbers from matching.
Note that later in this module, you will see the caret used a different way—as an anchor.
The use of the caret shown here is specific to character sets, and the negating behaviour
occurs only when the caret is used after the opening square bracket in a character set.

Quantifiers And Repetitions ? + *

Now let’s talk about using quantifiers to indicate repetition.

In earlier examples, we’ve used the plus sign and the question mark.

The question mark requires either zero or one of the preceding character. In the
expression “3-1-?” , the preceding character is a 1. So, both 3 and 3-1 would match.

The plus sign requires at least one of the preceding character. So, “3-1-+” wouldn’t
match just a 3. It would match 3-1, 3-1-1, and so on. The asterisk requires zero or more
of the preceding character. In the expression, “3-1-*”, the preceding character is a 1. So it
would match 3, 3-1-, 3-1-1, and so forth.

You can also SPECIFY repetition using a minimum and maximum number inside curly
brackets.

Recall that a dot matches any single character. What would you use to match a wildcard
of indeterminate length?

Dot star will match a string of any size. Dot star is an easy way to say “match anything,”
and is commonly used in Google Analytics goals and filters.

Grouping ( )
It is handy to use the parentheses and the pipe symbol (also known as the OR symbol)
together.

Basically, you can just list the strings you want to match, separating each string with a
pipe symbol — and enclosing the whole list in parentheses.

Here, we’ve listed four variations of “US” that we’ll accept as a match for US Holiday.
If it’s not in the list, it won’t get matched. That’s why “US Holiday” won’t get matched if
one of the periods is missing.

In our list, we’ve accounted for both periods missing, but not for just one period
missing.

Using question marks, the second regex in the slide will match all of the above.

Anchors ^ $
The caret signals the beginning of an expression. In order to match, the string must
BEGIN with what the regex specifies..

The dollar sign says, if there are any more characters after the END of this string, then
it’s not a match.

So, caret US means start with US. US Holiday matches, but “Next Monday is a US
Holiday” does not match.

Holiday$ means end with Holiday. US Holiday still matches, but “US Holiday Schedule”
does not match.

Anchors can be useful when specifying an IP address. Take a look at these examples.

Shorthand Character Classes /d /s /w

Some character classes are used so commonly that there is a shorthand you can use
instead of writing out the ranges within square brackets.

Let’s look at the example of a simplified regex that could match an addres:

Backslash d means match any one digit zero through nine.

Use curly brackets and a minimum and maximum number to specify how many digits to
match.
Backslash d followed by 1 comma 5 in curly brackets means that the address must
contain at least one digit, and at most five digits.

Backslash s means that the number should be followed by one space, backslash w means
match any alphanumeric character and the star means include as many alphanumeric
characters as you want.

“345 Embarcadero” matches, but just “Embarcadero” does not, because this regex
requires the string to start with a number.

If you want to make the number optional, group the first part of the regex with
parentheses–including the space–and follow it with the question mark.

Note that an address like “1600 Amphitheatre Parkway” would not match either,
because the regex does not account for the space between Amphitheatre and Parkway.

The slide shows one way you could account for this.

RegEx Review
Let’s review.

In the example on the slide, we’ve created an expression that will match the strings
Google or Yahoo, regardless of whether or not Google and Yahoo are capitalized.

Here, we’ve created an expression that will match URLs for internet and theatrical
movie trailers.

The first part of the expression indicates that the URL can begin with anything.

Then the expression specifies that the URL must end with index.php?dl=video/trailers/
and then either internet or theatrical.

The $ sign ensures that any URLs that are any longer than this won’t get included in the
match.
Common Uses For Regular Expressions
You’ll find lots of applications for regular expressions in Google Analytics.

Some common examples are:

• filtering out internal traffic by specifying a set of IP addresses

• setting up a goal that needs to match multiple URLs

• tracking equivalent pages in a funnel

• and using the filter box that appears on your reports to find specific entries in a table.

RegEx And Tracking Equivalent Pages

Here’s how you might use regular expressions to group pages or funnel steps on your
site.

Using a regular expression allows you to track them as one funnel step rather than
tracking each page or action individually.

Learn how goals and funnels work in the module on goals.

RegEx Within The Report Interface

And, here’s an example of using regular expressions within your reports.

We’re using the Find box to display all the rows in the table that contain Google or
Yahoo.

RegEx Generator For IP Address Ranges

Google Analytics provides a tool that makes it easier to generate a regular expression
that matches a range of IP addresses.

It’s called the Regular Expression Generator and you can find it at the URL shown in the
slide.
Or, you can search for Regular Expression Generator in the Google Analytics Help
Center.

Points To Remember
You’ll find a number of useful applications for regex as you use Google Analytics.

But, it’s important that you think through all the implications of each expression that
you use when you set up a filter or a goal.

It’s easy to make a mistake and not get the data or the result you’re looking for.

Set up a duplicate profile to test your regex statements. After enough data has been
collected, check your results and make sure they’re what you expect.

Remember to always maintain a backup profile that includes all your data.

There are lots of regex resources on the web. To get started, just search for regex.

What Are Cookies?

Some web sites store information about you or your computer in a small file called a
cookie. The cookie is stored on your hard drive.

Sites that run Google Analytics issue first party cookies that allow the site to uniquely,
but anonymously, identify individual visitors.

So, when a visitor returns to a site that runs Google Analytics, the site is able to
remember that the visitor has been to the site before and Google Analytics will only
count that visitor once in unique visitor calculations.

There are two types of cookies. First-party cookies are set by the domain being visited.
Only the web site that created a first-party cookie can read it. This is the kind of cookie
used for Google Analytics tracking.
Third-party cookies are set by third party sites — basically sites other than the site being
visited.

Users can choose whether to allow some, none, or all types of cookies to be set on their
computers.

However, if a user does not allow cookies at all, they may not be able to view some Web
sites or take advantage of customization features.

Persistent VS Temporary Cookies

Cookies can be set with or without an expiration date. This detail is important in order
to understand how Google Analytics tracks visits and unique visitors.

Persistent cookies have an expiration date, and remain on your computer even when you
close your browser or shut down. On return visits, persistent cookies can be read by the
web site that created them.

Temporary cookies do not have an expiration date, as they are only stored for the
duration of your current browser session. As soon as you quit your browser, temporary
cookies are destroyed.

Cookie-Based Visitor Tracking

While it’s impossible to determine the exact number of web visitors who have cookies
enabled or disabled, available statistics suggest that the vast majority of visitors enable
cookies.

Many kinds of sites require that visitors have cookies enabled.

For example, you need to have cookies enabled in order to login to many online
shopping carts and to use web mail.

First party cookies, which are the kind used for Google Analytics, are allowed by a
majority of visitors.
Cookie tracking makes it possible to correlate shopping cart transactions with search
campaign information, and perform other visitor analysis.

Remember — websites only have access to the information that you provide. Websites
can’t get your email address or access to any information on your computer unless you
provide it. And since Google Analytics only uses first party cookies, Google Analytics
cookies can only be read by the website that created them.

The utm First Party Cookies

Google Analytics sets the five first-party cookies shown in the slide.

The __utmv cookie is optional, and will only be set if the _setVar() method is called.
You will learn about _setVar() in the module on Custom Visitor Segmentation.

All of the Google Analytics cookies are persistent except for one. The __utmc cookie is a
temporary cookie that is destroyed when the visitor quits the browser.

Each of the other Google Analytics cookies has an expiration date set in the future,
meaning that the cookie will persist on the user’s computer until it expires, or until the
user deletes it from their computer.

Example: Google Analytics Cookies

Here’s an example of the cookies set by the Google Store. You can see that __utma,
__utmb, __utmc, and __utmz have been set. We’ll learn more about each cookie
shortly.

First, let’s try a brief experiment. Which of the sites that you’ve visited are using Google
Analytics?

To find out, open your browser’s cookie window. You’ll usually find it under your
browser’s “Options” or “Preferences”.
Now, in the cookies window, search for underscore underscore u-t-m. You should see all
the different Google Analytics cookies set by all the sites that you’ve visited that use
Google Analytics.

All cookies are browser-specific. So, if you’ve already been to a site, but you open a
different browser to visit that site again, another set of Google Analytics cookies will be
set.

Now, before we continue, search for the Google Store cookies by typing the domain
name “googlestore.com” into the Cookies search box.
If you’ve never visited the Google Store, go to googlestore.com now so that cookies are
created.
_utma – Visitor Identifier
Select the Google Store __utma cookie. In the cookie information, note the “Content”
and expiration date for the cookie.

The first number in the content of every Google Analytics cookie is called the “domain
hash.” It represents the domain that you visited and that set these cookies. Google
Analytics applies an algorithm to the domain and outputs a unique numeric code that
represents the domain. Each Google Analytics cookie set by the domain will begin with
this number.

The next number is a random unique ID.

The three subsequent numbers are timestamps. They represent the time of the initial
visit, the beginning of your previous session, and the beginning of your current session.
The timestamps represent the number of seconds since January 1, 1970.

Notice that the last three timestamps are the same. What does this tell you?

The last number, the session counter, can give you the answer. The last number tells you
the number of times you have visited this site. This number will increment each time
you visit the site. The session counter here is “1”, and the last three timestamps are all
the same because this is your first visit to the site.
The random unique ID combined with the first timestamp make up the visitor ID that
Google Analytics uses to identify unique visitors to the site. These details allow Google
Analytics to calculate the number of unique visitors and number of visits.

Look at your Google Store __utma cookie.

How many times have you visited the Google Store? If you think you’ve visited more
times than is indicated by the cookie, remember that the cookie only includes the
number of times you visited from this computer using this browser.

Also, if you have cleared your cookies at some point, it is only counting from the last
time you cleared your cookies.

When does this cookie expire? You should see that the date is two years from last the
time you visited.

_utmb And _utmc – Session Identifiers

The __utmb and __utmc cookies together identify a session.

The content of the __utmc cookie is simply the domain hash.

The content of the __utmb cookie will also be the domain hash plus, if the site is using
ga.js, some additional values.

The key difference between the two cookies is that __utmb is a persistent cookie with an
expiration date that is set 30 minutes after it is created. While __utmc is a temporary
cookie that is destroyed as soon as the visitor quits the browser.

Let’s review what you know about a session, or visit, in Google Analytics. First note that
the terms “session” and “visit” are used interchangeably. A session is defined by 30
minutes of inactivity or if a visitor quits the browser.
Each time the visitor navigates to a new page and the JavaScript in the Google Analytics
Tracking Code is executed, the __utmb cookie is refreshed and set to expire in 30
minutes.

This is how a session can be 2 hours long. As long as the visitor remains active on the
site, the session remains active.

But if the visitor stays on a page for more than 30 minutes, the __utmb cookie will be
destroyed. The next time the visitor loads a page, Google Analytics won’t find a__utmb
cookie. Instead, a new __utmb cookie is created and, from the standpoint of tracking,
this is a new session.

So, why is the __utmc cookie needed? Let’s say a visitor quits and starts the browser
and comes back right away to the same site. Since the __utmc cookie was destroyed,
Google Analytics will know that this is a new session.

So, to summarize, when the visitor loads a page, the JavaScript in the Google Analytics
Tracking Code checks for both the __utmb and __utmc cookies. If either one is missing,
it notes this as a new session, and creates whichever cookie– __utmb, __utmc, or both–
was missing.

Note that it is possible to adjust this behavior. With a small customization to the Google
Analytics Tracking code, you can make the session timeout length anything you want.
You’ll learn about this in the Code Customizations module.

_utmz – Campaign Cookie

The __utmz cookie stores the campaign tracking values that are passed via tagged
campaign URLs.

So, for example, if a visitor comes to your site on a link tagged with campaign variables
utm_source, utm_medium, and utm_campaign, the values for these variables will be
stored in the __utmz cookie.
Preceding the campaign tracking values, you will see four numbers stored in the __utmz
cookie.

The first number is the domain hash, as with the other Google Analytics cookies.

The second number is a timestamp.

The third and fourth numbers are the “session number” and “campaign number”,
respectively.

The “session number” increments for every session during which the campaign cookie
gets overwritten.

The “campaign number” increments every time you arrive at the site via a different
campaign or organic search, even if it is within the same session.

The __utmz cookie has a six month timeout, meaning that a visit will be attributed to a
particular campaign for up to six months, or until the __utmz cookie is overwritten with
another value.

You can modify the six month timeout and you can change the rules which govern when
the __utmz cookie value is overwritten. You’ll learn how in the Code Customizations
module.

The __utmz data shown here would show up in your All Traffic Sources report as
coming from the source / medium “google / organic”.

Now, in your browser’s cookie window, select the __utmz cookie from your visit to
googlestore.com. Assuming that it was a direct visit, you’ll see “utmcsr=(direct)” and
“utmcmd=(none)”. Your visit will show up in the Google Store’s Google Analytic’s
account as coming from the source / medium “direct / none”.

_utmz – Campaign Values

The slide shows how the values in the __utmz cookie map to campaign variables.
For example, the utmcsr value in the __utmz cookie is the source, or the value that was
assigned to utm_source in the tagged link.

utmv – Visitor Segmentation

The __utmv cookie is for custom visitor segmentation. You’ll only see this cookie if the
site calls the _setVar() method. This cookie contains the domain hash, and one other
value: the value you assign using _setVar().

For example, suppose all site visitors who log in get set to “Member”, while those who do
not log in remain unassigned. The Google Analytics account owner would then be able
to compare “Members” to those who are “(not set)” and see whether, for example,
Members convert more often or spend more money on the site.

The __utmv is a persistent cookie that expires after 2 years.

Try searching your browser cookies for “utmv”. Any sites that appear will be those that
use the Google Analytics custom segmentation feature.

Refer to the module on Custom Visitor Segmentation to learn more about _setVar() and
the __utmv cookie.

E-Commerce Reports
If your site sells products or services online, you can use Google Analytics e-commerce
reporting to track sales activity and performance.

The Ecommerce reports show you your site’s transactions, revenue, and many other
commerce-related metrics.

The Overview report and the top level navigation are shown here.

Many of the reports allow you to drill down and segment for in-depth analysis.

Report Examples
Some examples of the kind of information you can get from the e-commerce reports
include:

• the products that were purchased from your online store

• your sales revenue

• your e-commerce conversion rate, and

• the number of times people visited your site before purchasing

The E-Commerce Tab

E-commerce metrics are also available on the Ecommerce tab which appears in many
reports.

For example, on the Ecommerce tab of the AdWords Campaigns report, you can see how
much revenue is associated with your AdWords campaigns.

On the Ecommerce tab of the Referring Sites report, you can see how many transactions
are associated with site referrals.

And, on the Ecommerce tab of the All Traffic Sources report, you can see the per visit
value across all traffic sources.

Three Steps
In order to use e-commerce reporting, you’ll need to do three things.

First, enable e-commerce reporting within your Analytics website profile.

Second, add or make sure that you’ve added the Google Analytics Tracking Code to your
receipt page or “Transaction Complete” page.

Finally, you’ll need to add some additional e-commerce tracking code to your receipt
page so that you can capture the details of each transaction.
Let’s take a look at each step.

Step 1: Enable E-Commerce Reports

Step 1 is simply to enable the E-commerce selection on the Edit Profile Information
page. Here’s how you find it.

On the Analytics Settings page, click Edit next to the profile for which you want to
enable e-commerce tracking. This will take you to the Profile Settings page. At the top of
the page, you’ll see a section called “Main Website Profile Information”. Click “edit” in
the top right corner.

You’ll then see the screen shown here.

Select “Yes” next to E-commerce Website and save your changes.

Step 2: Add Google Analytics Tracking Code

For Step 2, check to make sure that the Google Analytics Tracking Code is on your
receipt page.

You should probably place it near the top of the page because the code you add in Step 3
needs to appear after the Google Analytics Tracking Code.

As with the other pages on your site, you can use a server-side include or other template
driver for dynamically generated pages.

Or, you can simply copy and paste the code into your HTML for static pages.

The slide shows an example of the standard Google Analytics Tracking Code.

Step 3: Add Code To Track Transactions

For Step 3, you’ll need to add code to track transaction details. This is an example of
what the code on the receipt page might look like.

The Google Analytics Tracking Code is at the top.

Then, there is a call to the _addTrans() method. The call to _addTrans() tells Google
Analytics that a transaction has occurred.

The arguments to _addTrans() provide details about the transaction — for example an
Order ID, the total order amount, and the amount of tax charged.

After the call to _addTrans(), there must be at least one call to the _addItem() method.
This call provides Google Analytics with details about the specific item purchased.

Finally, there is a call to the trackTrans() method which sends all the data to Google
Analytics.

Let’s look at each method in more detail.

Creating The Transaction: _addTrans ( )

The _addTrans method establishes a transaction and takes the arguments shown here.

Your code will need to dynamically retrieve the values from your merchant software to
populate these fields.

You can leave some of the fields blank by keeping the extra comma as a placeholder. But
note that Order ID and Total are required arguments.

Providing Product Details: addItem ( )

For each item that a visitor purchases, call _addItem. If more than one item is
purchased, you’ll call _addItem multiple times.

As with _addTrans, you can leave some of the fields blank, but note that Order ID, SKU
or Code, Price and Quantity are required arguments.

Use the same Order ID that you used in the call to addTrans().

If you’re not sure how to write this code, contact your merchant software provider.
Recording The Transaction: _trackTrans ( )
Finally, after the calls to _addTrans and _addItem, you’ll need to call _trackTrans to
send the transaction information to Google Analytics.

Remember that all of the e-commerce code must appear after the Google Analytics
Tracking Code calls _trackPageview.

Secure Pages
Generally, you’ll be placing ecommerce tracking code on a secure shopping cart page.

As long as you use ga.js, the standard Google Analytics Tracking Code automatically
detects when an https protocol is being used.

So you won’t need to add any special tracking code for secure pages.

However, if you are using urchin.js, you should review the Help Center article
referenced in the slide.

Shopping Carts On Other Domains Or Subdomains

For many e-commerce websites, the checkout process occurs on a separate domain or
subdomain.

For example, if you send customers from www.mystore.com to cart.mystore.com, you’re

sending them to a subdomain.
If either of these scenarios applies to your site, you’ll need to add some code to some of
your pages so that you can track activity across domains and subdomains.

The specific methods you’ll use are listed on the slide and you can learn how to use them
in the module on tracking domains and subdomains.

Goal Value
The Goal Conversion tab displays a metric called Per Visit Goal Value.

This metric is calculated based on the goal values that you set on the Goal Settings page.
Revenue
The Ecommerce tab displays three revenue related metrics: Revenue, Average Value,
and Per Visit Value .

These metrics are calculated using the revenue that is recorded by your Google Analytics
e-commerce code.

So, what is the difference between Per Visit Value and Per Visit Goal Value on the Goal
Conversion tab?

Per Visit Value is calculated using e-commerce revenue. Per Visit Goal Value is
calculated using static goal values.

Goal Value + Revenue

There are a few places where Goal Value and Ecommerce Revenue are summed.

On the Clicks tab, the Revenue per Click, ROI, and Margin are based on the sum total of
Goal Values and Ecommerce Revenue.

In the Content reports, the $ Index metric is also based on the sum total of Goal Value
and Ecommerce Revenue.

We’ll look at $ Index next.

What Is $ Index?
The $ Index metric appears in most of the Content reports and it allows you to identify
the pages that have the most impact on site profitability.

A single $ Index value by itself doesn’t tell you much — it’s most useful as a way of
ranking pages.

By sorting your pages from highest $ Index value to lowest $ Index value, you’ll be able
to identify your most important pages.
Let’s look at how $ Index is calculated.

$ Index Calculation
The calculation for $ Index assigns the highest values to pages that are frequently
viewed prior to high value conversions or transactions.

In contrast, pages that aren’t viewed prior to conversions or transactions will have the
lowest $ Index values.

