0:00 If you are just starting with Google Analytics, you've come to the right place. I will explain how to install it, how to use various reports, how to track events, and five necessary things you must configure in every analytics account from day one. To get started with Google Analytics, first you need to create an account, a property, and a data stream. To do that, go to analytics.google.com. And if you already have access to at least one property, then you will need to go to admin right here at the bottom left corner. And then you will need to click create account. Alternatively, if you have never worked with Google Analytics, then you will be prompted to create an account right away. So you can
0:46 think of the account as an organization. If your organization has multiple websites, then it should have one account and then one or more properties. Let me give this account a name. Then you can review these settings and decide what you want to enable. For example, do you want to get recommendations for your business or something else? Right now I will keep these settings as they are and click next. Then you need to create a property. So a property is a place where you store your data about one or more websites. If your organization has multiple websites, you can create separate properties for each website. But if those websites are part of the same user journey, for example, you expect a visitor to go to one website then to another and then convert. For
1:32 example, make a purchase, then you should create one property for multiple websites. In this case, I will name this I guess again analytics mania demo property. Then you can select your reporting time zone. So this is where your business is located. Then you can select your currency. After that, click next. And then you will be asked to enter business details. So select your industry. Then select your business size and click next. Here you have to select your business objectives. Based on your choices right here, you will unlock certain reports in Google Analytics. Here you can select multiple options. For example, you can select these four right here. Or alternatively, you can select the older layout of the reports, which personally I prefer more. As you
2:19 can see right here, each objective is related to a particular set of reports. For example, if you select generate leads, then you will see this collection of the reports. Of course, Google in the future might change this, but right now this is how it works. So I will keep this as other business objectives and then click create. Then agree with terms of service and then you will be asked to create a data stream. A single property might have separate data streams. For example, you can create one for websites and then if your business also has mobile apps, then you can add them right here. But in this tutorial, we are focusing solely on website tracking. Therefore, we will select the web data stream. Here you can enter the domain of your website. But if you plan to track
3:05 multiple websites in the same property, then you should enter any of those domains right here. For example, I will enter this because that's my demo website. But in reality it does not matter much which domain will you enter right here. If you enter let's say example.com and you also decide to track another website.com then this data stream will still work just fine. You don't need to create separate data streams for each website. It's more than enough to have one data stream and use it on all websites at the same time. Then let's give the stream a name. And then here you can decide whether you want to add some automatic event tracking in Google Analytics 4. That feature set is called enhanced measurement. And here you can select
3:50 what kind of events do you want to track automatically. Out of the box, you can keep all of these enabled, at least most of them. Personally, I disable the form interactions because it's not very reliable. As you become more experienced, then you will probably want to disable more of them. But if you're just starting with Google Analytics, then for now keep these enabled and then click save. Then click create and continue and your data stream is created. You will now be asked to install Google Analytics on your website and soon we will do that. But first let me quickly summarize the structure of Google Analytics account. Everything starts with a Google account. This is account that you use to access various Google's products. for example, Gmail,
4:36 Google Analytics, Google Ads, and all other products. Then when it comes to Google Analytics, you create Google Analytics accounts. As I've said, for one business, it's usually more than enough to have one account. Then inside that Google Analytics account, you can create one or more properties. If the websites that you're going to track are kind of separated, for example, one is for one line of products or business unit and then the other property is for something completely else, then it makes sense to have separate properties. Because if you don't want to combine data of those different websites in the same property, then create separate properties. But if you have multiple websites which are part of the same user journey and you want to see how many people went to this site and then later
5:23 came to this site and then converted then you should have one property and that property should be used by multiple websites. And then in each property you can have multiple data streams. Even though you can technically have multiple website data streams, Google highly recommends that you use one website data stream for multiple websites. Of course, if you decide to track multiple websites in the same property. So when we will install Google Analytics, that tracking code will be sending data to the data stream and then the data will become available in the property. And now let's take a look how can we install Google Analytics. Also, did you know that 85% of you who watch my videos are not subscribed? If you want to stay uptodate with Google Tech Manager and Google
6:09 Analytics and if you want to get this kind of videos first, then subscribe to my channel. So, after you create a website data stream in Google Analytics, you are asked to install a Google tag. This is a tracking code that will send data to Google Analytics. And there are several ways how you can achieve that. Some of them depend on the content management system or the platform that your website is using. If you're working with some custom website that does not have a built-in Google Analytics integration, then you should ask your developer to add this code to each page of the website. And the HTML code of the website is split into two parts. One is
