With a view to sustain in the Digital space, it is imperative for the digital marketers to not only gain knowledge of Web Analytics but also how to polish this skill. Web Analytics which is an integral part to determine several concepts such as category management, customer experience management etc. requires master skills which can be leveraged through this webinar on Google Analytics For Enhanced Marketing Measurement led by Swapnil Sinha, Head of Conversions, Google India for Digital Vidya.
Webinar Leader’s Profile:
Swapnil is the Head of Conversions for Google in India. He is a seasoned marketing and analytics leader whose passion lies in helping companies take better business decisions through analytics deployment. His experience across Business Intelligence, Web Analytics, Marketing and Customer relationship management enables him to solve marketing problems for all verticals and for companies of varied sizes. He started his career at TCS and then moved on to Omniture (now part of Adobe). He has led teams in marketing and analytics while at Yatra and Hewlett Packard. In his current pan-India role at Google, Swapnil helps clients get more value from their marketing spends by leveraging analytics.
He is a BE in Computer Science and an MBA from University of Utah.
Twitter Handle: @sswapnil
As transcribed by Digital Vidya:
Q- In classic analytics it is easier to control cookie but in Google Analytics it is not that easy. So, what do you recommend for Google Analytics? What is the cleaner way when it comes to controlling the cookie?
A- Primarily, in Google the hacks are not recommended. Instead, the universal analytics is the way to go as the concept about which the question was raised, even they too are very excited about it. The reason behind saying that is because there are lot of features which universal analytics is going to offer. Essentially, with universal analytics one can do cross device tracking, advanced level of e-commerce tracking and a lot of other stuff which one could not do with Google Analytics classic.
So, when it comes to attribution for your leads, it is recommended to have a better chance of correctly attributing if you move to universal analytics because it gives you more flexibility. Thus, universal analytics gives you a lot more flexibility.
Q- When you upgrade to universal analytics, do you lose the previous data?
A- No, you do not lose the previous data. Universal analytics allows you to do two different things. Firstly, it allows you to recall your data if you want to continue to use the same profile and the same property. So, if you are using the same web property in Google Analytics and want to upgrade that property to universal then you can do that and in that process you do not lose any data because you are still on the same property. If however, you decide to create a totally new property for universal, you can do that too and your old data would continue to stay in the old property. So, while its not in the same property then you can have that historical data at a different place. So, in either scenario you will still have that data with you.
Q- Would you recommend upgrading to universal analytics or having both Google Analytics as well as universal analytics?
A- I would not recommend having both. However, may be as a part of your deployment plan you could think of having classic analytics and universal analytics running in parallel form in a brief period of time may be within 5 or 7 days, while you test both of them. But in the long-run, you should not have both of them running on the site. You should definitely take down the classic one and then completely move to universal analytics because sometimes crazy things happen when you have two sets of code on the site. Besides this, the other thing is that if you are a big organization and there are lot of users who are consuming this data, so plenty of times you get two different versions of the truth, there are lot of questions which come to you which are very hard to answer. So, half of your energy will just go in justifying that this is correct, that is not correct etc. or reconciliation. So, the better thing to do is actually figure out a day when you want to completely migrate and then move everybody over.
Q- What is the difference between drop-offs and bounce?
A- Essentially, the way to look at it is as drop-off is a more generic term while a bounce rate is essentially, somebody coming to your website and without engaging further, he/she just goes and leaves. So, the first page of a user’s session on your website is the last page, he/she does not go beyond that and that is the bounce. It means a ball that came and bounced back. Whereas, a drop-off a more generic term, a bounce could be a drop-off as well. But in e-commerce place, when we say a bounce, we are talking about is a user is say transacting and then rather than completing the transaction, he exits on a particular step then that is what you call a drop-off. So, if it is a five steps process to make a purchase and rather than completing those five steps if somebody actually drops out in between then that is a drop-off. So, the two terms are very different in that sense.
A bounce is a metric that you typically use if you are evaluating whether your marketing is driving the relevant set of goals for you or not. If you have a high bounce rate on a particular campaign then may be that campaign is not driving the relevant users to your website. For instance: If I am looking for a holiday to Hawaii and I make a search but the web page that opens up is a generic page that talks about holidays in general and not Hawaii specifically as the destination then that is low in relevance for me and I will bounce out. So that is a bounce rate.
Q- Is active user and unique user means the same in Google Analytics?
A- There are two contexts to it. One is in the app world, so if you talk about mobile apps. Google Analytics also has an offering on mobile apps. At a particular given instance of time how many users are active on your website. So, unique user is a same cookie over a period of 30 days, if I keep coming back to the website, then I am the same unique user. So, the unique user count does not go up, but the session count keeps going up as the user comes on day 1, day 5, day 7, day 10 and likewise, the user keeps coming back. So, the session count is going up, which is 4 in this case. But, the unique user count is still staying one because I am the same user.
An active user is different because an active user is essentially how many unique users are active on my website right now. So, this is the real time reporting on Google Analytics. So, the two are very different because I am just looking at current snapshot and time how many actives am I getting.
The other context is in a context of apps as Google Analytics is also an app tracking mechanism, wherein you have an active user which is essentially how many users are using the app that you are tracking in Google Analytics. They have downloaded the app, now how many are active on that app, not at that point but in a span of time have they logged in or have they used that app or not. If they have, then they will be counted as an active user.
Q- Sometimes it is found in the organic search that the keyword column is showing not provided. Is there a way to get the keywords against which the Analytics shows not provided? Can you please suggest something on this?
A- Ever since we have migrated to secure search which are the ‘https’ searches, we are not passing the keyword information for organic searches into Google Analytics or any other analytics platform and that is purely from a private stand point, we do not want to pass on the information. Most of the searches that are happening right now are logged in searches which mean a user is already logged in on Google –either from Gmail or Google+ or whatever else. When a user makes a search going to Google, we already know who the user is so we do not want to pass at keyword information back to these external platforms. Google Analytics of course is still internal to Google but at the same time, we respect the privacy of the user to the kind of searches he/she is making, we do not want that to be published on any other forum. So, the only way that you can do this is look at web master tools. Unfortunately, that will give you the list of all your organic users driving traffic to your website. The thing with that is that you cannot get the behaviour level in metrics in web master tool. So, for a particular organic keyword, what did a user do, that you will not get. Having said that, even if you 10% of your traffic are stills showing as keywords and only let’s say 90% of show-up is not provided, those 10% can be looked at from an analysis stand-point and extrapolated to 100%.
Q- For demographic segmentation, is it imperative to have a privacy policy and also the Google Analytics is linked to Google Webmaster?
A- The demographics data is inferred demographics, it is not the real data for the user. But having said that, it definitely requires an update on the privacy policy of the website. So, the website privacy policy absolutely has to be updated. This basically requires a code change as well. So, the classic version of Google Analytics or the old version of Google Analytics code would not give you this report. But, with the code changed, you can actually start to see this demographics.
No, for demographic segmentation, it is not imperative to have Google Analytics linked to Google Webmaster. For the demographics to work, all you need to do is update your tracking code. So, basically remarketing your tracking code changed, it is essentially the change in the cookie that tracks the user. Instead of the first party cookie, you will get the double party cookie instead of a Google Analytics cookie. So, then what happens is that we are able to track the user.