To calculate the $ Index for a page, total ecommerce revenue and goal value is divided
by the number of unique times the page was viewed prior to the conversion or
transaction.

For example, let’s say that there were 4 visits to your site and 2 visits resulted in a $100
purchase. So, you made a total of $200 from these four visits. If on every one of these
visits, the visitor entered your site through the home page, the $ Index value for your
home page would be $200 divided by 4 page views. So the $ Index value would be $50.

On the 2 visits that included a purchase, the visitor also went to your Features page
before purchasing. So, the $ Index value for your Features page would be $200 divided
by 2 page views. The $ Index for your Features page would be $100.

Important Points About $ Index

You’ll notice that the calculation for $ Index uses unique pageviews.

This means that a page is only counted once per visit, even if a person views the page
multiple times before converting.

Also, only pageviews that precede the conversion or transaction are counted.

If you aren’t tracking ecommerce revenue in Google Analytics and you haven’t assigned
values to your goals, all of your $ Index values will be zero.
Finally, $ Index is most useful as a point of comparison or a ranking metric, not as a
standalone number. It’s designed to help you identify the pages on your site that are
most valuable.

Understanding Domains
So far in this course, we’ve focused on tracking within a single domain. Before we learn
how to track across multiple domains, let’s understand why we might want to do this.

A domain is a hostname that represents a numeric IP address on the internet. It allows

us to easily identify a website by a name instead of having to use a long string of
numbers.

For example, Google.com and YouTube.com are both domains owned by Google.

Tracking Across Domains Doesn’t Happen Automatically

You may sometimes need to track activity across multiple domains.

A common example of this is when you send visitors from your site to a separate
shopping cart site to complete their purchases

However, since Google Analytics uses exclusively first party cookies, it can’t
automatically track whether those visitors actually complete a purchase or not, because
the purchase is taking place on another site.

Phrased more generally, if a session spans multiple domains, it would not be possible to
track the session as a single visit attributed to one visitor. So, you’ll need a way of
sharing the cookie information between the two domains.

The _link ( ) Method

By calling the _link() method, you can send this cookie information across domains.

This allows Google Analytics to track a user across multiple domains by sending cookies
via URL parameters.
Tracking Across Domains : Step 1
To track across domains, you’ll need to follow two steps.

First, add a few lines to the Google Analytics Tracking Code on all pages of each site. The
lines you need to add are shown here, in blue.

Call _setDomainName() with an argument of “none”.

And call _setAllowLinker() with an argument of “true”.

Tracking Across Domains : Step 2

The second step involves the _link() method. Use this method in all links between
domains.

In this example, we’re updating all links from Google.com to YouTube.com and vice
versa. We update each link to call the _link() method as shown here.

Now, when a user clicks on a link that takes them to the other domain, the session
information is preserved and the user is identified as being the same visitor across both
domains.

Forms And _linkByPost ( ) Method

If you use a form to transfer your visitors from one domain to another, you will need to
use the _linkByPost() method instead of the _link() method.

This situation occurs most often with third party shopping carts.

To use forms to transfer from one domain to another, you must modify all the
appropriate forms with the code shown here.

The _linkByPost() method will change the form action by adding query-string
parameters to the value in the action attribute when the visitor submits the form.

Subdomains
You may also sometimes need to track across multiple subdomains. A subdomain is part
of a larger domain and frequently each subdomain contains the pages for a specific
department or offering.

For example, Google.com has several subdomains such

as news.google.com,sites.google.com, and maps.google.com.
Since Google Analytics uses first-party cookies, cookies set on a subdomain can not
automatically be read on the main domain, and vice versa.

As with multiple domains, you need to explicitly share the cookie information between
subdomains or you’ll lose session information. If you don’t share cookie information
between your subdomains, it may appear as though your own site is a referrer since only
one domain is recognized as the main domain.

Tracking Subdomains Using _setDomainName ( )

To track across multiple subdomains, call _setDomainName() and specify your parent
domain name as the argument. This will allow the Google Analytics Tracking Code to
use the same cookies across the subdomains.

For example, to track across Google’s various subdomains, you would call
_setDomainName() with an argument of “dot google dot com” . A side effect of using
this method is that your reports may not differentiate between visits to identically
named pages within the various subdomains.

So, for example, visits

to maps.google.com/home.html and mail.google.com/home.htmlwould be interpreted
as visits to a single
page. To correct this, you’ll need to set up an advanced filter. We’ll explain this in a
minute.

Best Practice #1 For Tracking Subdomains

There are a few best practices for setting up your Analytics account to track across
multiple subdomains.
First, create separate profiles for each subdomain. This way, you’ll be able to see reports
for each subdomain.

Set up duplicate profiles – one master profile, plus one profile for each subdomain. In
this example, we’re looking at two subdomains.

Your master profile has no filters, and each of the other two has an Include filter.

Profile 1 includes all traffic to both subdomains.

Profile 2 includes only traffic to subdomain A.

Profile 3 includes only traffic to subdomain B.

Best Practice #2 For Tracking Subdomains

Second, if you track across several subdomains within one profile, your reports may not
differentiate between visits to identically named pages within the various subdomains.

This is because the reports only show the Request URI — which, in this example, is
/home.html.

The hostname — maps.google.com — is stored in the Hostname data field in Google

Analytics.
So, once you’ve called _setDomainName() to set your primary domain name, visits
tomaps.google.com/home.html and mail.google.com/home.html would be interpreted
as the same page–”/home.html”.
To correct this, you can set up an advanced filter to include the subdomain in your
reports. Set up your filter as shown in the slide.

Note that the constructor must match exactly what is shown in the slide, starting with
the forward slash.

The filter works by appending the Hostname to the Request URI. As a result, you’ll be
able to distinguish between identically named pages on your subdomains.
Multiple Domains With Subdomains (Step 1)
If you want to track across both multiple domains and subdomains, you’ll need to
ensure that the Analytics cookies are set across the subdomains and that the cookies are
being passed between the parent domains.

There are two steps.

For the first step, add the lines of code shown in blue to Google Analytics Tracking Code
on every page of of one of Domain 1 and each of its subdomains.

Make sure that _setAllowLinker() has an argument of true and _setAllowHash() has an
argument of false.

Then, to each page of Domain 2 and each of its subdomains, add the same code — but
with a different argument to _setDomainName().

Multiple Domains With Subdomains ( Step 2 )

For step 2, call _link() or _linkByPost() in all links and forms that cross between the two
parent domains.

For example, the code shown in the slide shows how you’d do this to track across
Google.com and YouTube.com.

Note that you don’t need to use _link() or _linkByPost() in links between subdomains
within the same domain.

Again, you should create separate profiles in your account for each primary domain
and/or each subdomain.

You can easily do this by using an Include filter based on the hostname field.

Designing A Custom Report

You can create reports that show exactly the information you want to see, organized in
the way you want to see it.
When creating a custom report, think of a table.

Dimensions are the rows of the table and metrics are the columns in the table. This
report has two dimensions — in green — and four metrics in blue.

So, the report will show pageviews, bounces, visits, and revenue for each source and
keyword.

Creating A Custom Report

Click on the Custom Reporting menu to get started.

If you have no reports defined, your Custom Reporting Overview will look like this.

You’ll see a help article link and links to sample reports.

Click ‘Create new custom report’ to build a new report.

Adding And Title And Tabs

To name your report, just click on the title field, enter a report name and click Apply.

Make your name simple and easy to identify so that you’ll be able to quickly find it in a
list.

You can also provide a name for the report tab. This is particularly useful if you add
multiple tabs to your report.

Adding Metrics
The next step is to select the metrics and dimensions you want.

Use the search box to find metrics and dimensions.

You can also click a menu item to expand it and browse all of the available metrics or
dimensions.
To add a metric or dimension to the report, simply drag and drop it into the table.

Adding Dimensions
Here is a report with four metrics. Now, let’s add dimensions.

You can add up to 5 dimensions for each custom report – one top level dimension, and
up to four sub dimensions. The sub-dimensions allow a user to drill down to more
detailed data.

Some combinations of metrics and dimensions aren’t allowed. If you see a metric or
dimension greyed out, it’s because the combination isn’t available.

Review the chart available in the Google Analytics Help Center for an overview of
permitted combinations:

http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=99174
Viewing And Accessing The Report
You’ll see the new report listed under the Custom Reporting menu. Now that the report
has been saved, you can access it anytime.

In this custom report, we can click any of the Sources to see the keywords for that
source. Lets click ‘google’.

Deleting A report
Click on the Custom Reporting menu link to access the Custom Reporting Overview
page shown in the slide.

Here you can see a list of saved custom reports and you can edit or delete any of them.

Click Edit to modify the report.

Editing A Report
By editing a report, you can add, remove or modify metrics and dimensions, add tabs,
and change the name of the report.
Creating a new tab allows you to drag a different set of metrics onto the report. To
experiment with this, click Add Tab.

Here we’ve created a new tab called Visitors.

What Are Advanced Segments?

With Advanced Segments, you can quickly isolate and analyze subsets of your traffic.

You can create an advanced segment that only includes visits that meet a specific set of
criteria.

So, for example you can create an advanced segment that only includes visits from a
certain geographic region or visits during which more than $100 was spent.

Advanced Segments VS Filtered Profiles

While it’s possible to create filtered profiles that segment traffic data, there are some
differences between filtered profiles and advanced segments.

Advanced segments can be applied to historical data, but a filtered profile will only filter
traffic going forward. When you create an advanced segment, that segment is available
across all of your accounts and profiles. But, a filtered profile is only useful for a specific
web property. You can compare up to four advanced segments side by side in your
reports. In contrast, filtered profiles can only be viewed one at a time. It is much easier
to create an advanced segment than it is to create a filtered profile.

If you want to permanently affect the data that a profile shows, you should use a filtered
profile. So if you want a profile that only shows CPC data, you should set up a filtered
profile to do this.

And if you want to restrict user access to only a subset of data, the best way to do this is
to set up a filtered profile and restrict the users’ access to only that profile.

Applying And Advanced Segment

To apply an advanced segment, simply Click Advanced Segments and select the
segments you want.

The Default Segments are predefined, so you don’t have to do anything to use them
except to select them.

The All Visits segment under Default Segments is enabled by default.

Once you’ve applied one or more advanced segments, you can see the data for the
segments throughout all of your reports.

You can also change your date range and see the segments applied to historical data.

The segments remain applied until you deselect them or you logoff or view reports on
another account or profile.

Creating An Advanced Segment

Let’s create an advanced segment that only includes visits during which more than $100
was spent.

Begin by clicking the Advanced Segments pulldown.

Next, click Create a new advanced segment. Now you’ll see a screen that looks like this.

Using this screen, you ca combine one or more logical statements to define a segment.

To include only visits during more than $100 was spent, first look for the metric
Revenue.

It’s usually easiest to type what you are looking for into the search box, but you can also
browse the complete list of metrics and dimensions.

Now, drag the metric into the work area.

Select the condition Greater than and specify 100.

By clicking Test Segment, you can see that 25 visits meet the condition. You can add
additional logic, but for now, let’s just name and save the segment. The segment will
now appear in the Custom Segments area of the Advanced Segments pulldown.

Modifying An Advanced Segment

Now let’s modify this segment so that it only includes visitors from California.

Click Manage your advanced segments.

The Manage Advanced Segments screen will appear.

This screen lists both the predefined default segments and your custom segments.

If you want to build on an existing segment without changing the original segment, you
can click copy next to the segment you want to build off of.

But if you want to change an existing segment, click edit. You can only change Custom
Segments.

Let’s click edit next to the custom segment we just created.

Adding Conditions To A Segment

You can either add an Or condition or an And condition.

In this case, we only want to include visits that meet both conditions — revenue that
exceeded $100 and coming from California.

So, let’s click “Add And statement.” Now, we can drag Region into the added condition
and specify that Region must match California.

By clicking Test Segment, we can see that there were 25 visits with purchases of more
than $100,
Over 7000 visits from California, and 6 visits which match both conditions.

Finally, rename the segment if you wish and then save it.

The original segment is replaced by the new one and you can now apply it to your
reports.

What Are Motions Charts?

Motion Charts allow you to visualize your data in 5 dimensions.

You select metrics to be represented on the X and Y axis and by the size and color of the
dots.

And you can see how the data changes over time.

A Motion Chart can help you identify patterns and relationships in your data that you
might otherwise miss.

Accessing Motion Charts

Access Motion Charts by clicking Visualize. The Visualize button is available in most
reports that show tables.

What You’ll See On The Motion Chart

Each dot on the Motion Chart will be a data point from the report that launched it.

So, for example, if you click Visualize on a Keyword report, each dot will be a keyword.

You can mouse over each dot to see its label and by clicking it, you can make the label
stay visible as we’ve done here for the keyword “google store”.

In this chart, the X axis is Pages per Visit and the Y axis is Visits.

The color of each dot represents the Average Value.

The size of the dots represents the bounce rate.

In this Motion Chart, you can see right away that one keyword is much more valuable
than the others.

How To Select Metrics

Menus are available on each axis and for dot color and size so that you can select
metrics.

How To View Data Over Time

You can view the data over time by either dragging the slider or by pressing the Play
button.

You can also change the scale of the X and Y axis to linear or logarithmic.

Plotting A Data Point’s History

By selecting Trails and dragging the slider, you can plot the history of one or more data
points over time.

Saving A Motion Chart

You can save the settings of any Motion Chart so that you can access it later.

To do this, click Link to Chart and copy and save the link that’s provided.

Example Visualizations: Keywords

Let’s use Motion Charts to analyze two keywords from the Google Store.

The slide compares two Motion Charts side by side– one chart for each keyword. The
same metrics are used in both charts.

By comparing the size of the dots, we can see that the keyword on the left attracts much
less revenue than the keyword on the right. But even though it brings in less revenue,
the conversion rates on the left are much higher — indicated by the warmer colors. So, it
might be appropriate to try to attract more traffic on this keyword by buying it.
The keyword on the right is clearly valuable because it brings in so much revenue. But
the low conversion rate suggests that it would be better to attract this traffic organically
rather than through paid search.

Both keywords are attracting mostly new visitors, so it might make sense to create
promotional programs for existing customers.

Internal Site Search Reporting

Google Analytics provides internal site search reports that allow you to see how people
search once they’ve arrived at your site.

Why Is Internal Site Search Important?

So why analyze how people search your site?

On both large and small sites, visitors frequently use search boxes as a form of
navigation.

By looking at what people search for, you can identify missing or hidden content on your
site, improve search results for key phrases, and even get ideas for new keywords to use
in marketing campaigns.

Setting Up Site Search

In order to set up Site Search Tracking for your website, you’ll need to configure your
Profile settings.

On the Analytics Settings page, click ‘Edit’ next to the profile for which you want to
enable Site Search Tracking.

Once the Profile Settings page appears, look for the Main Website Profile Information
section and click Edit.

In the Site Search section, select the ‘Do Track Site Search’ radio button.
In the ‘Query Parameter’ field, enter the letter, word or words that designate an internal
query parameter.

To find out what the query parameter is, perform a search on your site.

Normally when a user searches on your site, their query can be found in the URL.

For example, if you search on Google.com, you will see your search query preceded by
‘q=’. Therefore, Google’s query parameter would be ‘q.’

In the example above, the query parameter is ‘q,’ and the query was ‘Google Analytics’

Identifying Your Query’s Parameter (s)

What is the query parameter in this example?

Look at the URL that’s generated by your search. You should be able to find your query
and the query parameter in the URL.

In this case, the search query was “creating a profile” and you can see that the query
parameter is “query”.

Your parameter might be different — it could be the word “term” or “search”,

Or it might be just a letter, like “s” or ”p”.

Setting Up Site Search

If you have a particularly large site, some sections of your site may use different query
parameters.

You may provide up to five parameters, separating each parameter by a comma.

Next, select whether or not you want Google Analytics to strip out the query parameter
from your URL. Stripping out the query parameter has the same effect as excluding URL
Query Parameters in your Main Website Profile Settings
If, in your Site Search settings, you choose to strip the query parameters, you don’t have
to also exclude them from your main settings.

Note that Google Analytics will only strip out the query parameters you listed, and not
any other parameters in the same URL.

Site Search Categories

If you use ‘Categories‘ on your site – such as the ability to use drop-down menus to
narrow a search – you can include categories in your search analytics by following these
steps:

First, select the ‘Yes’ radio button under ‘Do you use categories for site search?’

Then, enter your ‘Category Parameter’ in the field provided. Enter only the letters that
designate an internal query category such as ‘cat, qc,’.

The same principle that you used to identify the query parameter can be used to identify
the category parameter. You can also contact your webmaster to identify the query and
category parameters for your site.

Decide if you want to strip out the category parameters that you just provided. If you
select Yes, only the parameters you provided will be stripped out. As with the query
parameter setting, this has the same effect as excluding URL Query Parameters in your
Main Website Profile Settings so if you choose to strip the category parameters here, you
don’t have to exclude them again from your main settings.

Click ‘Save Changes’ to finish.

Where To Find Site Search In Your Reports?

The Site Search reports are located in the Content section of Google Analytics. Click on
the Site Search navigation button to see all of the reports.

By analyzing your Site Search reports, you can find out:

• Which products or items visitors are looking for

• Where visitors started their search and where they ended up after searching

• Whether searches resulted in conversions

Site Search Overeview

The Site Search Overview summarizes the search activity on your site.

You can get to more detailed reports by clicking on the embedded links in the Site
Search Overview, or by using the left navigation.

Site Search Usage

Here we can see that over half of all visits to this site included some form of internal site
search, strongly indicating that internal site search is a popular feature on this website.

Just above the pie-chart, you’ll notice two dropdown menus. if you select Goal
Conversion Rate in the left-most dropdown, you can see how visits that included search
compare to visits that did not include search with respect to conversions.

And, you can click the ecommerce tab to see how revenue and other ecommerce metrics
differ for visits with and without site search.

Site Search Terms

The Search Terms report only includes visits during which a search was performed.

From the screenshot on the slide, you can see that there were 5,720 searches and that
4,410 search terms were used. The terms are listed in the table, and you can see how
each term compares in terms of number of searches, percentage of search refinements,
conversions and other metrics.

Looking at the search terms that people use to search once they are on your site can give
you ideas for keywords that might also help drive traffic to your site.
You can cross segment this traffic. For example, if you wanted to see which cities these
visitors came from, you could select City from the Dimension dropdown.

Other Analysis Options With Search Terms

You can see how visitors who searched on a specific term refined their searches.

To see this report, click on one of the terms in the table of the Site Search Terms report.

Then, from the Analyze dropdown menu, select Search Term Refinement. You’ll see a
report similar to the one shown in the slide.

This report shows you the terms visitors searched on after their original search and
which of these “refinements” are most popular.

If many of your visitors search on a common refinement, you might consider modifying
the results page to present information related to the refinement.

Where did visitors who search on a specific term start the search from, and where did
they go after searching?

To find this information, go to the Search Terms report for a specific keyword, and select
Search Navigation from the Analyze dropdown menu.

Below the graph, you’ll see three columns. The table on the left shows the pages from
which visitors began their searches. The icon in the middle represents the search results
page and the table on the right shows the pages people visited immediately after the
Search Results page.

To use the report, click one of the entries in the table on the left. You can now see where
those people who began their search on the page you selected ended up.

Site Search Start Pages

You can use the Start Pages report to find out how many searches were initiated on each
page of your site.
The easiest way to find this report is to click on Start Pages under Site Search in the left
navigation.

The Start Pages report lists all of the pages from which visitors searched.

Click on a page in the table to learn more about the searches that occurred from that
page. A detail report will appear which lists all of the search terms that were used from
that page.

You can use this report to find out what visitors are searching for from your landing
pages and you can use the information to improve the page content.

