Google Analytics UA | The Complete Guide | 2021
What you'll learn
- Understand why measurement is vital for your website and business
- Understand the process to plan your dashboards and reports
- Identify the impact that bad data has on your business & decisions
- Understand the need to segment data, to find your best and worst customers
- Understand how Google Analytics works from data collection, configuration, processing, and reporting perspectives
- Identify how UTM tracking codes work and create your own
- Understand the key terminology used in Google Analytics
- Execute on a measurement plan
- Understand what an account, property and view is in Google Analytics
- Identify your current setup and map out the correct account structure
- Understand what a typical account setup is for basic sites, companies with multiple brands, and multi-domain websites
- Understand the differences between a predefined and custom filter
- Identify how regex works, and how it is used in custom filters
- Strategically define the filters needed for your website
- Understand how to best flag issues of importance from your audit that might impact reporting
- Understand the difference between the various levels of access in Google Analytics
- Understand your options for data sharing, and what you gain as a result
- Understand the concept, and use case for the User ID function
- Understand how your Tracking Info settings can impact your reporting data
- Identify the need to link Google Analytics with other Google products
- Identify where you would find remarketing lists for your Google Ads & Marketing Platform campaigns
- Set up Site Search and understand where that data lives and what it's for
- Understand which Goals you currently have set up, if you’re missing any, and if they are working correctly
- Use Content Grouping to understand your website content
- Identify how ecommerce data can be used in Google Analytics
- Use and set up annotations and alerts - so you always know what's going on
- Understand what the Segment, Attribution models, and Custom Channel Groupings functions are used for under your Personal Tools and Assets
- Create or edit marketing channels in your admin settings, and nail the planning process
- Create custom channels like paid social, email signatures, or press releases
- Explore how the reporting API works when assigning credit (attribution) to your marketing channels
- Identify what event tracking is used for, and where the data lives in your Google Analytics reports
- Identify which events you should be tracking on your website or app, and how to build them
- Recognize how Google Tag Manager works with your events
- Reflect on your business objectives and understand the need for Goals within your Google Analytics setup
- Understand how Goals can be mapped to a customer journey, with your site in mind
- Review your current goal status, and identify opportunities to improve your current setup
- Create and identify new opportunities for Goals on your website
- Establish how funnels are created in Google Analytics, and identify where the data sits in your account
- Understand the features available in the reporting interface and how to get the most out of them
- Identify how to give context to data, with date ranges, and other modifiers
- Reflect on how you can use the examples for your own business analysis
- Understand the difference between the core reporting API and the MCF reporting API
- Recognize how long it takes customers to convert on your website
- Understand how your channels and content assist in conversions
- Understand the typical conversion path by specific marketing channels on your website
- Recognize & Compare the different attribution models within Google
- Recognize the pros, cons, and limitations of Segments in Google Analytics
- Apply your knowledge in creating the system, conditional, and sequence Segments
- Reflect on how to use Segments for your website and business
- Understand and scope custom dimensions and metrics
- Understand the concept of data import, when to use it, and how to use it
- Understand the concepts and use cases for custom attribution models, and create your own
- Understand how to use the Admin Audit and Measurement Plan template
- Review your current Google Analytics set up and suggest improvements to your setup
- Reflect on user experience techniques to display data in a more easily understood, more meaningful way
- Apply your knowledge and build a basic dashboard in Google Data Studio
Requirements
- There are no requirements for this course, just a willingness to learn, and an ambition to be great at measuring and reporting on your work
Description
Update March 16th 2022: Google Analytics announced that Universal Analytics will be depreciated on the 1st July 2023 after that, the data will no longer be available to use.
Please note that this course is for Universal Analytics only and does not contain any lessons on GA4
We have loved creating this course and it has been a pleasure to share our knowledge with you.
Thank you for all your support and feedback.
Updated January 2021: Our previous students, from our days delivering in-person training and online courses have come from companies like Google, General Assembly, Airbnb, Coca Cola, Booking. com, Vodafone, Freelancer. com & tons (& tons) of smaller businesses and startups who want to learn, nail it, and win! Over our career we have taught over 65,000 students and have now ventured into the land of Udemy!
Hold on there, don’t Google have their own free one – why would you pay for a course? Which is fair, it’s a lovely little course, you’ll learn all the lingo. You won’t however, know how to do anything – which is kind of our bag. Equally, if you are after Google Analytics for Properties, or G4P - that's a new product, and in beta. Luckily, we will have a course for it as soon as the product is ready - around the same time that Google have one.
If you are after Universal Google Analytics, you are in the right place!