For example, if many visitors search on “shipping options” from your shopping cart
page, you may want to display shipping information directly on the page.

Site Search Destination Pages

Which pages are most commonly found through search on your site?

You are able to see popular destination pages for the search term, as well as additional
information on the related search.

Click on a page in the table to see the specific search terms that led to the page.

Site Search Categories

The Site Search Categories report helps you determine which categories your visitors
selected when performing a search on your site.

This information helps you understand how visitors use your search engine, which
product areas and categories are most popular, and how successfully visitors find what
they are looking for in each category.

Site Search Trending

There are 7 Trending reports which display search activity over time. To access them,
click Trending in the left navigation under Site Search.
Then select the specific report you want using the Trending dropdown menu in the
report.

For example, selecting Visits with Search allows you to see how many visits to your site
included a search.

Selecting Total Unique Searches shows you how many times people searched your site.
And, if a visitor searches for the same thing more than once during a single visit, the
search will only be counted once.

You May Wonder…

Your Site Search reports will generally show a different number of conversions than
what is shown in all of your other reports.

This is because goal conversions in the Site Search reports are based on visits that
include at least one search on your website whereas the goal conversions shown in all
other reports are based on all visits.

Because Site Search reports only include conversions from visits that included a search,
you can see how effectively searches on your site drive conversions.

If you are confused about the difference between “search term” and “keyword”, it’s
helpful to remember that Google Analytics reports use “search term” when referring to
internal site searches and “keyword” when referring to external searches.

Web Analytics Transition

Many websites use technologies such as Flash and Ajax to interact with visitors.

For example, some websites embed video players, games, and other interactive
experiences on site pages. However, the basic web analytics model of tracking pageviews
doesn’t capture these kinds of interactions. This is because when a visitor interacts with
a video player, for example, no pageview is generated.
Some other examples of interactions that don’t generate pageviews are Ajax-based
activities, file downloads, and clicks on links that take the visitor to another site.

So how do you track these kinds of activities? There are two ways: virtual pageviews and
Event Tracking.

Virtual Pageviews
You can create a virtual pageview to represent practically any kind of activity or
interaction you want.

You simply call _trackPageview() and provide any name you want as the argument.

It’s “virtual” because you’re telling Google Analytics to register a pageview even though
no new page has actually been loaded.

You’ll see these virtual pageviews alongside ordinary pageviews in the Top Content and
Content Drilldown reports.

Example Code
If you look at the Google Analytics Tracking Code, you’ll notice that it calls
_trackPageview().

This lets Google Analytics know that the browser has loaded a page.

When you call _trackPageview(), however, you’ll want to provide an argument that
specifies a virtual pagename for the event you’re tracking.

Uses Of Virtual Pageviews

Here are some more examples.

In the first example, we’re tracking a download.

In the second example, we’re tracking a Flash event.

In each of these cases, we’re simply calling _trackPageview() to register a virtual
pageview.

Best Practices For Creating Virtual Pageviews

It’s a good idea to adopt a clear naming convention for your virtual pageviews. You
might, for example, group virtual pageviews into categories by giving them a virtual
subdirectory.

Also, since virtual pageviews appear along with standard pageviews in reports, you may
wish to create a duplicate profile where you filter out the virtual pageviews.

To make this easy, you might organize all of your virtual pageviews into a “virtual”
subdirectory.

Event Tracking
The other way to track non-pageview interactions is to use Event Tracking.

One advantage of using Event Tracking is that you won’t generate an extra pageview
each time an interaction occurs. Another advantage is that you can easily organize your
events into categories, actions, and provide labels and even values for each event you
track.

All of your events show up in the Event Tracking reports within the Content section.

Call _trackEvent () To Register An Event

To use Event Tracking, you’ll need to use the ga.js based Google Analytics Tracking
Code.

So, if your site has urchin.js tags, you’ll need to migrate to the ga.js tags.

Once you’re using ga.js, all you need to do is call the _trackEvent() method each time
you want to register an event.

We’ll discuss the arguments to _trackEvent() in a minute.

Example: Tracking A Flash Video Player
Here’s an example of how you’d call _trackEvent() from a Flash video player.

In this example, _trackEvent will get called each time the visitor releases the Play button
on the video player.

_trackEvent will register an event with a category name of “Videos”, an Action name of
“Play”, and a Label of “Movie Drama”.

Let’s look at each of these arguments.

Event Tracking Data Model

Let’s look at each of the arguments to _trackEvent.

The strings that you provide for the first 3 arguments, Category, Action, and Label,
govern how the events will be organized in your reports.

So, you’ll want to think carefully about how you want to structure your events.

Categories
Category is a name that you supply as a means to group objects — which are usually user
interface elements that you want to track.

So, for example, if you have games and videos on your site, you’d probably want to have
a “Games” category and “Videos” category.

The Categories report in the Event Tracking section will show you all the user interface
elements with which your visitors interacted.

Actions
Action is the name you want to give to the type of interaction you’re tracking.

So, for example, for Videos, you’d probably want to track how many times your visitors
pressed Play.
The Actions report in the Event Tracking section will show you the interactions that
occurred.

Labels
The Label argument is optional. A Label allows you to provide additional information
for for the event you are tracking.

For example, if you are tracking video plays, you might use the Label argument to
specify the name of the movie that was played.

Or, for file downloads, you might use it for the name of the file being downloaded.

The Labels report in the Event Tracking section will show you the Labels of of the events
that occurred.

Values
Value is the fourth, and optional, argument to _trackEvent().

Unlike the other arguments which are all strings, Value is an integer. You can use it to
assign a numeric value to a tracked page object.

You’ll then be able to see a sum total of these values in the Event Value column of your
Event Tracking reports.

You’ll also be able to see an average of these values in the Avg. Value column of your
Event Tracking reports.

So, you might, for example, specify a dollar value when a specific playback marker is
reached on your video player.

Total Events VS Unique Events

In your reports, you’ll notice that both Total Events and Unique Events are counted.
Total Events is simply the total number of times an event occurs — really it’s just the
number of times _trackEvent was called.

But, for Unique Events, each particular event is only counted once per visit.

So, if during a single visit, a visitor presses Play 5 times on the same movie, Total Events
will be incremented by 5.

But Unique Events will only be incremented by 1, because for Unique Events, a
particular event is only counted once per visit.

Best Practices For Setting Up Event Tracking

As we mentioned earlier, the arguments you provide when you call _trackEvent will
govern how events are organized in your reports.

So, before you add the calls to _trackEvent to your site, consider these best practices.

First, determine in advance all of the kinds of events you’ll want to track.

Try to create a hierarchy of Categories, Actions, and Labels that will grow with your
needs. Work with your report users to make sure that the hierarchy makes sense.

And use a clear and consistent naming convention for your Categories, Actions, and
Labels.

Finally, note that a maximum of 500 events per visit will be tracked. So, avoid tracking
highly repetitive events such as mouse movements

Advantages Of Event Tracking Over Virtual Pageviews

If you use the urchin.js Google Analytics Tracking Code and you track events using
virtual pageviews, you may be wondering whether it’s worth it to switch to ga.js and use
trackEvent() instead.
By using ga.js and trackEvent(), you’ll be able to analyze event based interactions in
much greater detail than is possible using virtual pageviews.

For example, instead of just seeing how many times a movie was played on your site,
you’ll be able to analyze how people use your video player, and see how different events
correlate with site usage and ecommerce metrics.

Also, by tracking events separately from pageviews, you won’t inflate your pageview
count.

“User Defined” VS Predefined Variables

Google Analytics provides over a dozen predefined variables that you can use to analyze
different segments of your traffic.

For example, segmenting a report by City allows you to compare how visitors from
different cities interact with your site.

But, Google Analytics also provides a custom segmentation variable that you can use to
classify visitors any way you like. It’s called User Defined.

Example: Member VS Non-Member Visits

For example, you could use the User Defined variable to divide your visitors into two
groups, members and non-members.

Each time a visitor signs in to your site, you could set the User Defined value to
“Member”.

A visitor who never signs in would have the default User Defined value of “not set”.

So, your User Defined variable would have two possible values — “Member” and “not
set”.

This would allow you to compare, for example, conversion rates for members versus
conversion rates for non members.
Example: Returning Member
What happens if a returning visitor is a member but visits the site without signing in?
Will the visit still be properly classified as coming from a member?

Yes, because the value of the User Defined variable is set in the visitor’s __utmv cookie
which is persistent. The visitor is classified as a ‘Member’ until the __utmv cookie
expires after 2 years, or gets overwritten with another value.

A User Defined value is set at a session level, which means that the value applies to the
whole session. So, even if you overwrite the value of “Member” with another value, this
visit will still be classified as a Member visit.

But the next time the visitor comes back to your site, they’ll be classified according to the
overwritten value.

Setting The User Defined Variable

To set a value, just call the _setVar() method and specify your value as the argument.

So, for example, to flag a visitor as a member, you’d add the code shown in the slide to a
web page of your site that is accessible only by visitors who are logged in. The call to
_setVar() must appear after your Google Analytics Tracking Code on the web page.

Calling _setVar() sets a persistent first-party cookie for the visitor called __utmv. Again,
the visitor will be labeled as a ‘Member’ until the __utmv cookie expires after 2 years, or
gets overwritten with another value.

Code Example: Form Selection

Let’s say you want to assign a visitor’s User Defined value according to his or her
response on a form.

For example, if you have a form that asks the visitor to select one of four job categories,
here’s how you could capture the response as a User Defined value.

Practices And Guidelines

Even if you overwrite a previously set User Defined value, the current visit is still
classified according to the value that was overwritten. Only subsequent visits will be
classified according to the new value.

So, User Defined values are best used to segment your visitors according to
characteristics that don’t change frequently — things like profession or age group. You
could capture this kind of information from a visitor survey, for example.

You might use the User Defined variable to segment visitors according to site activities
they have participated in — for example people who have signed up to receive a
newsletter versus those who haven’t.

Another use of the User Defined variable is to filter out your internal traffic. Although
you’d generally use an exclude filter to exclude a range of IP addresses, you might have
trouble doing this if your company uses dynamic IP addresses.

To get around this, you could call _setVar() on a page that is only accessible internally to
label employees as ‘Internal’, and then filter out visits based on this value.

Viewing Report Data

To compare traffic, conversions, and e-commerce for each of your User Defined values,
look at the User Defined report in the Visitors section.

For each value that has visits associated with, you’ll see an entry in the table.

Segmenting By User Defined

You can also segment most reports by User Defined values.

How To Change Session Timeout Value

In Google Analytics, a visit—or session—is defined by 30 minutes of inactivity, or when a
user quits the browser.

You can change the 30 minute default by calling _setSessionTimeout() as shown in the
slide.
Simply specify a new timeout value in seconds as the argument to
_setSessionTimeout().

How To Change Campaign Expiration

By default, a conversion can be attributed to a campaign that is up to 6 months old.

But, if your business has a longer or shorter marketing campaign timeframe, you can
change this value.

Just call _setCookieTimeout() and specify your new campaign length in seconds.

For example, let’s say that you want to set a campaign length of 30 days.

To figure out the number of seconds that is, type “30 days in seconds” into Google
Search.

The search engine will give you the answer — 2 million, 592,000 seconds — which you
can plug into _setCookieTimeout().

How To Change Campaign Precedence

Google Analytics attributes conversions to the campaign that most recently referred the
visitor.

For example, let’s say that someone discovers your site by clicking one of your AdWords
ads.

Then, they come back to your site by clicking a banner ad that you’ve tagged with
campaign variables. This time, they convert to one of your goals.

By default, the banner ad will get the credit for the conversion, not the AdWords ad that
originally referred them.

To change this behavior, you can tag all of your campaign links with utm_nooverride=1.
If you do this consistently with all of your campaigns, Google Analytics will attribute
conversions to the first referring campaign, instead of the most recent one.

Note that the utm_nooverride setting can be used in conjunction with autotagging.

How To Add Search Engines

Google Analytics automatically tracks referrals from over 30 search engines.

But, if you want to add a search engine, you can do it by calling _addOrganic() in your
Google Analytics Tracking Code.

First, perform a search in the search engine and look at the URL of the search results
page.

In the URL, look for the keyword you searched — it should be preceded by a letter and
an equal sign. This letter is the query variable for the search engine.

In the example, the query variable is “p”.

Add a call to _addOrganic in your Google Analytics Tracking Code. The first argument is
the name of the search engine. The second argument is the query variable.

How To Treat Certain Keywords As Direct

You may wish to treat traffic that results from certain search keywords as Direct.

For example, if someone searches for the exact name of your site, you might want to
treat that visit as a Direct visit instead of a search.

To do this, simply add a call to _addIgnoredOrganic() in your Google Analytics Tracking

Code. Specify the keyword as the argument.

Treat Certain Referring Sites As Direct

You can also treat referrals from certain sites as Direct traffic instead of as referrals.
 For each site that you want to exclude as a referral and treat as Direct, add a call to
_addIgnoredRef() in your Google Analytics Tracking Code.

Specify the name of the site as the argument.

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Tagged as: Adwords, Analytics Exam, GAIQ, Google Analytics, Google Analytics
Individual Qualification
- See more at: http://www.jenssorensen.co.uk/2010/07/google-analytics-individual-
qualification-exam-test-notes/#sthash.1FXosOiM.dpuf

 Understand different Attribution Models and when you might use them. Attribution
models allow you to assign credit for sales or goal conversions to channels at particular points in
a conversion path. Setting up the appropriate attribution models can give you insight into how
you can better allocate resources by channel. By default, GA uses the Last Non-Direct Click
attribution model, in which the last channel a visitor interacted with gets all of the credit for the
conversion, disregarding whether or not the visitor actually converted on a direct visit. This
model assumes that the direct visit was actually won by the previous channel the visitor came in
on, and so that channel deserves all the credit. For example, if a visitor found your site via a PPC
ad but then didn’t convert until a direct visit the next day, that PPC ad deserves credit for the
conversion. However, with the Last Click model, the last channel a visitor came in on is
responsible for the conversion, even if it was a direct visit. The First Interaction model gives
100% of the conversion value to the channel a visitor first experienced, and is useful when
running ad campaigns geared towards building brand awareness. With the Linear model, all
channels a visitor interacted with receive equal credit, and is useful for measuring the holistic
performance of a campaign. The Time Decay model also gives credit to all channels in a
conversion path, but attributes more of the credit to channels nearest to the conversion, while
the Position Based model allows you to specify the percent of the conversion credit each step in
the path should receive, first, middle, and last. Finally, you can also create your own custom
model. You can compare how models represent your data and figure out which is best for your
campaigns using the Model Comparison Tool.
 Multi-Channel Funnels allow you to see how different channels assisted in
generating conversions. Most conversion reports give all credit for the conversion to the last
 channel a visitor interacted with before converting, but with this report, you can examine how
other marketing activities might have led to that final conversion. The report will include any
other channels the visitor experienced within the last 30 days before converting by default, but
can be set to include interactions as far back as 90 days prior to the conversion. There are three
roles a channel can play in a conversion path: first, assist, and last. In the Assisted
Conversions report you’ll find a column titled Assisted/Last Click or Direct Conversions,
which is a ratio representing whether or not a channel provides more assisted or direct
conversions. The closer the ratio is to 0, the more the channel was responsible for direct
conversions rather than assists. If the ratio is above 1, that means the channel was responsible for
more assists than direct conversions. If the ratio is exactly one, that means the channel was
responsible for as many assists as it was direct conversions.

 Accounts have Properties which have Views. At the account level, businesses can
group their digital assets together and set configurations like user access. Each business or
business unit typically has a single account. Each account can have multiple properties, which
each individually collect their own data with their own Google Analytics tracking IDs. It’s
generally a good idea to create a different property for your business's websites, subdomains,
mobile apps, and other digital properties. Views allow you to configure your data for reporting,
like setting filters that exclude traffic from your company’s IP address, or creating distinct ways
of looking at the data for different users to access.
 Once view filters have been applied, the data is permanently changed. You won’t be
able to undo your filters and see the original data before it was processed for the configuration
settings that you applied. Because of that, it’s best practice to keep three essential views for each
property: an unfiltered view of the original raw data, a master view configured for reporting, and
a test view where you test out new configurations.
 Intelligence Events: Intelligence reports can be found under the home tab and can be
generated automatically or you can create a custom one. They are helpful in identifying large
statistical variations that you may have otherwise have missed.

 Site Speed Reports: Make sure you are up to speed on this report and understand that
site speed it is determined by three main indicators of latency: Page-load time, Execution speed,
and how quickly a page can be parsed for the user to interact with.

 Demographics Report: Make sure you understand that the collection of demographic
information is made possible by DoubleClick third-party cookies. Cookies that are associated
with a user are the only ones that will contribute to your data collection. There are a portion of
 cookies that do not have a user associated with it so you will not get a full picture across your
users, but a subset of the whole. Demographics can also help identify a market that you do not
currently promote to, but have active users.

 Measurement Protocol: This gives developers the ability to see raw interaction data
throughout their platforms creating a view across devices not normally found in GA, like digital
appliances or a point of purchase system. Your UA code helps connect these interfaces and is a
feature of Universal Analytics.

 Technologies Outside of GA and You as a Website Owner: There were a few

technologies that were suggested that affected your and the technology’s interaction with GA.
For Example, make sure that you know things like how Flash and AJAX will affect how you
count a visit or what metrics you would look at most when rebuilding a website.

 Tag Manager: This nifty tool takes the developer work out of building custom tracking
code. Remember these 3 main tips - use one account for every site, delete all other tracking code
on the page after implementing them, and you only need one container for all tracking codes

https://moz.com/ugc/a-5step-plan-to-mastering-the-new-gaiq-exam

GAIQ TEST QUES AND ANSWERS

Digital analytics is

a) the analysis of quantitative data from your business

b) a process of continual improvement of the online experience
c) the analysis of qualitative data from your business
d) the analysis of data from your business and the competition
e) all of these answers are correct

Answer:
e) all of these answers are correct
 

Complete the definition of “digital analytics” by choosing the best option to fill in
the blanks for the statement below.

“Digital analytics” is the analysis of qualitative and (a) ___________________ data from
your business and the competition to drive a (b) ___________________ of the online
experience that your (c) ___________________ and potential customers have which
translates to your desired (d) ___________________.

(a) numeric, (b) continual change, (c) customers, (d) audience

(a) quantitative, (b) continual improvement, (c) customers, (d) outcomes
(a) numeric, (b) continual improvement, (c) customers, (d) audience
(a) quantitative, (b) continual change, (c) customers, (d) outcomes

Answer:
(a) quantitative, (b) continual improvement, (c) customers, (d) outcomes

What is the first step of analytics planning?

a) Document your technical infrastructure

b) Implement Google Analytics
c) Create your implementation plan
d) Define your overall measurement plan and business objectives

Answer:
d) Define your overall measurement plan and business objectives

Which of the following should be the first step you complete during the analytics
planning process?

a) Implement Google Analytics

b) Create your implementation plan
c) Define your overall measurement plan and business objectives
d) Maintain and refine your plans
e) Document your technical infrastructure
Answer:
c) Define your overall measurement plan and business objectives

It’s important to have a clear measurement strategy to guide your implementation

strategy and your data analysis. Which of the following business objectives
would be most relevant for content publishers?

a) collecting user information for sales teams to connect with potential leads
b) selling products or services
c) encourage engagement and frequent visitation
d) all these options are equally relevant as business objectives for content publishers

Answer:
c) encourage engagement and frequent visitation

The demographics and interest category information in Google Analytics comes

from

a) the DoubleClick third-party cookie

b) Google Tag Manager
c) survey data filled out by users
d) Information that you upload from your CRM
e) The AdWords first-party cookie

Answer:
a) the DoubleClick third-party cookie

When do Google Analytics Terms of Service permit sending personally

identifying information (PII) to Google?

a) when encrypted
b) in custom campaigns only
c) never
Answer:
c) never

A visitor comes to your site but stops looking at pages and generating events.
Which of the following will occur by default?

a) Google Analytics does not keep track of sessions by default

b) The visitor’s session expires after 5 minutes of inactivity
c) The visitor’s session expires once the visitor has exited your site
d) The visitor’s session expires after 30 minutes of inactivity

Answer:
d) The visitor’s session expires after 30 minutes of inactivity

Which of the following would you use to set up a custom alert?

a) Intelligence
b) Real-Time
c) Conversions
d) Content

Answer:
a) Intelligence

Once your Google Analytics data has been processed, it can not be changed.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
a) True
 

When Google Analytics processes data, one of the main tasks it completes is
organizing hits into:

a) users and sessions

b) cohorts and interactions
c) registered users and browsers
d) purchasers and browsers

Answer:
a) users and sessions

A session in Google Analytics consists of:

a) The reports generated by users over a specific period of time

b) Interactions or hits from a specific user for all time
c) Interactions or hits from a specific user over a defined period of time
d) A group of users getting together in person to discuss analytics

Answer:
c) Interactions or hits from a specific user over a defined period of time

(Note: We like the idea of answer d) but unfortunately it’s wrong! :-))

By default, an Analytics session ends when inactive for:

a) 15 minutes
b) 30 minutes
c) 45 minutes
d) 60 minutes

Answer:
b) 30 minutes
You need to immediately find out whether people are viewing the new content
that you just added today. Which of the following would be most useful?

a) Real-Time
b) Intelligence
c) Annotations
d) secondary dimensions

Answer:
a) Real-Time

Which of the following would you use to exclude rows with fewer than 10 visits?

a) table sort
b) primary dimension
c) secondary dimension
d) table filter
e) pivot table

Answer:
d) table filter

In which of the following circumstances would you want to increase the default
sessions timeout length in Google Analytics?

a) The games on your site are highly interactive.

b) A typical session on your site involves filling out at least 3 forms.
c) The default session timeout length is set dynamically by Google Analytics and you
cannot change it.
d) The average length of videos on your site is 35 minutes.
e) The average article on your site takes 4 minutes to read.

Answer:
d) The average length of videos on your site is 35 minutes.
In which of the following circumstances would you want to increase the default
sessions timeout length in Google Analytics?

a) You need to start collecting Real-Time Data.

b) The default session timeout length is set dynamically by Google Analytics and you
cannot change it.
c) Users typically spend less than 2 minutes on each page of your site.
d) The average length of videos on your site is 35 minutes.

Answer:
d) The average length of videos on your site is 35 minutes.

Note: This is the same question as above but with different answers.

Which are the four main parts of the Google Analytics platform?

a) Configuration, Prozessing, Reporting, and Recollection

b) Configuration, Collection, Progressing, and Reporting
c) Collection, Configuration, Processing, and Reporting
d) Collection, Processing, Continuation, and Reporting

Answer:
c) Collection, Configuration, Processing, and Reporting

Which of the following are considered the four main components of how the
Google Analytics system works? Select four correct answers.

a) reporting
b) replication
c) collection
d) configuration
e) calculation
f) analysis
g) certification
h) processing

Answer:
a), c), d), h)
 

Which of the following is a session level interaction?

a) Ecommerce transaction
b) none of these answers is correct
c) social interaction
d) pageview
e) event

Answer:
b) none of these answers is correct

Which of the following are “hit” types tracked by Google Analytics?

a) pageviews
b) events
c) all of these answers are correct
d) transactions

Answer:
c) all of these answers are correct

Which of the following are “hit” types tracked by Google Analytics?

(select all that apply)

a) Pageviews
b) Reservations
c) Events
d) Transactions

Answer:
a), c), d)
 

During data Processing, Google Analytics:

a) transforms the raw data from Collection using the Configuration settings
b) collects the data from Analytics tracking code added to a website, mobile application
or other digital environment
c) lets you access and analyze your data using the Reporting interface
d) lets you adjust Configuration settings before data is collected

Answer:
a) transforms the raw data from Collection using the Configuration settings

You can adjust sample size in Google Analytics by

a) adjusting a control in the reporting interface

b) adjusting the session timeout control
c) adding a segment to your report
d) any of these actions will adjust the sample size

Answer:
a) adjusting a control in the reporting interface

What is the hierarchy of the Google Analytics data model?

a) User > Session > Interactions

b) Sessions > Visitors > Interactions
c) Sessions > Users > Interactions
d) Interactions > Users > Sessions

Answer:
a) User > Session > Interactions

 
Which of the following could you use to set targets for your measurement
plan? Check all that apply.

a) Your historical site performance

b) Third-party industry benchmark data
c) Internal expectations from your business leadership
d) A random guess

Answer:
a), b), c)

True or False. The date range set for a Dashboard doesn’t apply to Real-Time
widgets since they only show data for current active users, not historical data.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
a) True

During aggregation, Google Analytics:

a) exports the collected data into a Google Spreadsheet

b) organizes the collected data into pivot tables
c) organizes the collected data within database tables
d) samples the data immediately

Answer:
c) organizes the collected data within database tables

Which of the following are configurations that permanently modify your data
during the processing stage?

(select all that apply)

a) Channel Groups
b) Content Groups
c) Custom Reports
d) Filters
e) Goals
f) Javascript Customization

Answer:
a), b), d), e)

The process Google Analytics uses to retrieve data from large, complex data sets
faster is called:

a) retrieval
b) expediency
c) sampling
d) configuration

Answer:
c) sampling

You should add Analytics tracking code to your site___________________

a) before documenting your business objectives

b) after implementation planning
c) when it’s convenient for your IT team
d) during measurement planning

Answer:
b) after implementation planning

You should include Google Analytics tracking code on every page of a website
you want to track.

a) True
b) False
Answer:
a) True

Which of the following would most quickly allow you to determine whether the
Google Analytics code snippet is working on a specific website page?

a) Annotations
b) Real-Time
c) Secondary dimensions
d) Intelligence Alerts

Answer:
b) Real-Time

True or False: To collect mobile application data with Google Analytics, you
should implement the exact same code you use for your website tracking.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
b) False

Which of the following technologies on your site influence how you implement
Analytics? Select all that apply.

a) Server redirects
b) Query string parameters
c) Flash and AJAX events
d) Responsive web design
e) all of these answers are correct

Answer:
e) all of these answers are correct
 

The code snippet for tracking websites with Google Analytics is written in:

a) AJAX
b) Flash
c) JavaScript
d) PHP

Answer:
c) JavaScript

Which of the following platforms is Google Analytics capable of tracking? Check

all that apply.

a) User activity on a website

b) User activity on a mobile website
c) User activity on a mobile application
d) User activity on a gaming console
e) User activity on any digitally connected device

Answer:
a), b), c), d), e)

Which of the following would you use to send data from a website to Google
Analytics?

a) Campaign Tracking paramenter

b) JavaScript tracking code
c) none of these would be appropriate
d) Google Analytics mobile SDK

Answer:
b) JavaScript tracking code
 

Which of the following would you use to send data from a web connected point-
of-sale system to Google Analytics?

a) Measurement Protocol
b) any of these would be appropriate
c) Campaign Tracking parameter
d) JavaScript tracking code
e) Google Analytics mobile SDK

Answer:
a) Measurement Protocol 

It is recommended that you place the Google Analytics javascript tracking code:

a) just after the opening <head> tag

b) just before the closing </head> tag
c) just after the opening <footer> tag
d) just before the closing </footer> tag

Answer:
b) just before the closing </head> tag

The tracking code in Google Analytics:

(select all that apply)

a) connects data to your specific Google Analytics account

b) sends data back to your Google Analytics account for reporting
c) tracks changes in your AdWords account
d) identifies new and returning users

Answer:
a). b), d)
 

The same type of Google Analytics tracking code should be used for both a
website and a mobile app.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
b) False

In order to distinguish between users on web pages, Google Analytics:

a) uses the IP address of a device that accesses the site

b) uses the city, state and country of a visitor that access the site
c) creates anonymous unique identifiers using third-party cookies
d) creates anonymous unique identifiers using first-party cookies

Answer:
d) creates anonymous unique identifiers using first-party cookies

Third-party data may be joined with the Google Analytics data collected via the
tracking code.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
a) True

How is Google Analytics able to determine if a group of website interactions are

all from the same user device?
a) By detecting what city, operating system and browser the hits come from
b) By setting a unique ID for the device that is attached to each hit
c) By grouping together all hits that are collected within a 30 minute time period
d) Google Analytics is not able to detect if a group of interactions are from the same
user device

Answer:
b) By setting a unique ID for the device that is attached to each hit

Rather than using the random numbers that the tracking code creates, you can
override the unique ID with your own number.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
a) True

True or False: The order in which filters appear in your view settings matters.

a) True. Filters are executed in the order in which they appear.

b) False. Filters are not necessarily executed in the order in which they appear.

Answer:
a) True. Filters are executed in the order in which they appear.

Which of the following are possible uses of filters? Select all that apply.

a) replace complicated page URLs with readable text strings

b) report on only a subdomain or directory
c) include only traffic coming from a particular campaign
d) exclude visits from a particular IP address

Answer:
a), b), c), d)
 

Why is it important that you maintain one unfiltered view when using filters with
your Analytics account?

a) You will need to configure your goals in the unfiltered view

b) Without one unfiltered view, you will not be able to use a filter for multiple views
c) An unfiltered view ensures that the original data an always be accessed
d) There is no reason to maintain an unfiltered view

Answer:
c) An unfiltered view ensures that the original data an always be accessed

Your company has a website and a mobile app, and you want to track each
separately in Google Analytics. How should you structure your account(s)?

a) One account, one property, no views

b) One account, two properties
c) One account, one property, two views
d) One account, one property, one view, because you can’t use Google Analytics to
track the mobile app

Answer:
b) One account, two properties

Which of the following are possible uses of views within a single Google
Analytics account?

a) To look more closely at traffic to a specific part of a site (a page or selection of

pages)
b) To limit a user’s access to a subset of data
c) To track domains that belong to another account
d) To look more closely at traffic to a specific subdomain

Answer:
a), b), d)
 

You want a second view of your data where you only see traffic to a specific
subdirectory. What is the best way to set this up?

a) Create a new view and apply an advanced filter that deletes page data outside the
subdirectory
b) Create a duplicate view and add a filter: select “Include only traffic to a subdirectory”
from the Filter Type drop down, and specify the subdirectory
c) Create a second Google Analytics account, and apply the new tracking code to the
pages in the subdirectory
d) Create a new web property and add the new tracking code to the pages on the
subdirectory

Answer:
b) Create a duplicate view and add a filter: select “Include only traffic to a
subdirectory” from the Filter Type drop down, and specify the subdirectory

Using filters, you can _______.

a) exclude data from a view

b) change how the data looks in your reports
c) include data in a view
d) All of these answers apply

Answer:
d) All of these answers apply

Which of the following best represents the hierarchical structure of a Google

Analytics account from top to bottom?

a) View → Account → Property

b) Property → Account → View
c) Account → View → Property
d) Account → Property → View

Answer:
d) Account → Property → View
 

Which of the following statements are true?

Check all that apply.

a) If you make a mistake with a configuration setting on a view, you can always
reprocess the data to fix it.
b) To view data from two websites in aggregate using Google Analytics, you must use
the same tracking ID on both sites.
c) Once a view is deleted it can be restored using the trash can feature.
d) When a new view is created, it will show the historical data from the first view you
created for the property.

Answer:
b) +c)

Filters can modify the data in your Google Analytics reports by:

(select all that apply)

a) including data
b) excluding data
c) exporting data
d) changing how data looks in reports

Answer:
a), b), d)

Which of the following would you use to show two date ranges on the same
graph?

a) secondary dimension
b) motion chart
c) plot rows
d) pivot table
e) date comparison
Answer:
e) date comparison

Which of the following reporting tools would you use to show two rows of data on
the same graph?

a) Date comparison
b) Table filter
c) Table sort
d) Plot rows
e) Primary dimension
f) Secondary dimension
g) Pie chart
h) Pivot table

Answer:
d) Plot rows

Which of the following Audience reports would you use to see how often users
return to your site?

a) Location reports
b) Language
c) Frequency & Recency reports
d) New vs. Returning reports
e) Engagement reports
f) Browser & OS reports
g) Mobile reports

Answer:
c) Frequency & Recency reports

The URL for the homepage of your site is example.com/index. You would like this
to appear as “/home” in your Pages report. How can this be achieved?
a) Use a Search and Replace custom filter on the Request URI field where Search
Strings is “/index” and Replace String is “/home”
b) Use a Search and Replace custom filter on the Request URI field where Search
String is “www.example.com/index” and Replace String is “www.example.com/home”

Answer:
a) Use a Search and Replace custom filter on the Request URI field where Search
Strings is “/index” and Replace String is “/home”

Which of the following would be most useful for ranking pages according to
revenue contribution?

a) Page Value
b) Bounce Rate
c) Revenue
d) ROI
e) Margin

Answer:
a) Page Value

To see the bounce rate of a specific medium in an Acquisitions report:

Check all that apply.

a) Change the primary dimension in the Channels report to “Medium” and view the
Bounce Rate metric
b) Change the primary dimension in the Source/Medium report to “Medium” and view
the Bounce Rate metric
c) Change the primary dimension in the Referrals report to “Medium” and view the
Bounce Rate metric
d) You cannot see this information in any Acquisitions reports.

Answer:
a) + b)
 

Which of the following types of traffic will show in the “Campaigns” report?

Check all that apply

a) Visits from Google AdWords campaigns that have autotagging enabled

b) Visits from Google AdWords campaigns that have autotagging disabled and no
manual campaign tagging
c) Visits from all links tagged with the parameter utm_medium=cpc
d) Visits from all links tagged with the utm_campaign parameter

Answer:
a) + d)

Which of the following reports allows you to identify the terms visitors use to
conduct searches within your site?

Select all that apply.

a) Keyword report
b) Affinity Categories
c) Search Engine Optimization report
d) Site Search report

Answer:
d) Site Search report

The Site Search reports show:

a) how users search your site

b) traffic coming from search engines
c) traffic coming from Google organic search
d) traffic coming from Google paid search

Answer:
a) how users search your site
 

Which of the following Audience reports would you use to see how your site
performance differs between desktop, smartphone and tablet users?

a) Location reports
b) Language
c) Frequency & Recency reports
d) New vs. Returning reports
e) Engagement reports
f) Browser & OS reports
g) Mobile reports

Answer:
g) Mobile reports

You are interested in identifying the most popular content on your site. Which of
the following sections will have this report information by default?

a) Search
b) Acquisition
c) Audience
d) Conversion
e) Behavior

Answer:
e) Behavior

True or False: When you share a link to a custom report, you share the data in the
report.

a) True: Sharing a link to a custom report shares the data in the report.
b) False: Sharing a link to a custom report only shares a template for the report.

Answer:
b) False: Sharing a link to a custom report only shares a template for the report.
 

Which of the following are tracked by the Site Speed reports? Select all that
apply.

a) button click response time

b) how quickly images load
c) All of these are tracked by the Site Speed reports.
d) page-load time for a sample of pageviews on your site
e) how quickly the browser parses a page and makes it available for user interaction

Answer:
c) All of these are tracked by the Site Speed reports.

Which of the following reporting tools would you use to exclude any rows of a
report with fewer than 50 visits?

a) Date comparison
b) Table filter
c) Table sort
d) Plot rows
e) Primary dimension
f) Secondary dimension
g) Pie chart
h) Pivot table

Answer:
Table filter

Which of the following Audience reports would you use to determine whether
first-time site visitors or repeat site visitors spend more time on your site on
average?

a) Location reports
b) Language
c) Frequency & Recency reports
d) New vs. Returning reports
e) Engagement reports
f) Browser & OS reports
g) Mobile reports

Answer:
d) New vs. Returning reports

True or False. It is possible to customize the default channels in the Channels

report and create your own custom channels from scratch.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
a) True

Which of the following Behavior reports would you use to identify the pages of
your site that have the highest bounce rate as the first page of a user’s session?

a) All Pages
b) Content Drilldown
c) Landing Pages
d) Exit Pages
e) Site Speed
f) Site Search
g) Events

Answer:
c) Landing Pages

Which of the following Behavior reports could you use to find new keyword ideas
for your search advertising campaigns?
a) All Pages
b) Content Drilldown
c) Landing Pages
d) Exit Pages
e) Site Speed
f) Site Search
g) Events

Answer:
f) Site Search

Which of the following are required to create a Custom Report?

Check all that apply.

a) A report title must be entered

b) Multiple report tabs must be created
c) Multiple metric groups must be created
d) At least one metric must be added
e) At least one dimension must be added
f) A report filter must be applied

Answer:
a), d), e)

True or False. Custom Reports will only display data for the date range selected
at the time the report is created.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
b) False

 
You can retrieve Google Analytics reporting data through the following methods:

(select all that apply)

a) the account administration settings

b) the reporting interface
c) the SDKs
d) an API

Answer:
b), d)

The reporting APIs can be used to:

(select all that apply)

a) automate complex reporting tasks

b) automate your tracking code customizations
c) retrieve Google Analytics data for use in your own applications
d) build your own dashboard with Google Analytics data

Answer:
a), c), d)

Each query sent to the Reporting API must specify:

(select all that apply)

a) the start and end dates

b) the name of the standard report you wish to use
c) which metrics to display
d) the ID of the account view that the data should be retrieved from

Answer:
a), c), d)
 

If the data for a report you request is stored in a standard aggregate table, it will
never be sampled in Google Analytics.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
a) True

If you decrease the sample size for a report, more sessions will be used to
calculate the report and it will take longer to generate.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
b) False

You can adjust the sample size by:

(select all that apply)

a) adding a segment to your report

b) adjusting the session timeout control
c) adjusting a control in the reporting interface
d) specifying the sample size when querying the API

Answer:
c), d)

Which campaign tracking variables are required in order to ensure accurate data
shows for your campaigns in the „All Traffic“ report? Select all that apply.
a) utm_campaign
b) utm_term
c) utm_source
d) utm_medium
e) utm_content

Answer:
a), c), d)

Note: The new version of this question allows only one answer, so the correct option is
“utm_campaign, utm_source, utm_medium”

Which of the following is a valid tagged custom campaign? Select all that apply.

a) www.example.com?
utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter1&utm_campaign=spring
b) www.example.com?
utm_medium=referral&utm_source=example&utm_campaign=winter
c) www.example.com?
utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=mysearch&utm_campaign=spring&utm_term=backpack
s
d) www.example.com?
utm_campaign=fall&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter1&utm_content=a1

Answer:
a), b), c), d)

Which of the following is not a standard campaign parameter?

a) utm_adgroup
b) utm_content
c) utm_campaign
d) utm_source

Answer:
a) utm_adgroup
 

What is the optimize landing pages?

a) to generate a URL with tracking parameters
b) to optimize landing pages
c) using the URL builder is required in order to track AdWords visits
d) to generate the URL tracking parameters that need to be appended to an organic
search result

Answer:
a) to generate a URL with tracking parameters

Which is the recommended parameter for identifying different versions of an ad?

a) utm_ad
b) utm_medium
c) utm_creative
d) utm_content

Answer:
d) utm_content

 For each user who comes to your site, Google Analytics automatically captures
which of the following Traffic Source dimensions?

a) Source and Medium

b) Source, Medium, Campaign, and Ad Content
c) Campaign and Medium
d) Campaign and Ad Content

Answer:
a) Source and Medium
 

Which of the following traffic mediums are automatically tracked by Google

Analytics without extra tagging or account linking? Check all that apply.

a) search
b) referral
c) cpc
d) organic
e) email
f) display
g) ppc
i) (none), when the traffic source is “direct”

Answer:
b), d), i)

Which campaign tracking variables should you always use when manually
tagging a URL?

a) utm_content, utm_campaign
b) utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign
c) utm_source, utm_content
d) utm_campaign, utm_adgroup, utm_term

Answer:
b) utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign

Which of the following should you manually tag with campaign tracking
variables? Check all that apply.

a) Banner ads
b) AdWords campaigns
c) Referrals
d) Organic search traffic
e) Non-AdWords CPC campaigns
f) Email campaigns
Answer:
a), e), f)

Which of the following are examples of channels? Select all that apply.

a) Audience
b) Organic Search
c) Conversion
d) Display
e) Email

Answer:
b), d), e)

Note: Other channels are Direct, Referral, Paid Search, Social.