Listen, we won’t make you an analytics wizard overnight – and we think misleading people is a bit mean – so we aren’t going to. Honestly, you could go off and learn the ins and outs of this fantastic platform by yourself – took us a few years, and if you have that kind of time – we salute you! We enjoyed the sweat and tears, no lie.
You’ll probably know, that unlike the formal training offered for other marketing tools, Google Analytics training tends to fall through the cracks. You’ll have heard about analytics, no doubt. You might even have glanced at the occasional report. Line goes up, good news, line goes down, bad news – that kind of thing.
But, do you really know how to use this wonder-tool with confidence? With so much confidence in fact, that you can super-charge your decision-making, answer even the trickiest question about any customer interaction and make your website work harder for you, without breaking a sweat?
Aha. Now that changes things, doesn’t it? And that brings us back to why we’re here. Because, unlike most marketers, we know how to absolutely -crush it- on Google Analytics, we literally wrote the book. And with this course, you can crush it too.
You aren't required to know anything beforehand - we'll teach you the fundamentals, how to apply them, how to develop into an advanced user, if that's where you'd like to go.
Now to the super special bit. We are going to help you understand how it all works and master the ‘how to do it part’ with editable templates that have come off the back of 10+ years in analytics, about 175 analytics audits, and teaching tens of thousands of people. It has taken us months to create these templates alone, but they will form the documentation you need, not to mention save you months in creating them for yourself. Short of sitting down beside side you, and doing your job for you - this course has - everything you'll need.
How’s that for special? See you in there!
P.S. make sure you check out our 'How to Use this Course' resource in lesson 1 so you can focus on the modules that will work best for your learning journey.
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Your instructors:
Aiden Carroll is Co-Founder of The Coloring In Department. He built some of Google's earliest and most successful education products, that still run today, has taught 65,000 people worldwide, and is Global Lead Digital Instructor at General Assembly NYC & London
Jill Quick is Co-Founder of The Coloring In Department. She is a globally recognised authority on Google Analytics and speaks at numerous international conferences on the topic. Safe to say, she knows her stuff.
Who this course is for:
- Anyone who currently works in a marketing role, or would like to be in one
- Anyone who currently works in UX Design or Product Management and wants to level up their testing and reporting
- Anyone who currently works as a developer, and wants to collaborate more effectively with other digital functions
- Anyone who owns a small business or a startup, and wants to make sure they are making the right choices with their time and money
- Anyone who manages a team or agency, and wants to understand more of what's going on
Instructors
- 4.4 Instructor Rating
- 143 Reviews
- 788 Students
- 1 Course
Hey, I'm Aiden - and thanks for checking out my courses.
** My courses have been taken by 65,000 happy campers so far, and have been featured on the BBC, CNN, Mashable, Business Insider & Techcrunch**
I'm head over heels in love with the technology sector. Currently, I'm the Co-Founder of accessible education brand, The Coloring In Department - and I believe that high quality, engaging education shouldn't have a high price point. That's why we exist, really.
In the past I've built a number of globally recognised training products for global brands. Particularly, Google training products, and whilst I'm a proud Xoogler, I still work there sometimes. I'm also Global Lead Digital Instructor at General Assembly.
I spend most of my time sorting out the marketing and advertising strategies of Fortune 500 & FTSE 100 companies - and then training them so that they don't forget what I said. These are brands you've eaten, flown on, visited, drank, downloaded, given your money to, and trusted - so we've technically met already.
I claim to have spoken or hosted 1200 events, online and off – but that number is probably too low, I've long since forgotten. I do love them though!
Sometimes I'm invited to judge things, from Cannes Lions to Webbys Speaking of judging, I hope you both enjoy my courses, and judge me kindly!
- 4.4 Instructor Rating
- 143 Reviews
- 788 Students
- 1 Course
Your instructor Jill Quick, she's a chatty, candid, lady with a knack for creating templates and models that people can use to learn all about digital marketing.
Loves analytics and learning about UX and user behavior. Has an obsession for decent coffee and a love for small batch Gin.
Living the whole balanced-work-life-juggle-the-kids-and-working-mum-balance-kind-of-thing. Fairly sure there’s a #hashtag in there somewhere.
You may have seen one of her talks about all things digital marketing and analytics. She has enjoyed the opportunity to speak at conferences such as Learn Inbound, SMX London, Search Love, InOrbit, UnGagged. As well as webinars for Majestic SEO, CopyHackers and SEMrush.
Jill has created training courses and materials for General Assembly, Smart Insights, The IDM, and ISDI. As well as guest lecturing on Digital Marketing Master programs at various universities.
Driven by the values of The Coloring in Department, that learning shouldn’t be for people with deep pockets, it should be more affordable, it should be more accessible. We also believe that you can have fun as you learn.
Looking forward to you joining The Coloring in Department squad!