Which of the following are examples of Sources?

a) example.com
b) mail.google.com
c) All of these are possible Sources.
d) (direct)
e) google

Answer:
c) All of these are possible Sources.

Which of the following are examples of Sources? Select all that apply.

a) Email
b) Example.com
c) Search
d) Google
e) Display

Answer:
b), d)
Note: Direct would also be a Source.

Which of the following are examples of Mediums? Select all that apply.

a) Conversion
b) Example.com
c) Google
d) Email
e) All of these are Mediums.

Answer:
d) Email

Note: Other examples are Organic, CPC, Referral, None (Direct Traffic). Example.com
and Google are Sources.

Which of the following Channels is part of the Default Channel Grouping? Select
all that apply.

a) Display
b) Direct
c) Social
d) Organic

Answer:
a), b), c), d)

You are interested in exploring metrics by campaign and traffic source. Which of
the following sections will have this report information by default?

a) Behavior
b) Conversion
c) Audience
d) Admin
e) Acquisition

Answer:
e) Acquisition

Which of the following could be measured by defining a goal in Google

Analytics? Select all that apply.

a) The percentage of visits that contain only one page view

b) The percentage of visits during which visitors spent at least two minutes on the site
c) The percentage of visits that result in a site registration
d) Conversion rate
e) All of the above.

Answer:
e) All of the above.

Which of the following could be measured by defining a goal in Google

Analytics? Check all that apply.

a) The percentage of sessions that result in a site registration

b) The percentage of sessions that are unique
c) The percentage of sessions which contain three or more pageviews
d) The percentage of sessions during which users spend at least 2 minutes on the site

Answer:
a), c), d)

When configuring a goal, why is it useful to assign a goal value?

a) To determine the conversion rate

b) To calculate ecommerce metrics
c) To determine the popularity of each of your pages
d) To attribute monetary value to non-ecommerce conversions
Answer:
d) To attribute monetary value to non-ecommerce conversions

Which of the following questions can be answered using the goal flow report?

a) Is there a place in my funnel where traffic loops back to the beginning of the
conversion process to start over?
b) Are there a lot of unexpected exits from a step in the middle of my conversion funnel?
c) Are there any steps in my conversion process that don’t perform well on mobile
devices compared to desktop devices?
d) Do visitors usually start my conversion process from the first step or somewhere in
the middle?
e) All of these can be answered using the goal flow report.

Answer:
e) All of these can be answered using the goal flow report.

You have defined goal X such that any PDF download qualifies as a goal
conversion. A user comes to your site once and downloads five PDFs. How many
goal conversions will be recorded?

a) 2
b) 0
c) 5
d) 1

Answer:
d) 1

Setting up goals allows you to see________.

a) bounce rate
b) conversion rates
c) a list of transactions
d) ecommerce revenue

Answer:
b) conversion rates

Your web property is “www.example.com”. You set up a URL goal of “/thankyou”

and a Match Type of “Begins with”. Which of the following URLs will count as
goals? (Select all that apply.)

a) www.example.com/thankyou.html
b) www.example.com/thankyou/receipt.php
c) www.example.com/receipt/thankyou.php
d) www.example.com/thankyou.php

Answer:
a), b), d)

Create a goal in the “Master Profile” for the website to match the following pages:
www.mysite.com/thankyou/shoes
www.mysite.com/thankyou/shirt
www.mysite.com/thankyou
What match type and URI pattern did you use to create the goal in your account?

a) Match type: Equals to; URI pattern: /thankyou

b) Match type: Begins with; URI pattern: /thankyou
c) Match type: Equals to; URI pattern: www.mysite.com/thankyou
d) Match type: Begins with; URI pattern: www.mysite.com/thankyou

Answer:
b) Match type: Begins with; URI pattern: /thankyou

Specifying a goal value allows Google Analytics to calculate __________ (select

all that apply)
a) Revenue per Click
b) Bounce Rate
c) Average Order Value
d) Ecommerce Revenue
e) Goal Revenue

Answer:
e) Goal Revenue

When configuring a goal, why is it useful to assign a goal value?

a) To attribute monetary value to a non e-commerce site

b) To calculate e-commerce metrics
c) To determine the popularity of webpages
d) You must assign a goal value in order to track conversions

Answer:
a) To attribute monetary value to a non e-commerce site

Which of the following would prevent URL destination goal conversions from
being recorded? Select all that apply.

a) There was a misspelling in the URL of the goal definition

b) The tracking code is missing from the conversion page
c) The match type in the goal definition is incorrect
d) No URL destination goals have been defined

Answer:
a), b), c), d)

Which of these best defines a Destination goal in Google Analytics?

a) A website page viewed by the user once they have completed a desired action
b) A KPI
c) A page that has given you revenue
d) The most popular page on your site

Answer:
a) A website page viewed by the user once they have completed a desired action

You define a Destination goal by:

a) Adding the e-commerce code to the goal page

b) Adding the conversion ID to the tracking code on the goal page
c) Dragging the goal page onto a Standard Report
d) Specifying the conversion page in your view settings within Google Analytics

Answer:
d) Specifying the conversion page in your view settings within Google Analytics

Which of the following are required in order to see data for each page of a three-
page conversion process in the Goal Flow report?

Check all that apply.

a) You must have Ecommerce reporting implemented.

b) You must set up a Goal for the conversion.
c) You must set up each of the three pages as a funnel step in the Goal settings.
d) None of the above. Goal Flow reports are automatically populated with data about
your conversion processes.

Answer:
b), c)

Google Analytics Goals let you specify:

a) which users are likely to convert

b) which interactions should be used to calculate conversions
c) which users spend the most time on your home page
d) which page or screen is the first of a user’s visit

Answer:
b) which interactions should be used to calculate conversions

Your ecommerce site sells colorful wrist watches that visitors can customize
using a tool online. Which of the following represent(s) a micro conversion for
your site?

a) an offline sale
b) an online sale
c) a view of the home page
d) All of these are mirco conversions for this site.
e) Use of the “customize your watch” tool

Answer:
e) Use of the “customize your watch” tool

Which of the following represents a macro conversion for an ecommerce site?

a) receiving a product inquiry

b) a completed sales transaction
c) collecting a lead
d) a click on a “buy” button
e) all of the above

Answer:
b) a completed sales transaction

You run a heavy-machinery business and use your website to generate sales
leads for high-priced items. Which of the following actions below would you
consider the main “macro conversion” for your site?

a) A potential customer visits a lead form, but doesn’t fill it out or submit it.
b) A potential customer fills out and submits a lead form.
c) A potential customer downloads a spec sheet for one of your machines.
d) A potential customer signs up for your weekly newsletter.
e) A potential customer joins your social media community.

Answer:
b) A potential customer fills out and submits a lead form.

A macro conversion

a) Occurs when someone completes an action that’s important to your business

b) Is your highest converting campaign
c) Always occurs prior to a micro conversion
d) Is a large revenue sale that is directly attributable to a display campaign
e) Occurs when over 50% of visitors buy an item

Answer:
a) Occurs when someone completes an action that’s important to your business

Person A and person B each visits your commerce site once. During her visit,
person A buys one of your products. Then, before leaving the site, she makes
another purchase. Person B buys nothing. What is your ecommerce conversion
rate for these two visits?

a) 0%
b) 100%
c) 50%
d) 33%
e) 200%

Answer:
b) 100%

Note: The ecommerce conversion rate is calculated like this: number of transactions /
visits = 2/2 = 1 = 100%

 
You want to know whenever weekly revenue for your “spring sale” campaign
increases or decreases by an unusual amount. Which of the following would me
most useful?

a) secondary dimensions
b) Intelligence
c) Annotations
d) Real-Time

Answer:
b) Intelligence

Which of the following is true of ROI?

a) If Cost is $5 and Revenue is $5, your ROI is 50%

b) If Cost is $5 and Revenue is $5, your ROI is 100%
c) If Cost is $5 and Revenue is $5, your ROI is 0%
d) If Cost is $5 and Revenue is $5, your ROI is 20%
e) None of these answers are true of ROI

Answer:
c) If Cost is $5 and Revenue is $5, your ROI is 0%

Note: ROI is calculated like this: revenue minus cost / cost = (5 – 5)/5 = 0/5 = 0

To calculate ROI correctly, Google Analytics needs (select all that apply)

a) Cost
b) Operating Cost
c) Margin
d) Interest Rate
e) Revenue

Answer:
a) + e)
 

Which of the following should you NOT collect with the Google Analytics
ecommerce JavaScript? Select all that apply.

a) tax amount
b) credit card number
c) billing city
d) purchase amount
e) product SKU(s)

Answer:
b) credit card number

In order to set up ecommerce tracking, you need to_________. Select all that
apply.

a) have linked an AdWords account with your Google Analytics account

b) enable ecommerce tracking in at least one of the views for a property
c) add ecommerce tracking JavaScript to your receipt page or “transaction complete”
page
d) add an ecommerce campaign variable to your URLs

Answer:
b) + c)

Which of the following questions could you answer with the Ecommerce reports?

Check all that apply.

a) Which product category brings in the most revenue for my business?

b) What are the ten most frequently purchased products on my site?
c) What products did a visitor purchase together in the same transaction?
d) What is the average order value of the transactions placed on my site?

Answer:
a), b), c), d)
Which of the following AdWords reports would you use to investigate when you
should modify your bidding during certain hours of the day to optimize
conversions?

a) AdWords Keywords
b) Hour of Day
c) Destination URLs
d) Placements
e) Campaigns

Answer:
b) Hour Of Day

Note: There is an older version of this questions where the answer was “Day Parts” but
that report does not exist anymore!

If a paid keyword has an Assisted/Last Click or Direct Conversion value of .5,

which of the following is true?

a) The keyword played an assist role in exactly one conversion

b) The keyword played an assist role in exactly five conversions
c) The keyword played an assist role less often than it played a last click role
d) none of these answers

Answer:
c) The keyword played an assist role less often than it played a last click role

Note: In this example the value is 0.5. That means for example 5 assists and 10 last
click or direct conversions = 5/10 = 0,5. If the value would be about 1, the paid keyword
played equally an assisted and completed role. If the value would be --greater than 1,
the keyword played an assisted role.

You want to evaluate the landing pages you are using for AdWords ads. Which of
the following dimensions would be most useful?
a) Destination URL
b) Ad Group
c) Campaign
d) Placements
e) Keyword

Answer:
a) Destination URL

Which of the following AdWords reports would you use to investigate whether
you should modify your bidding during certain hours of the day to optimize
conversions?

a) Campaigns
b) Keywords
c) Search Queries
d) Time of Day
e) Destination URLs

Answer:
d) Time of Day

Which of the following would help you to determine the conversion value of a
paid keyword?

a) Multi-Channel Funnels
b) CPM
c) CTR
d) Real-Time
e) none of these answers

Answer:
a) Multi-Channel Funnels

 
Which of the following metrics would allow you to assess AdWords campaign
profitability? (Select all that apply)

a) Revenue per Click

b) CTR
c) ROI
d) Margin
e) CPM

Answer:
c) ROI

Which of the following are possible ways to view the dimension “Ad Content” in
your Google Analytics AdWords reports?

Check all that apply.

a) Switch the primary dimension in the AdWords Campaigns report to “Ad Content”
b) Switch the primary dimension in the AdWords Keywords report to “Ad Content”
c) Add “Ad Content” to the Campaigns report as a secondary dimension

Answer:
b) + c)

Which of the following Google Analytics dimensions are only available for
AdWords traffic?

Check all that apply.

a) Medium
b) Matched Search Query
c) Query Match Type
d) Placement Domain
e) Source
f) Campaign

Answer:
b), c), d)
 

Which of the following would be most useful in measuring how many days
passed between the first visit to a site and the eventual conversion?

a) Time Lag
b) Conversion Value
c) Path Length
d) Top Conversion Paths
e) Assisted/Last Interaction Conversions

Answer:
a) Time Lag

Your Multi-Channel Funnel reports have no data. What is the most likely reason?

a) You haven’t implemented Goals or Ecommerce

b) Your are not using Content Experiments
c) You haven’t enabled demographic data
d) You haven’t set up Goal Funnels
e) You are not using Google Tag Manager

Answer:
a) You haven’t implemented Goals or Ecommerce

You’ve noticed that many users visit your site several times before converting
and you want to understand in more detail how they arrive at your site. Which of
the following metrics would be most helpful in showing you whether a keyword is
part of a conversion path?

a) Visits
b) Assisted Conversions
c) Bounce Rate
d) Impressions
e) Clicks
Answer:
b) Assisted Conversions

What is Bounce Rate?

a) the percentage of visits when a visitor viewed only one page and then exited without
a second interaction on the site
b) the percentage of times unique visitors returned to your website in a given time
period
c) the percentage of sessions for which a visitor exits from your homepage
d) the percentage of site exits

Answer:
a) the percentage of visits when a visitor viewed only one page and then exited
without a second interaction on the site

Why might a site have a high Bounce Rate? Check all that apply.

a) The landing page of the site has extra Event Tracking implemented to track additional
actions besides pageviews.
b) The ads that bring the users to the site set different expectations than the landing
page.
c) The site only has one page (e.g. a simple blog).
d) The page that your users typically land on doesn’t have enough information or a good
call-to-action.

Answer:
b), c), d)

True or False. In order to see data in the Multi-Channel Funnels reports you must
first implement Goals or Ecommerce.

a) True
b) False
Answer:
a) True

Which of the following Multi-Channel Funnels reports would you use to see the
most common sequences of marketing touch points that lead to conversions on
your site or app?

a) Assisted Conversions
b) Top Conversion Paths
c) Time Lag
d) Path Length

Answer:
b) Top Conversion Paths

You’ve found that most of your customers initially learned about your brand via a
display ad. Which of the following attribution models will give credit to display
ads that introduced customers to your brand? Select all that apply.

a) First Interaction attribution model

b) Last Non-Direct Click attribution model
c) Linear attribution model
d) Position Based attribution model
e) Last Click attribution model

Answer:
a), c), d)

Channel X has an Assisted/Last Interaction Conversion value of exactly 1. Which

of the following is true?

a) Channel X equally initiates and assists conversions

b) Channel X always initiates conversions
c) Channel X is always the last click before conversion
d) None of these is true
Answer:
d) None of these is true

Note: The correct answer would be Channel X equally assists and completes
conversions.

In the Linear attribution model,

a) each touchpoint in the conversion path share equal credit for the conversion
b) the last touchpoint receives 100% of the credit for the conversion
c) the touchpoints closest in time to the conversion get most of the credit
d) the first touchpoint receives 100% credit for the conversion

Answer:
a) each touchpoint in the conversion path share equal credit for the conversion

Which of the following most accurately describes the concept of attribution in

digital analytics?

a) calculating cost per click

b) determining a user’s device
c) calculating ROI
d) assigning credit for conversions
e) determining a traffic source

Answer:
d) assigning credit for conversions

Which of the following attribution models would be useful for evaluating ads and
campaigns that are designed to create initial awareness about a brand?

a) Last Interaction model

b) Last Non-Direct Click model
c) Linear model
d) First Interaction model

Answer:
d) First Interaction model

A customer visits your site four times in a month before making a $100 purchase
on your site. She first comes to your site by clicking on a search ad, then a social
media ad, then another search ad, and finally a display ad. If you’re using a linear
attribution model, how much conversion credit could be assigned to the last
display ad?

a) $0
b) $25
c) $50
d) $100

Answer:
b) $25

Note: The conversion credit is calculated as follows: purchase value/touch-points in the

conversion path = 100/4 = 15

Which of the following suggests a poorly performing landing page?

a) Bounce Rate > 90%

b) Bounce Rate < 90%
c) % New Visits > 90%
d) % New Visits < 90%
e) None of these answers

Answer:
a) Bounce Rate > 90%

Which of the following Behavior metrics shows the number of sessions that
included a view of a page?
a) Visits
b) Unique Pageviews
c) Pageviews
d) Bounce rate
e) Unique Visits

Answer:
a) Visits

Which of the following are valid scopes for dimensions?

a) user level, campaign level, session level, hit level

b) campaign level, session level, hit level
c) session level, hit level
d) none of these answers is correct
e) user level, session level, hit level

Answer:
e) user level, session level, hit level

You want to explore traffic metrics by gender and age. Which of the following
sections in Analytics will be most useful?

a) Behavior
b) Conversion
c) Admin
d) Audience
e) Acquisition

Answer:
d) Audience

Which of the following are measures of traffic volume?

a) Avg. Time on Site
b) Margin
c) Bounce Rate
d) Visits

Answer:
d) Visits

Which of the following reporting dimensions would be useful to reference if you

were rebuilding a website?

a) Browser
b) Screen Colors
c) Language
d) All of these dimensions
e) None of these dimensions

Answer:
d) All of these dimensions

Which of the following metrics shows the number of times your ads were
displayed?

a) Impressions
b) CTR
c) Visits
d) Clicks
e) Pageviews

Answer:
a) Impressions

Which of the following are dimensions?

a) % New Sessions
b) Bounce rate
c) Conversion Rate
d) Screen resolution
e) Region

Answer:
d) + e)

Which of the following are dimensions?

a) Conversion Rate
b) Page Title
c) % New Sessions
d) Country

Answer:
b), d)

The following are examples of dimensions:

(select all that apply)

a) Traffic source
b) Page name
c) Country
d) Unique visitors

Answer:
a), b), c)

Your business objective is to maximize the number of sales through your

website. Which of the following metrics would most directly help you measure
performance against this objective?
a) Ecommerce Conversion Rate
b) Bounce Rate
c) Pages/Visit
d) Visits
e) Page Value

Answer:
a) Ecommerce Conversion Rate

You want to see conversion rates for Windows visits coming from London. Which
of the following dimensions would you need to select?

a) City, and Goal Conversion Rate as a secondary dimension

b) Operating System, and City as a secondary dimension
c) Goal Conversion Rate, and City as a secondary dimension
d) any one of these options

Answer:
b) Operating System, and City as a secondary dimension

Which of the following reporting tools would you use to show the dimension
“city” next to the dimension “source” in a report?

a) Date comparison
b) Table filter
c) Table sort
d) Plot rows
e) Primary dimension
f) Secondary dimension
g) Pie chart
h) Pivot table

Answer:
f) Secondary dimension

 
Which of the following metrics would be most useful in measuring how many
conversions were initiated by Paid Search?

a) Assisted Conversion Value

b) First Interaction (Click) Conversions
c) Conversion Rate
d) None of these metrics

Answer:
b) First Interaction (Click) Conversions

Which of the following are metrics? Select all that apply.

a) City
b) % New Visits
c) Pageviews
d) Browser

Answer:
b)+c)

The following are examples of metrics:

(select all that apply)

a) Unique visitors
b) Page name
c) Average visit duration
d) Traffic source

Answer:
a), c)

Which of the following would be most useful for optimizing landing pages?
a) Unique Visits
b) Unique Pageviews
c) Visits
d) Pageviews
e) Bounce Rate

Answer:
e) Bounce Rat

Which two metrics below would be the best KPIs for measuring the performance
of an ecommerce business?

a) bounce rate and average session duration

b) pageviews and revenue
c) pageviews and bounce rate
d) revenue and average order value

Answer:
d) revenue and average order value

Every metric may be combined with every dimension in Google Analytics.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
b) False

You can combine a metric X with a dimension Y in Google Analytics

a) as long as sampling is not required

b) if X and Y have been precalculated together in an aggregate table
c) if X and Y are in the same channel grouping
d) if X and Y have the same campaign
e) if X and Y have the same scope
Answer:
e) if X and Y have the same scope

Explanation: not every metric can be combined with every dimension. Each dimension
and metric has a scope: users, sessions, or actions. 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 an action-level
(or, hit-level) dimension like Page.

You want to create a report comparing the performance of pages on your site and
decide to use the following dimensions and metrics: Page Title, Avg. Visit
Duration, Goal 1 Conversion Rate. Which of the following statements is true
about this report?

a) Google Analytics will allow you to create this report, and the report makes sense
since you chose to combine hit-level metrics with the hit-level dimension Page Title.
b) Google Analytics will allow you to create this report, but the report does not make
sense since you chose to combine session-level metrics with the hit-level dimension
Page Title.
c) Google Analytics will not allow you to create this report.

Answer:
b) Google Analytics will allow you to create this report, but the report does not
make sense since you chose to combine session-level metrics with the hit-level
dimension Page Title.

Which of the following would be valid segments to consider when looking at

data? Select all that apply.

a) traffic by device
b) traffic by geography
c) traffic by marketing channel
d) traffic by time of day
e) all of the above

Answer:
e) all of the above
 

Which of the following are true about segmentation? Select all that apply.

a) Segmentation can help you find the underlying causes of changes to your aggregate
data.
b) Segmentation allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your data.
c) Segmentation should generally not be used without Real-Time reporting.
d) Segmentation is a technique that should only be used by experienced analysts.

Answer:
a) + b)

Which of the following are true about segmentation? Check all that apply.

a) Segmentation allows you to combine data from multiple web properties in your
reports.
b) Segmentation allows you to isolate and analyze subsets of your data.
c) Segmentation is a technique that should only be used by experienced analysts.
d) Segmentation can help you find the underlying causes of changes to your aggregate
data.

Answer:
b) + d)

You want to know whether button X is clicked more often than button Y. Which of
the following would be most useful?

a) Events
b) Annotations
c) Intelligence
d) Real-Time

Answer:
a) Events

 
You want to measure the percentage of sessions during which the user clicks a
“product detail” button. Which of the following would you need to do in order to
see this information?

a) Track the button as a page view and look at the Events Overview
b) Track the button with an event and set up an event goal
c) Enable the button as a KPI and set up a dashboard
d) Set up a “product details” button in the ecommerce JavaScript
e) None of these options will work

Answer:
b) Track the button with an event and set up an event goal

You want to see the percentage of sessions in which a specific button was
clicked. Which of the following would be most useful?

a) set up Real-Time reporting

b) set up a dashboard
c) set up an event goal
d) set up a custom report

Answer:
c) set up an event goal

In order to see data in the Events reports, which of the following must you do in
addition to implementing the standard Google Analytics tracking code on your
site?

a) Set up Event Tracking on the Account settings page and specify which types of
events you want to track
b) Set up Event Tracking on the Property settings page and specify which types of
events you want to track
c) Add additional Event Tracking code to each action on your site that you want Google
Analytics to track as an event
d) None of the above. Events are automatically tracked with the standard Google
Analytics tracking code.
Answer:
c) Add additional Event Tracking code to each action on your site that you want
Google Analytics to track as an event

Which of the following technologies or features can be used to add data to

Google Analytics?

a)     Data Import, Real-Time

b)     Data Import, Intelligence
c)     Data Import, Measurement Protocol
d)     Real-Time, Intelligence

Answer:
c) Data Import and Measurement Protocol

You publish articles by many different authors on your site. You want to create a
report that shows the total number of pageviews for each author. Which of the
following features will allow you to add author information to Google Analytics?

a)     Analytics Intelligence

b)     Data Import
c)     Segments
d)     Annotations
e)     Custom Reports

Answer:
b) Data Import
(note: there is an older version of this question where the answer instead of this is
“Dimension Widening”)

Which of the following is an example of adding internal context to your data?

Choose one.

a) Using third-party data from your competition to set targets for your own site
performance.
b) Using a monthly visits benchmark from your industry as a whole to set targets for
your own site performance.
c) Using your site’s historical monthly visits data to set a future monthly visits target.
Answer:
c) Using your site’s historical monthly visits data to set a future monthly visits
target.

The measurement protocol can collect and send user activity data to Google
Analytics from any web-connected device, such as a ticket kiosk.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
a) True

Similar to the JavaScript and mobile SDKs, you’ll need to include a tracking ID
with each hit collected by the Measurement Protocol.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
a) True

How can you add data to Google Analytics from other sources? (select all that
apply)

a) Link your AdWords account to Google Analytics to import advertising data

b) Use Cost Data Upload to import click and cost data from non-AdWords campaigns
c) Import a .csv file into Google Analytics to attach new dimensions to existing
dimensions
d) Upload data to Google Spreadsheets and automatically sync it with your Google
Analytics account

Answer:
a), b), c)
 

To add external data to Google Analytics using the Data Import feature, you must
have:

a) a key that links the imported data with Google Analytics

b) a key that links the imported data with your AdWords account
c) an SDK that links the imported data with Google Analytics
d) an API that links the imported data with your AdWords account

Answer:
a) a key that links the imported data with Google Analytics

What are the two methods of importing external data into Google Analytics using
Dimension Widening?

(select all that apply)

a) Linking to Google Spreadsheets

b) Using the Mobile SDKs
c) Using the API
d) Uploading a spreadsheet or CSV file

Answer:
c), d)

For mobile applications, Google Analytics will use the same Javascript tracking
code as websites.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
b) False

 
Google Analytics stores mobile app usage data locally on the device and sends it
to the Analytics account later using a batch process called:

a) resending
b) rerouting
c) dispatching
d) displacing

Answer:
c) dispatching

If an app gets uninstalled and then reinstalled, Google Analytics will have to
create a new unique identifier on the device instead of matching the session as
coming from a returning user.

a) True
b) False

Answer:
a) True

1.What is Bounce Rate?

A) the percentage of visits to your site where the visitor viewed only one page and then exited
without any interaction on your site
B) the number of times unique visitors returned to your website
C) the percentage of sessions for which the visitor can be tracked as unique
D) the percentage of site exits

2.How would you track visitors coming from an email, banner, or newsletter campaign?
A) by manually tagging the destination URLs of the campaign
B) Google Analytics will track visits coming from any campaign automatically
C) by turning autotagging on
D) It is not possible to track visitors coming from non-AdWords campaigns

3.What does a high bounce rate on a landing page associated with a particular keyword
suggest?
A) The keyword will have a relatively high ROI
B) The content on the landing page does not properly match the expectations of visitors who
searched on that keyword
C) The landing page is highly relevant to the keyword
D) You should stop buying the keyword

4.How would you set up Google Analytics to attribute conversions to the original referring
campaign?
A) Add "utm_nooverride=off" to the end of your campaign URLs
B) Conversions are attributed to the original referring campaign by default
C) Add "utm_nooverride=1" to the end of your campaign URLs
D) Conversions are attributed to the most recent campaign and there is no way to modify this
behavior

5.How is click-through-rate calculated?

A) clicks / impressions
B) visits / impressions
C) clicks / visits
D) absolute unique visitors / impressions

6.You want to exclude your company's internal traffic from your reports. Which RegEx would
exclude the IP range 193.88.222.1 to 193.88.222.10? (Hint: Use the RegEx Generator in the
Google Analytics Help Center)
A) 193\.88\.222\.(1 -10)
B) ^193\.88\.222\.([1-9]|10)$
C )193.88.222.1-10
D) 193\.88\.222\.[1 -9]| 10

7.Your website uses a shopping cart on a different domain. To ensure that visitor session data is
retained when switching domains, which of the following do you need to implement?
A) the _link() or _linkByPost() method
B) the _trackTrans() method
C) the _setLocalRemoteServer() method
D) This is tracked automatically; no additional configuration is required

8.How would you find out which keywords visitors from Tokyo used to find your site?
A) This information is not available in Google Analytics
B) Search for "Tokyo" in the All Traffic report
C) Select the "Keyword" dimension in the Map Overlay (Location) report
D) Select the "City" dimension in the Keywords report

9.You are running a correctly tagged email campaign that refers visitors to your website. How
would you track conversions associated with the campaign in cases where visitors did not
convert in the first instance, but instead returned at a later time by typing the URL of your site
directly into their browser?
A) You cannot track conversions when a visitor returns as "direct" (i.e. by typing the URL of your
site directly into their browser)
B) Google Analytics does this by default (within 18 months)
C) Google Analytics does this by default (within 6 months)
D) Tag the URL in the email with a campaign of "nooverride"

10.A visitor arrived at your website via referrer A on one occasion, and then via referrer B on
another. During the second visit, the visitor completed a purchase transaction. To what source
will the purchase transaction be attributed?
A) referrer B B) referrer A
C) direct
D) (not set)

11.You define a URL Destination goal by_.

A) editing the profile and specifying the request URI of the conversion page
B) adding the e-commerce code to the goal page
C) adding the conversion ID to the tracking code on the goal page
D) dragging the goal page onto the Dashboard

12.Which reports tell you how many automatic crawlers (search engine robots) visited your
website?
A) Google Analytics does not track the vast majority of crawlers since they are classed as
personally identifiable information
B) Google Analytics does not track the vast majority of crawlers since most do not have IP
addresses
C) The Network Properties reports
D) Google Analytics does not track the vast majority of crawlers since most do not execute
JavaScript

13.What is one way of determining whether an increase in Average Time on Site actually
reflects an increase in site interaction?
A) look for a corresponding increase in Bounce Rate
B) look for a corresponding increase in Direct visits
C) look for a corresponding increase in Pages/Visit
D) look for a corresponding decrease in Direct visits

14.You are an online merchant. A customer makes an order to be delivered to his home
address. He then decides to make a separate order to be delivered to a friend's address. How
many transactions will be reflected in your reports?
A) 0
B) 1
C) 2

15.Which of the following could be measured by defining a goal in Google Analytics? (Select all
that apply)
A) the percentage of visits that result in a site registration
B) the percentage of visits that are unique
C) the percentage of visits which contain only one page view
D) the percentage of visits during which visitors spent at least 2 minutes on the site

16.What kind of intelligence events are available in Google Analytics? (Select all that apply)
A) Automatic alerts
B) Custom alerts
C) Weekly alerts
D) Daily alerts

17.You notice that the goal conversion rate in your Site Search Terms report is different from
the Goals menu report, what is the likely reason for this discrepancy?
A) Not all visits include a site search; only those which did are included in the conversion rate
calculation in the Site Search Terms report
B) The Site Search Terms report is only able to show goal conversion rates for one of your goals
C) Of those who perform a search during their visit, fewer are likely to convert
D) This is a bug; the figures should match

18.Which is the recommended parameter for identifying different versions of an ad?

A) utm_creative
B) utm_medium
C) utm_content
D) utm_ad

19.What is the purpose of the URL builder?

A) to optimize landing pages
B) to generate a URL with tracking parameters
C) to generate the URL tracking parameters that need to be appended to an organic search
result
D) using the URL Builder is required to track AdWords visits

20.Which report would you use to assess whether visitors who search your website have a
higher conversion rate than visitors who do not?
A) Site Search Overview report
B) the Goal Conversion tab on the Site Search Usage report
C) the Goal Conversion tab on the Search Terms report
D) It is not possible to obtain this data

21.Which of the following will Google Analytics track by default? (Select all that apply)
A) the referrer that directed a visitor to your site
B) the number of visitors to your site
C) the average amount of time people spent on your site
D) the click path of an individual visitor
22.Which is the recommended way to prevent URL query parameters (session_id, for instance)
from appearing in Content reports?
A) Create an exclude filter in the profile
B) Create an include filter in the profile
C) Exclude them in the main Profile Settings
D) This is not possible

23.Which of the following would prevent you from creating a new profile in Google Analytics?
(Select two)
A) You have not opted in to Benchmarking
B) You do not have access to the code of the website
C) You do not have admin rights to the Analytics account
D) You have already reached the maximum number of permitted profiles for your
account

24.You have two profiles which track the same web property. You copy a URL Destination goal
from Profile 1 and enable it in Profile 2. A week later, you find you are receiving goal data in
Profile 1 but not in Profile 2. Which of the following could be the reason? (Select two)
A) Profile 2 has colliding filters that prevent any data from appearing
B) Profile 2 has a filter that manipulates the Request URI
C) The tracking code has been incorrectly applied in Profile 2
D) AdWords has been incorrectly linked to the profile

25.Which of these best defines a URL Destination goal in Google Analytics?

A) the most popular page on your site
B) a page that has given you revenue
C) a KPI
D) a website page viewed by the visitor once they have completed a desired action

26.Which of these definitions best describes what a referrer is?

A) the URL of the website from which a visitor came
B) the web page to which your server defaults when no page on the domain is specified
C) a virtual container for holding computer files
D) the process of converting a numeric IP address into a text name

27.Why might a website www.mysite.com have traffic appearing as coming from "mysite.com /
referral"?
A) On some pages of mysite.com, the Google Analytics Tracking Code is called more than once
B) These are returning visitors to mysite.com
C) Autotagging has not been enabled
D) mysite.com has several subdomains and the Google Analytics Tracking Code has not been
customized accordingly
28.How would you configure a profile to include only Google CPC data?
A) Add two include filters to the profile: one requiring Campaign Source to be "google", and the
other requiring Campaign Medium to be "cpc"
B) Add an include filter requiring Campaign Source to be "google I cpc"
C) Link the profile to your Ad Words account
D) This is not possible

29.Which is NOT a standard Google Analytics campaign variable?

A) utm_source
B) utm_adgroup
C) utm_term
D) utm_content

30.Which of these are available in Real-Time reporting? (Select all that apply)
A) Active number of visitors
B) Total number of visitors today
C) Pageviews per minute
D) Pageviews per second

31.How can you ensure that clicks and visits match in your AdWords Campaigns report?
A) Place the Google Analytics Tracking Code before the </body> tag
B) Enable autotagging in AdWords
C) Make sure your browser allows cookies
D) You can't because Google Analytics tracks visits and imports click data from AdWords

32.Which of the following are elements of the Event Tracking data model?
A) categories, actions, labels
B) actions, titles, values
C) actions, labels, methods
D) categories, labels, formats

33.True or False: In Google Analytics, you can see how many visitors are on your site right now.
A) True.
B) False.

34.Which of these best describes the differences between a first- and a third-party cookie?
A) A first-party cookie is a temporary cookie and a third-party cookie is a persistent one
B) A first-party cookie is set by the same web site you are visiting, a third-party cookie is set by a
different web site than the one you are visiting
C) A first-party cookie is set by a different web site than the one you are visiting, a third-party
cookie is set by the same web site as the one you are visiting
D) A first-party cookie may only contain one attribute, a third-party cookie may contain several
attributes
35.Which of the following is true about Visit Duration?
A) Visit Duration categorizes visits according to the amount of time spent on the site.
B) Visit Duration is the same metric as Avg. Time on Site.

36. True or False: The order in which filters appear in your Profile Settings matters
A) True: Filters are executed in the order in which they appear
B) False: Filters are not executed in the the order in which they appear

37.Where do you find the URL Builder?

A) in Conversion University
B) in "Settings" > "Edit" > "Main Website Profile Information"
C) in the Help Center
D) You must ask a Google Analytics Authorized Consultant for access to the URL Builder

38.You are implementing e-commerce tracking on your client's site. Their site does not use an
"affiliation" field. Which of the following is an example of a correct implementation?
A) _gaq.push(['_addTrans',
'1234',
'11.99',
'1.29',
"5",
'San Jose',
'California',
'USA'
]);
_gaq.push(['_addltem',
'1234',
'DD44',
'T-Shirt',
'Green Medium',
'11.99',
'1'
]);
_gaq.push(['_trackTrans']);

B) _gaq.push(['_addTrans',
'1234',
'',
'11.99',
'1.29',
'5',
'San Jose',
'California',
'USA'
]);
_gaq.push(['_addltem',
'1234',
'DD44',
'T-Shirt',
'Green Medium',
'11.99',
'1'
]);
_gaq. push(['_trackTrans']);

C) _gaq.push(['_addTrans',
'1234',
// affiliation or store name
'11.99',
'1.29',
'5'

39.Temporary cookies differ from persistent cookies because:

A) temporary cookies cannot last for more than 30 minutes
B) temporary cookies are removed when you close your browser
C) temporary cookies can be deleted while persistent cookies cannot
D) temporary cookies are set by a third party

40.What kind of cookies does Google Analytics use?

A) first-party; utma, utmb, utmd

B) first-party; utma, utmb, utmz

C) third-party; utma, utmz, utmv

D) third-party; utma, utmb, utmz

41.Which of the following are metrics?

A) Browser
B) City
C) Pageviews
D) Avg. Time on Site

42.How might you use the information in the Landing Pages report? (Select two)
A) to see where visitors are entering the site
B) to identify your high bounce-rate landing pages
C) to see where visitors are exiting the site
D) to identify your most-visited site pages

43.Which of the following are dimensions?

A) Screen Resolution
B) Region
C) % New Visits
D) Bounce Rate

44.If you manually tag your AdWords campaigns, which one of the following AdWords
attributes would you be able to view in your Analytics reports?
A) Placement URL
B) Match Type
C) Campaign
D) Ad Group

45.Which of the following should you manually tag with campaign tracking variables?
A) organic search results, referrals and bookmarks
B) banner ads, referrals, and all CPC campaigns
C) AdWords campaigns only
D) banner ads, email campaigns, and non-AdWords CPC campaigns

46.Why is it important that you maintain one unfiltered profile when using filters with your
analytics account?
A) There is no reason to maintain an unfiltered profile
B) You can only use predefined filters with unfiltered profiles
C) Without one unfiltered profile, you will not be able to use a filter for multiple profiles
D) You will need to configure your goals in the unfiltered profile
E) Since raw data cannot be reprocessed, maintaining an unfiltered profile ensures that the
original data can always be accessed

47.Your AJAX-based gaming website is hosted on a single html page. Which is the best way to
measure the percentage of visits during which more than 5 games were played? (Select the
best answer option)
A) Track each game-play as an event and define a goal for greater than 5 events per visit.
B) Track each game-play as a virtual pageview and define a goal for greater than 5 pages viewed
per visit.
C) Track each game-play as a virtual pageview and define 5 separate goals, one for each virtual
pageview.
D) Track each game-play as an event and define 5 separate goals, one for each event.

48.You manage a website that sells household appliances. Your site assigns the product id 17
(pid=17) to all pages related to refrigerators. You would like to have a profile where your data
includes only pages on your site related to refrigerators. Which of the following would
accomplish this?
A) Filter 1-- Type: Custom Include; Field: Request URI; Pattern: "/refrigerator"
Filter 2-- Type: Custom Search and Replace; Field: Request URI; Search for "pid=17" and replace
with "/refrigerator"
B) Filter 1-- Type: Custom Search and Replace; Field: Request URI; Search for "pid=17" and
replace with "/refrigerator"
Filter 2-- Type: Custom Include: Field: Request URI: Pattern: "/refrigerator"
C) Either of these would work

49.What does _trackPageview() do?

A) expedites page load time
B) enables e-commerce tracking
C) registers a pageview
D) registers an internal site search

50.Which of the following could explain why Google CPC visits are not showing up in Google
Analytics? (Select all that apply)
A) The wrong match type has been selected in the profile settings
B) Autotagging has not been enabled
C) A redirect on the landing page stripped out the gclid
D) Ecommerce has not been enabled and no goals have values

51.You have had your Google Analytics account for months, and have been successfully tracking
traffic to a web property in Profile 1. You created a duplicate profile -Profile 2- but the profile's
reports are not showing any data.
Which of the following would help explain the situation? (Select two)
A) You created Profile 2 less than 24 hours ago
B) There are conflicting filters applied to Profile 2 which are preventing data from
coming through
C) You do not have access to the data
D) You applied a custom lowercase filter

52.Why can AdWords Clicks differ from Analytics Visits?

A) Some visitors may have JavaScript disabled
B) Some visitors may be blocking cookies
C) 'Clicks' and 'Visits' are different metrics
D) All of the above

53.Does Google Analytics track visits to cached pages?

A) Yes; the JavaScript is executed even from a cached page
B) No, the JavaScript is not executed from cached pages

54.Can Google Analytics track search engines other than those that it tracks by default?
A) No, the list of recognized search engines is maintained by Google
B) Yes, by modifying your Google Analytics Tracking Code
C) Yes, by adding the search engines to the Analytics Settings page
D) No. Google Analytics only tracks visitors coming from the Google search engine

55.Which of the following is NOT possible?

A) creating three profiles that track the same website
B) creating a profile that aggregates data from different Google Analytics accounts
C) creating 40 profiles
D) enabling Site Search for the profile being created

56.Which of the following could be used to track Flash events? (Select two)
A) _trackPageview()
B) _trackEvent()
C) _link()
D) _flashSite()

57.What technologies does Google Analytics use to track visitors?

A) Java and four temporary cookies
B) JavaScript and third-party cookies
C) JavaScript and first-party cookies
D) HTML only

58.What would prevent URL Destination goal conversions from being recorded? (Select all that
apply)
A) The conversion page has the incorrect tracking code
B) The match type in the goal definition is incorrect
C) There was a misspelling in the URL of the goal definition
D) The Google Analytics Tracking Code is missing from the conversion page

59.Which of the following is not a valid dimension?

A) Country/Territory
B) City
C) Address
D) Region

60.Where on the appropriate page(s) should e-commerce tracking code be placed?

A) The e-commerce tracking code should replace the standard Google Analytics Tracking Code
B) The e-commerce tracking code should be placed before the standard Google Analytics
Tracking Code
C) The e-commerce tracking code should be placed after the standard Google Analytics Tracking
Code

61.What are the benefits of linking your AdWords account with your Google Analytics account?
(Select all that apply)
A) this will allow Google Analytics to differentiate between Google CPC and non-Google CPC
visits
B) this will allow you to access your Analytics data from within the AdWords interface
C) this will allow you to have AdWords cost data imported into your Analytics account
D) this will allow Analytics to calculate ROI of your AdWords spend

62.Is it possible to make the Pages report display different names than the actual page
pathnames?
A) Yes, you can rename the pages by entering the desired request URI in the call to
_trackPageview();
B) Yes, you can rename the pages by entering the desired URI in the call to link();
C) You need to talk to your webmaster to change the settings of the server to allow arbitrary
parameters
D) No, it is not possible

63.Which of the following would cause Google Analytics to track a visitor as new even if they
had been tracked during their previous visit to the site? (Select all that apply)
A) if the visitor is blocking cookies
B) if the visitor has JavaScript disabled
C) if the previous visit occurred 6 months ago
D) if the visitor used a different browser for the return visit
E) if the visitor deleted cookies after the first visit

64.Which of the following may only be added to a profile by an administrator?

A) Custom Alerts
B) Annotations
C) Goals
D) Advanced Segments

65.You have two websites with different domains (e.g. Mysite.com and Yoursite.com) which
you want to track under a single Google Analytics account. Why would you link the sites using
the _link() method?
A) to allow Flash content from Mysite.com to display on Yoursite.com
B) to preserve visitor and session information across the two domains
C) to add Mysite.com to the list of referrals
D) to clear all the cookie information

66.Select the Goal URL pattern and match type that will count all of the following pages as
conversions:

http://www.mysite.com/shoes/buy.asp
http://www.mysite.com/shoes/buy.asp?prodid=9
http://www.mysite.com/shoes/buy.asp?prodid=100
A) pattern is "/shoes/buy\.asp?" and match type is "Head Match"
B) pattern is "/shoes/buy.asp" and match type is "Exact Match"
C) pattern is "/shoes/buy.asp" and match type is "Head Match"
D) pattern is "/shoes/buy.asp?prodid=.*" and match type is "Exact Match"

67.Why might you see a search engine name appear in the results for your Referring Sites
report (e.g. "google.com")?
A) Someone was referred to your site via a search result page, but the keyword was not
captured
B) Someone was referred to your site via a link on a personalized search engine page such as
iGoogle

68.Which campaign tracking variables should you always use when manually tagging a URL?
A) utm_campaign, utm_adgroup, utm_term
B) utm_source, utm_content
C) utm_content, utm_campaign
D) utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign

69.Which of the following visitors would be reported as coming from "direct / (none)"? (Select
wo)
A) visitors who typed your site's URL directly into their browser
B) visitors who came to your site via a bookmark
C) visitors who came to your site via a banner ad
D) visitors who came to your site via an AdWords campaign

70.On mysite.com. all the e-commerce transactions are assigned to a single traffic source:
mysite.com / referral. Which of the following are possible explanations?
A) This transaction page has an outdated version of the Google Analytics Tracking Code
B) Autotagging has not been enabled and none of the referring links contain tags
C) The transaction page contains code that is setting the source improperly
D) The transaction page is on a subdomain and cross domain tracking has not been correctly
implemented

ANOTHER TEST QUESTIONS

Which of the following are possible uses of profiles within a single G Analytics
account? Select all
a. to look more closely at traffic to a specific part of the site (a page or selection pages)
b. to track web domains that belong to another account
c. to look more closely at traffic to a specific subdomain
d. to limit a user's access to a segment of data

Which of the following reports display e-commerce revenue data?

(I)the adwords campaign report
(II) the All traffic report
(III)the e-commerce section reports

a. I only
b. I and II only
c. I,II,and III
d. none of the above

What would prevent URL Destination goal conversions from being recorded?
Select all that apply
a. the conversion page has the incorrect tracking code
b. The Google Analytics Tracking Code is missing from the conversion page
c. There was a misspelling in the URL of the goal definition
d. The match type in the goal definition is incorrect

Where is e-commerce tracking code usually placed?

a. on all pages in the funnel
b. on the landing page
c. on the destination url
d. on the purchase confirmation or "thank you" page?

Which of the following G Analytic methods can be used to create virtual

pageviews?
a. _link()
b. _setAllowLinker()
c._setAccount()
d._trackPageview()

Which of the following would prevent you from creating a new profile in G.A.?
Select two
a. you have not opted in to Benchmarking
b. You do not have access to the code of the website
c. You do not have admin rights to the Analytics account
d. You have already reached the maximum number of permited profiles for your
account.

Which search engines can Google Analytics track by default?

a. most widely-used search engines worldwide
b. only google.com
c. only the local Google search engine for the country you are in
d. only the search engines that you added to the G.Analytics Tracking Code

Why would anyone want to create virtual pageviews?

a. To track session ids
b. To track a website that uses frames
c. to track a website that uses style sheets
d. To track visitor activity that does not generate a pageview

You define a goal using Regular Expression Match and the following RegEx:
^/products/show

Which pages will count as conversions?

(I) http://products.mysite.com/products/show/?prodid=1001
(II)http://www.mysite.com/sales/products/show.asp
(III)http://products.mysite.com/show.php?id=101
(IV)http://www.mysite.com/products/show.asp?id=1002

a. I and II
b. I and IV
c. I,II, and IV
d. None of above

You want a single table, to be downloaded to a spreadsheet, that shows Visits

and Pageviews for every combination of City and Browser. Which of the following
would work best for this purpose?
a. Explorer option in a custom report
b. Flat table option in a custom report
c. "Add Report Tab" option in a custom report
d. This is not possible

Which of the following statements is true?

a. each profile has its own goals
b. each account has its own goals
c. each web property has its own goals
d. each tracking code has its own goals

What kind of personally identifiable data is available by default in G Analytics

reports?
a. No personally identifiable data is available
b. visitor IP Adress
c. visitor age groups and genders
d. user logins

Which of the following are possible uses of filters? Select all that apply
a. Limit administrative capabilities for selected user(s)
b. Replace complicated page URLs with readable text strings
c. Exclude visits from a particular IP adress
d. Report on only a subdomine or directory
e. Include only traffic coming from a particular campaign

Your website uses a shopping car on a different domain. To ensure that visitor
session data is ¿related? when ¿satching? domains, which of the following do
you need to implement?
a. the _setLocalRemoteServer() method
b. The _trackTrans()method
c. the _link()or_linkByPost()method
d. This is tracked automatically, no additional configuration is required

Which of these best describes what a cookie is?

a. a temporary storage area that a web browser or service provider uses to store
common pages and graphics that have been recently opened
b. a small text/data file written to a visitor's machine bya a web server
c. The ammount of data that can be transmited along a communications channel in a
fixed amount of time
d. a ¿tiny? blank image stored on a web analitycs server

Throughout a checkout process the request URI of the page (/checkout.?

¿¿?)does not change for the last 3 steps. What is the recommended way to
distinguish these steps in Google Analytics?
a. On each page, add a unique request URI as an argument to _setAllowLinker()
b. On each page, add a unique request URI as an argument to _trackPageview()
c. On each page, add a unique request URI as an argument to _setDomainName()
d. On each page, add a unique request URI as an argument to _link()

But I suppose that’s enough of me talking to you. Here’s the Google Analytics questions and answers
that you need to know to have a shot at passing!

Q: What is the purpose of “_trackPageview()”?

A: To register a pageview in Google Analytics.
Q: True or False: Google Analytics can NOT track visits to cached pages.
A: False. The Analytics tracking code will still be executed on a cached page.

Q: True or False: by default, Google Analytics will track the number of visitors.
A: True

Q: True or False: by default, Google Analytics will track the referrer that directs visitors to your site.
A: True

Q: True or False: by default, Google Analytics will track the average amount of time spent on your site.
A: True

Q: True or False: by default, Google Analytics will track the click path of individual visitors.
A: True.

Q: Where can you find the Google URL Builder?

A: The URL Builder is located in the Help Center.

Q: What can the URL Builder help you with?

A: The URL Builder can help to create URLs with tracking parameters already attached.

Q: True or False. You should manually tag banner ads with campaign tracking variables.
A: True

Q: True or False. You should manually tag email campaigns with campaign tracking variables.
A: True

Q: True or False. You should manually tag non-AdWords PPC campaigns with campaign tracking
variables.
A: True

Q: True or False. You should manually tag organic search results with campaign tracking variables.
A: False, you can’t do this.

Q: True or False. You should manually tag AdWords campaigns with campaign tracking variables.
A: False, autotagging will do this for you.
Q: True or False. You should manually tag bookmarks with campaign tracking variables.
A: False

Q: How can you track visitors from a newsletter, banner, or email marketing campaign?
A: Manually tag the destination URLs of the campaign that you send visitors to.

Q: What is the formula for ROI?

A: (Revenue – Cost) / Cost; be prepared to do some basic ROI calculations during the test.

Q: What are the three minimum campaign variables you should utilize to tag a URL using manual
tagging?
A: Source, Medium, and Campaign.

Q: What is the correct parameter to identify different versions of an ad?

A: Use the content parameter utm_content

Q: What is the formula for Click-Through Rate?

A: Clicks / Impressions

Q: Google AdWords data is not showing up in your account as google / cpc. Why might this happen?
A: It can happen if autotagging is not enabled in your AdWords settings, or if a redirect is stripping out
the gclid.

Q: True or False: You can view Campaign data in Google Analytics with AdWords manual tagging
enabled.
A: True.

Q: True or False: You can view Placement URL data in Google Analytics with AdWords manual tagging
enabled.
A: False.

Q: True or False: You can view Match Type data in Google Analytics with AdWords manual tagging
enabled.
A: False.

Q: True or False: You can view Ad Group data in Google Analytics with AdWords manual tagging
enabled.
A: False.
Q: Reports show that visitors are coming from paused or discontinued campaigns. Why might this be?
A: If the visitors were originally referred by that campaign, and are now coming back as direct visitors,
they will be attributed to the paused or discontinued campaign.

Q: What is a referrer?
A: It is the URL of an outside website from which a visitor comes to your website.

Q: On your website.com, you are seeing traffic coming from website.com / referral. Why might that be
happening?
A: You may have several subdomains and the Google Analytics Tracking Code is not configured
properly.

Q: A search engine appears in the list of referring sites. Why might this happen?
A: It could happen if someone was referred to your site through a personalized search page, for
instance.

Q: What are the two most common ways that visitors can be recorded as “direct / (none)” in Google
Analytics?
A: If they type your website’s URL into their browser directly, or if they come to your site through a
bookmark.

Q: In the Google Analytics Intelligence Events, what types of alerts are available?
A: You can get Daily alerts, Weekly alerts, Automatic alerts, and Custom alerts through Google
Intelligence.

Q: True or False: You would use Intelligence to set up a custom alert.

A: True.

Q: True or False: You can use Intelligence to alert you if weekly revenue increases or decreases by an
unexpected amount.
A: True.

Q: How can you use the Landing Pages Report in assessing website performance?
A: You can use it to identify landing pages with high bounce rates, and to determine where visitors are
entering your website.

Q: What is one indication of a poorly performing landing page?

A: A high Bounce Rate, perhaps greater than 90%.
Q: What is Bounce Rate?
A: The percentage of visits on a website where the visitors views one page and leaves without any
interaction on the website.

Q: You are getting high bounce rates on a landing page from a particular keyword. Why might this be?
A: If the content on the landing page does not meet the expectations of people searching for that
keyword, they may immediately leave your website and contribute to a higher bounce rate.

Q: Which metric can you use to determine if one type of campaign was responsible for initiating
conversions?
A: The Assisted Conversion Value

Q: Your visitors have a habit of visiting your site several times before converting. Which metric could
help you determine whether or not a particular keyword is part of a conversion path?
A: Assisted Conversions

Q: What are some valid location dimensions?

A: Country/Territory, City, and Region are valid dimensions. Address is not a valid dimension, as Google
Analytics does not track Personally Identifiable Information.

Q: True or False: Bounce Rate is a dimension.

A: False. It is a metric.

Q: True or False: %New Visits is a dimension.

A: False. New Visitors is a dimension, but %New Visits is a metric.

Q: True or False: Screen Resolution is a dimension.

A: True.

Q: True or False: Region is a dimension.

A: True.

Q: True or False: Browser is a metric.

A: False, it is a dimension.

Q: True or False: City is a metric.

A: False, it is a dimension.
Q: True or False: Average Time on Site is a metric.
A: True.

Q: True or False: Pageviews is a metric.

A: True.

Q: You want to find out which keywords visitors from Chicago use to find your website. How can you do
this?
A: In the Map Overlay report, select the Keyword dimension for the city of Chicago.

Q: How can you determine the conversion rate for people on a certain Operating System and located in
a particular city?
A: Looking at the Operating System report, choose City as your secondary dimension.

Q: People are spending more time on your site. How can you tell if they are actually interacting more
on the site?
A: Look for an increase in Pages per Visit.

Q: What does the Visit Duration report show you?

A: It categorizes visits based on the amount of time they spend on your website.

Q: If a visitor conducts two transactions on your website during one visit, how many conversions and
how many transactions will be tracked by Google Analytics?
A: 2 transactions, and 1 conversion.

Q: If a visitor subscribes to your newsletter, than someone else on the exact same computer also
subscribes during the same session, how many conversions will be tracked?
A: Google Analytics will count 1 conversion.

Q: What is a good metric for measuring the quality of traffic to your website?
A: Conversion rate.

Q: If Channel X equally initiates and assists in conversions, what would its Assisted/Last Interaction
Conversion value be?
A: It would be exactly 1.

Q: What does the Site Search Report tell you?

A: It can help you determine how your visitors are searching your site.
Q: How can you determine whether people who use your Site Search have a higher conversion value
than people who do not?
A: Go to the Site Search Usage report and view the Goal Conversion tab.

Q: What types of goals can Google Analytics track?

A: Destination URLs, time on site, pages per visit, and events.

Q: What is available in Google’s Real Time Reporting?

A: You can view pageviews per second, pageviews per minute, and active number of visitors.

Q: Can Real Time show you whether or not the Google Analytics code snippet is working on a particular
page?
A: Yes, according to Google.

Q: You just added new content and would like to see if people are viewing it. Can you use Real Time to
determine this?
A: Yes.

Q: What are some ways you can use profiles?

A: You can look more closely at traffic to one subdomain, you can look more closely at traffic to one
directory or section of a website, and you can limit access to some segments of data.

Q: You want a profile to include only Google AdWords data. How can you do this?
A: Use an Include filter.

Q: Is profile filter order applied in order, or all at once?

A: In order, so be careful how you apply filters on your data.

Q: True or False: You can apply an Advanced Segment to historical data.

A: True.

Q: True or False: You can compare Advanced Segments side by side in reports.
A: True.

Q: How can you track user engagement on websites that use Flash or AJAX and are located on one
HTML page?
A: You can use Event Tracking, or track interactions as Pageviews and set goals.
Q: What is the purpose of a virtual pageview?
A: To track activity that visitors may complete that does not result in a natural pageview.

Q: How can you track Flash Events with Google Analytics code?
A: _trackEvent() or trackPageview() will work.

Q: You have two buttons on your website and would like to track if people click on Button #1 more
than Button #2. Can you do this in Google Analytics? If so, how?
A: Yes, you can track this. Use Event Tracking.

Q: What are the three elements of Event Tracking?

A: Categories, Actions, and Labels.

Q: Using regular expressions, how could you filter out the IP address range of 222.11.222.1 through
222.11.222.10?
A: ^222\.11\.222\.([1-9]|10)$ (Use the IP address range tool for questions like this one!)

Question: What does “_trackPageview()” do?

Answer: It registers a page view.

Question: Can Analytics track visits to cached pages?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Does Analytics automatically track number of visitors?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Does Analytics automatically track referrers?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Does Analytics automatically track average time spent?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Does Analytics automatically track click path?

Answer: Yes.
Question: Where is the URL Builder?

Answer: Help Center.

Question: Why is the URL Builder important?

Answer: It can help you create URLs with tracking parameters already included.

Question: Should you manually tag banner ads with variables?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Should you manually tag non-AdWords PPC campaigns with variables?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Should you manually tag email campaigns with variables?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Can you manually tag organic search with variables?

Answer: No. Not possible.

Question: Should you manually tag bookmarks with variables?

Answer: No. It won’t work.

Question: When tracking visitors from newsletter, banner, or email campaigns, what do you
tag?

Answer: Manually tag destination URLs.

Question: What are the three campaign variables you should tag a URL using manual tagging?

Answer: Source, Medium, and Campaign.

Question: What is Google Analytics?

Answer: Free service offering a simple way to track metrics on your Website with the addition
of a small snippet of code placed on all pages of your Website.

Question: What does connecting AdWords and GA provide?

Answer: Cost data to be imported into GA

Question: How should you tag in AdWords?

Answer: Auto-tagging, not manual

Question: Where should you avoid using redirects with AdWords?

Answer: On landing pages, avoid redirects that will strip gclid of AdWords

Question: How does AdWords handle invalid clicks?

Answer: AdWords filters them out

Question: T or F: If JavaScript is turned off, both Google Analytics and AdWords will not function

Answer: False, AdWords will still function properly.

Question: How long is AdWord’s window of conversion?

Answer: 30 days

Question: What are pageviews?

Answer: number of views of a website by a user

Question: What is session duration?

Answer: length of time spent on a website by a user

Question: What are bounce rates?

Answer: percentage of single page sessions in which the user did not interact with the website
(like low bounce rates)

Question: What are frequency and recency?

Answer: how frequently each user returns within a certain time frame and the time past before
returning

Question: What are landing pages?

Answer: URL that has gained the most interest in Google web search results
Question: What are exit pages?

Answer: pages on your site which users exited

Question: What are refering sites?

Answer: pages in those domains that are referring traffic to your site

Question: What are goals?

Answer: a count of how many sessions reached a certain page or group of pages

Question: What are filters?

Answer: can limit/customize the traffic data included in your Google Analytics

Question: What are events?

Answer: user interactions that are independently tracked from a web or screen page such as
downloads, ad clicks, gadgets, or video plays

Question: What are sessions?

Answer: number of times a user is active on a website

Question: What are conversions?

Answer: completion of an activity on your site that is important to the success of your business
(ex. completed sign up for newsletter)

Question: What do you need to do in order to start using Google Analytics?

Answer: Sign up for a new account online, set up account properties, include the tracking ID
and code in your website or app

Question: How does Google Analytics determine a session?

Answer: Inactiveness for 30 minutes or more yields a new sessions, however users that leave
the site and return within 30 minute span are considered the original session.

Question: What is a metric?

Answer: The quantitive measurements of your data. Metrics in Google Analytics can be sums or
ratios.
Question: What are some valid location dimensions?

Answer: Country/Territory, City, and Region are valid dimensions. Address is not a valid
dimension, as Google Analytics does not track Personally Identifiable Information.

Question: True or False: Bounce Rate is a dimension?

Answer: False. It is a metric.

Question: True or False: %New Visits is a dimension?

Answer: False. New Visitors is a dimension, but %New Visits is a metric.

Question: True or False: Browser is a metric?

Answer: False, it is a dimension.

Question: You want to find out which keywords visitors from Chicago use to find your website.
How can you do this?

Answer: In the Map Overlay report, select the Keyword dimension for the city of Chicago.

Question: How can you determine the conversion rate for people on a certain Operating
System and located in a particular city?

Answer: Looking at the Operating System report, choose City as your secondary dimension.

Question: People are spending more time on your site. How can you tell if they are actually
interacting more on the site?

Answer: Look for an increase in Pages per Visit.

Question: What does the Visit Duration report show you?

Answer: It categorizes visits based on the amount of time they spend on your website.

Question: If a visitor conducts two transactions on your website during one visit, how many
conversions and how many transactions will be tracked by Google Analytics?

Answer: 2 transactions, and 1 conversion.

Question: What are some ways you can use profiles?

Answer: You can look more closely at traffic to one subdomain, you can look more closely at
traffic to one directory or section of a website, and you can limit access to some segments of
data.

Question: You want a profile to include only Google AdWords data. How can you do this?

Answer: Use an Include filter.

Question: What is the purpose of a virtual pageview?

Answer: To track activity that visitors may complete that does not result in a natural pageview.

Question: You are interested in exploring metrics by campaign and traffic source. Which of the
following sections will have this report information by default?

Answer: Acquisition

Question: You should add Analytics tracking code to your site _______.

Answer: after implementation planning

Question: Which of the following would you use to show two date ranges on the same graph?

Answer: date comparison

Question: A visitor comes to your site but stops looking at pages and generating events. Which
of the following will occur by default?

Answer: The visitor’s session expires after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Question: Which of the following are advantages of implementing Google Tag Manager?

Answer: You can add non-Google tags to your site without editing site code

Question: Where do you find the tracking code, tracking id & property number?

Answer: Sign in to your Analytics account

Question: What does the ec.js plugin allow yout to see?

Answer: Viewing product impressions

Question: What are the best monetization Models for Gaming Apps?
Answer: Freemium, In-app purchases, Ads

Question: What are the best monetization Models for Utility Apps?

Answer: Freemium/Subscription, Ads

Question: What is ROI?

Answer: (Revenue-Cost)/Cost.
Question: What is the Formula for CTR?
Answer: Clicks/Impressions
Question: How do you know if one campaign initiated a conversion?
Answer: Assisted Conversion Value.
Question: What does Assisted Conversion help with?
Answer: Tracking whether a particular keyword helped secure a conversion.
Question: What is the Last Interaction attribution model?
Answer:the Direct channel — would receive 100% of the credit for the sale
Question: What is the Last Non-Direct Click attribution model?
Answer:all direct traffic is ignored, and 100% of the credit for the sale goes to the last
channel that the customer clicked through from before converting
Question: What is the Last AdWords Click attribution model?
Answer:the first and only click to the Paid Search channel — would receive 100% of the
credit for the sale.
Question: What is the First Interaction attribution model?
Answer:the Paid Search channel — would receive 100% of the credit for the sale.
Question: What is the Linear attribution model?
Answer: the Paid Search, Social Network, Email, and Direct channels — would share
equal credit (25% each) for the sale.
Question: What is the Time Decay attribution model?
Answer: the touchpoints closest in time to the sale or conversion get most of the credit.
Question: What is the Position Based attribution model?
Answer: 40% credit is assigned to each the first and last interaction, and the remaining
20% credit is distributed evenly to the middle interactions.
Question: What is the Last-click model?
Answer: What attribution model is GA?
Question: To which Google Analytics report does the Enhanced Link Attribution property
setting apply?
Answer: Pages
Question: What are 4 goal types?
Answer: Destination, duration, pages, event
Question: When is a destination goal triggered?
Answer: When a specific location loads
Question: When is a duration goal triggered?
Answer: When a session that lasts a specific amount of time or longer
Question: When is a pages goal triggered?
Answer: When a user views a specific number of pages or screens
Question: When is an event goal triggered?
Answer: When an action defined as an event is triggered
Question: How can you set the goal value for an event goal?
Answer: Use the Event value as the Goal value.
Question: What must you do to start using ecommerce tracking?
Answer: Enable it for both web and app properties at the view level
Question: Where does Site Search reports show?
Answer: Under Content on the Standard Reporting
Question: Where can you view event tracking data?
Answer: Under the Events reports menu under Behavior category in your reporting
views
Question: What are the 5 event components?
Answer: Category, action, label, value, implicit count
Question: What is the category event component for?
Answer: Root of Event tracking and should function as the first way to sort events
Question: What is the action event component for?
Answer: A descriptor for a particular event category. You can use strings to define and
action
Question: What is the label event component for?
Answer: Optional descriptor that you can use to provide further granularity.
Question: What is the value event component for?
Answer: A numerical variable for the event
Question: What is the implicit count component for?
Answer: To count the number of interactions with an event category. It does not appear
in the standard GA reports but the data is accessible via API
Question: Where do the values for Events display?
Answer: Event Reports
Question: What is Ad Mob? 
Answer: a mobile advertising network that Google acquired in November 2009. It offers
advertising solutions for Android, iOS and Windows Phone 8.
Question: What is Android SDK? 
Answer: The Android SDK is a collection of API libraries and developer tools that are
needed to build, test, and debug apps for Android.

Question: Can you view Campaign data with Manual Tagging enabled?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Can you view Placement URL data with Manual Tagging enabled?
Answer: No.
Question: Can you view Match Type data with Manual Tagging enabled?
Answer: No.
Question: Can you view Ad Group data with Manual Tagging enabled?
Answer: No.
Question: How do you identify different versions of an ad?
Answer: Content parameter utm_content.
Question: If AdWords data is not showing up what may be happening?
Answer: Autotagging may not be enabled or a redirect is stripping the gclid.
Question: How can visitors come from paused or discontinued campaigns?
Answer: If the visitors originally came from the campaign and are now direct visitors.
Question: What is a referrer?
Answer: It’s a URL from an outside website that directs visitors to your website.
Question: What does traffic coming from website.com mean?
Answer: Tracking is not configured properly.
Question: Why would a search engine appear on a list of referring sites?
Answer: It could be a referrer through a personalized search page.
Question: What does a direct visitor mean?
Answer: It means they typed in the website URL or can through a bookmark.
Question: What type alerts can be created from Intelligence Events?
Answer: Daily, Weekly, Automatic, and Custom.
Question: How can you set up a custom alert?
Answer: Through Intelligence.
Question: How can you set up a weekly revenue alert?
Answer: Through Intelligence.
Question: What are some valid dimensions?
Answer: Country/Territory, City, and Region.
Question: Is address a valid dimension?
Answer: No. Google does not track personal id information.
Question: Is Bounce Rate a Metric or Dimension?
Answer: It is a Metric.
Question: Is %New Visits a Metric or Dimension?
Answer: It is a Metric.
Question: Is New Visits a Metric or Dimension?
Answer: It is a Dimension.
Question: Is Screen Resolution a Metric or Dimension?
Answer: It is a Dimension.
Question: Is Region a Metric or Dimension?
Answer: It is a Dimension.
Question: Is Browser a Metric or Dimension?
Answer: It is a Dimension.
Question: Is City a Metric or Dimension?
Answer: It is a Dimension.
Question: Is Average Time on Site a Metric or Dimension?
Answer: It is a Metric.
Question: Is Pageviews a Metric or Dimension?
Answer: It is a Metric.
Question: How can you find out which keywords visitors from Chicago are
finding your site?
Answer: Map Overlay Report. Select Keyword Dimension.
Question: How can you determine conversion rate based on Operating System in
a particular city?
Answer: Choose Operating System report and City (as a secondary dimension).
Question: How can you tell whether people are interacting with your site?
Answer: Look at Pages per Visit.
Question: What is the Visit Duration report?
Answer: It categorizes visits dependent on the amount of time spent on your website.
Question: If a visitor conducts two transactions in one visit, how many
conversion and transaction will Google Analytics read?
Answer: 2 transactions and 1 conversion.
Question: If a visitor subscribes to a newsletter and someone with the same
computer also subscribes within the same sessions how many conversions will
google Analytics count?
Answer: 1 Conversion.
Question: What is not tracked because it doesn’t execute JS?
Answer: Crawlers.
Question: How long can data take to show in GA?

Answer: 24+ hours

Question: What categorizes visits according to time spent on site?
Answer: Visit duration
Question: What data does Google NOT capture?
Answer: address, name, credit cards.
Question: What are Intelligence Events?
Answer: Alerts where GA detects changes in site performance
Question: Which metric excludes bounces from the calculation?
Answer: Average time on page
Question: What is the first step for an overall GA implementation?
Answer: Articulate business objectives
Question: What is the purpose of “_trackPageview()”?
Answer: To register a pageview in Google Analytics.
Question: How can you track user engagement on websites that use Flash or
AJAX and are located on one HTML page?
Answer: You can use Event Tracking, or track interactions as Pageviews and set goals.
Question: How can you track Flash Events with Google Analytics code?
Answer: _trackEvent() or trackPageview() will work.
Question: What are the three elements of Event Tracking?
Answer: Categories, Actions, and Labels.
Question: True or False: Google Analytics can NOT track visits to cached pages.
Answer: False
Question: True or False: by default, Google Analytics will track the number of
visitors.
Answer: True
Question: True or False: by default, Google Analytics will track the click path of
individual visitors.
Answer: True
Question: What are the three minimum campaign variables you should utilize to
tag a URL using manual tagging?
Answer: Source, Medium, and Campaign.
Question: What is the correct parameter to identify different versions of an ad?
Answer: Use the content parameter utm_content
Question: What is the formula for Click-Through Rate?
Answer: Clicks / Impressions
Question: Google AdWords data is not showing up in your account as google /
cpc. Why might this happen?
Answer: It can happen if autotagging is not enabled in your AdWords settings, or if a
redirect is stripping out the gclid.
Question: Reports show that visitors are coming from paused or discontinued
campaigns. Why might this be?
Answer: If the visitors were originally referred by that campaign, and are now coming
back as direct visitors, they will be attributed to the paused or discontinued campaign.
Question: What is a referrer?
Answer: It is the URL of an outside website from which a visitor comes to your website.
Question: On your website.com, you are seeing traffic coming from website.com /
referral. Why might that be happening?
Answer: You may have several subdomains and the Google Analytics Tracking Code is
not configured properly.
Question: A search engine appears in the list of referring sites. Why might this
happen?
Answer: It could happen if someone was referred to your site through a personalized
search page, for instance.
Question: In the Google Analytics Intelligence Events, what types of alerts are
available?
Answer: You can get Daily alerts, Weekly alerts, Automatic alerts, and Custom alerts
through Google Intelligence.
Question: How can you use the Landing Pages Report in assessing website
performance?
Answer: You can use it to identify landing pages with high bounce rates, and to
determine where visitors are entering your website.
Question: What is one indication of a poorly performing landing page?
Answer: A high Bounce Rate, perhaps greater than 90%.
Question: What is Bounce Rate?
Answer: The percentage of visits on a website where the visitors views one page and
leaves without any interaction on the website.
Question: Which metric can you use to determine if one type of campaign was
responsible for initiating conversions?
Answer: The Assisted Conversion Value
Question: Your visitors have a habit of visiting your site several times before
converting. Which metric could help you determine whether or not a particular
keyword is part of a conversion path?
Answer: Assisted Conversions
Question: What is the first step of analytics planning?
Answer: Define your overall measurement plan and business objectives
Question: Your Multi-Channel Funnel reports have no data. What is the most
likely reason?
Answer: You haven’t set up Goal Funnels
Question: Your company has a website and a mobile app, and you want to track
each separately in Google Analytics. How should you structure your account(s)?
Answer: one account, two properties
Question: Which of the following most accurately describes the concept of
attribution in digital analytics?
Answer: assigning credit for conversions
Question: You have defined goal X such that any PDF download qualifies as a
goal conversion. A user comes to your site once and downloads five PDFs. How
many goal conversions will be recorded?
Answer: 1
Question: Your business objective is to maximize the number of sales through
your website. Which of the following metrics would most directly help you
measure performance against this objective?
Answer: Ecommerce Conversion Rate
Question: What type of data can and can not collect?
Answer: The Measurement Protocol only allows developers to collect user-interaction
(event / hit) data. It does not allow developers to upload aggregated data like tables.
Question: How is Google Analytics able to determine if a group of website
interactions are all from the same user device?
Answer: By setting a unique ID for the device that is attached to each hit

Question: What is a Landing Page Report?

Answer: It is a report that helps identify landing pages which high bounce rates.
Question: What is considered a high bounce rate?
Answer: A bounce rate greater than 90%.
Question: What is Bounce Rate?
Answer: The percent of visits when the visitor views one page before leaving.
Question: If a particular keyword has a high bounce rate, what could be
happening?
Answer: The content doesn’t fit what people think should be on it.
Question: What is a good metric for measuring quality of traffic?
Answer: Conversion Rate.
Question: What is a Site Search Report?
Answer: It can help you determine what visitors are searching for when they come to
your site.
Question: How can you determine if someone who used your site search has a
higher conversion value?
Answer: Site Search Usage and then Goal Conversion tab.
Question: What are common Analytics goals?
Answer: Destination URLs, time on site, page per visit, and events.
Question: What is Google’s Real Time Reporting used for?
Answer: You see pageviews per second or minute and the number of active visitors.
Question: If Real Time is working does that mean your Analytics code snippet is
working?
Answer: Yes.
Question: If you add new content, how soon can you see whether people are
viewing it?
Answer: immediately.
Question: How can you use profiles to help increase traffic?
Answer: You can figure out whether traffic is coming from a particular source and
segment your marketing to appeal to those profiles.
Question: How can you ask a profile to contain only AdWords data?
Answer: Include Filter.
Question: How are profile filters ordered?
Answer: In the order that you apply them.
Question: Can an Advanced Segment be applied to historical data?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Can Advanced Segments be compared side by side in reports.
Answer: Yes
Question: Can User Engagement be tracked with websites using Flash or AJAX?
Answer: Yes with Event Tracking.
Question: What is a virtual pageview?
Answer: It is when a visitor completes an activity but does not trigger a natural
pageview.
Question: What can you use if you want to track Flash Events?
Answer: _trackEvent() or trackPageview()
Question: How can you track two buttons and which one receives the most
clicks?
Answer: Event Tracking.
Question: The three elements to Event Tracking are?
Answer: Categories, Actions, and Labels.
Question: When does AdWords display a conversion date?
Answer: The date the ad was displayed
Question: When does GA display a conversion date?
Answer: The date the conversion occurred
Question: What do you use to distinguish page steps for forms and checkout
flows when URIs are not unique?
Answer: _trackPageview()
Question: What is a URI?
Answer: uniform resource identifier (URI) is a string of characters used to identify a
name of a web resource.
Question: What tracks activity that doesn’t generate a pageview?
Answer: Virtual pageviews
Question: What do you use for Flash event tracking?
Answer: _trackPageview() and _trackEvent()
Question: What are the Event Tracking elements?
Answer: categories, actions, labels
Question: What kind of alerts are available?
Answer: Custom and Automatic Alerts
Question: What are Segments?
Answer: Show only matching visits to a set of criteria
Question: How can you filter the data to certain specifications?
Answer: Segments
Question: What can be used in creating Segments?
Answer: Metrics or dimensions
Question: How many segments are allowed per report?
Answer: 4
Question: Why would multiple segments be applied to a report?
Answer: To analyze how they perform against each other
Question: What is the minimum path length displayed by default in the Multi-
Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths report?
Answer: 2
Question: How long is your Google Analytics data guaranteed to be stored?
Answer: At least two years
Question: Including the original page, how many total page variations can you
include in a Content Experiment?
Answer: 10
Question: Where can you find the Google URL Builder?
Answer: The URL Builder is located in the Help Center.
Question: What can the URL Builder help you with?
Answer: The URL Builder can help to create URLs with tracking parameters already
attached.
Question: What can the URL Builder help you with?
Answer: True or False. You should manually tag organic search results with campaign
tracking variables.
Question: True or False. You should manually tag organic search results with
campaign tracking variables.
Answer: False, you can’t do this.
Question: True or False. You should manually tag AdWords campaigns with
campaign tracking variables.
Answer: False, autotagging will do this for you.
Question: True or False. You should manually tag bookmarks with campaign
tracking variables.
Answer: False
Question: How can you track visitors from a newsletter, banner, or email
marketing campaign?
Answer: Manually tag the destination URLs of the campaign that you send visitors to.
Question: What is the formula for ROI?
Answer: Revenue – Cost) / Cost; be prepared to do some basic ROI calculations during
the test.
Question: What does the Site Search Report tell you?
Answer: It can help you determine how your visitors are searching your site.
Question: What types of goals can Google Analytics track?
Answer: Destination URLs, time on site, pages per visit, and events.
Question: What is available in Google’s Real Time Reporting?
Answer: You can view pageviews per second, pageviews per minute, and active
number of visitors.
Question: Can Real Time show you whether or not the Google Analytics code
snippet is working on a particular page?
Answer: Yes, according to Google.
Question: You just added new content and would like to see if people are viewing
it. Can you use Real Time to determine this?
Answer: Yes.
Question: In order to set up ecommerce tracking, you need to _______. Select all
that apply.
Answer: add an ecommerce campaign variable to your URLs.
Question: Which of the following is not a standard campaign parameter?
Answer: utm_adgroup
Question: You want to explore traffic metrics by gender and age. Which of the
following sections in Analytics will be most useful?
Answer: Audience
Question: You want to measure the percentage of sessions during which the user
clicks a “product details” button. Which of the following would you need to do in
order to see this information?
Answer: track the button with an event and set up an event goal
Question: You want to see the percentage of sessions in which a specific button
was clicked. Which of the following would be most useful?
Answer: set up an event goal
Question: Where are goals set?
Answer: at the view level
Question: Which types of groups can you create in Google Analytics?
Answer: Channel Groups