6:54 called a head and the other one is called body. Google recommends that your developers should add this code to the head of the code, which means somewhere at the top of your code. But if for some technical reasons this is not possible, it's still okay to add this in the body. But again, the head is more recommended. Now, the exact steps of this method differ based on how your website is built. Some websites might have a dedicated field where you can add certain code. In other cases, the developers might actually need to edit the code and update code templates on all pages of the website. So I cannot give you some universal advice. But the thing that you have to remember here is that one of the ways how you can install Google Analytics is that you give this code to a developer and tell him or her
7:41 to install this code on all pages of the website. Alternatively, your website might have a built-in Google Analytics integration, where all you have to do is add the tracking ID, which is also known as measurement ID. It starts with G dash. In Google Analytics, you can find that ID right here in the Google tag. Or if you decide to do this in the future, then you can close this. And then let's go to home and I will show you another way where you can find it. So if you are not getting any data yet, that measurement ID will be visible right here or you can go to admin then data streams select your website data stream and you have this measurement ID right here. So copy it and then paste it in
8:29 your website's content management system in some dedicated field that asks you to enter the tracking ID. Once you enter that ID right here and click save, Google Analytics will be installed on your website. Or a third installation method is the one that I prefer the most and that is by using Google Tag Manager. It has a learning curve but it gives you most flexibility as well. The main benefit of Google Tag Manager is that it allows you to quite easily manage various tracking codes on your website and in many cases you can do that without developers involvement. With Google Tag Manager, you can manage not only Google's tags but also other vendor tags like Facebook pixel, LinkedIn insights tag and so on. For your convenience, I have posted a link to a
9:16 Google Tag Manager tutorial below this video. But in a nutshell, here are the quick instructions on how to get started with it. So, first you will need to go to tag manager.google.com and then create a new account. Then give this account a name. The logic here is the same as with Google Analytics account. So for one organization usually it's more than enough to have one account. Then select your country. Then give container a name. For example, it can be your domain. Then select web and create. Then accept with terms of service. And then you will get these two codes. The second code can be ignored. It's not that important. But the first code should be added to all pages of the website. Because if this code is added on all pages, then you will be able to
10:03 activate Google Analytics on those pages as well. Now let's say that I have given this code to a developer and the developer has already installed Google Tag Manager on a website. So the next step is to install Google Analytics. We can do that by going to tags then new tag configuration Google Analytics Google tag and here we have to paste the measurement ID. You can find that in the admin and data streams section. So, copy the measurement ID, paste it right here, and give it a name. For example, I usually name it like that, G4 config, and click save. Now, we can test if this is working. So, click preview. Enter the URL of the website where you have installed Google Tag Manager. In my case, this is the address of the demo
10:50 page. And click connect. In a new tab or a separate window, you will see your website open and it will say that tag assistant is connected. It means that Google tech manager preview mode is working. Then here in the preview mode, if you go to initialization, you will see that your Google tag has fired. Now the next step is to check whether data coming from this tag has been received by Google Analytics. You can do that by going to GA then go to admin then debug view and you should see some events right here. For example, page view scroll you might see some other events like first visit or session start. So if you see the events right here and if you click on those events and look for example at
11:36 page location and the URL here matches what you see right here then it means this is working properly. So the next step will be for you to go to Google Tag Manager and then submit these changes so that this tag goes live for all website visitors. You can do that by clicking submit and then entering some version name for example installed G4 and then click publish. From this moment these changes were published for your visitors and now Google Analytics will start getting data. What we have done so far is a solid first step. This is the bare minimum that you need if you want to install Google Analytics with Google Tag Manager. But if you want to take one step further, then stick around till the
12:22 end of this video because at the end I will share some additional things that you must configure in every Google Analytics for property. Now the next step is to get familiar with the interface of Google Analytics and with reports. If you go to home, you should already see that your data collection is active. And then you will need to wait for the data to appear in the reports. Usually, it takes between 24 and 48 hours to properly process the data. While you wait, you can also go to reports and then in the reports snapshot, you can select your main priority. If you care more about page views, user counts, then you can choose this template. If you care more about sales and revenue, then
13:08 you can choose this template. If you care more about your marketing performance, then you can select this template right here. So, let's say that I will pick this one. If you don't know exactly what they will look like, you can also click preview template and you will see what kind of widgets will be available right here. So, sales and revenue, they mostly focus on the number of purchases, carts, and so on. If you go to marketing performance preview then you will see how many users did you get, how many sessions, your top traffic sources and so on. So let's say that I will pick marketing performance. Click choose this template. Of course you will not see data right away. As I've said you will need to wait. So the best moment will be to check this data at
13:53 least tomorrow. But it does not mean that I cannot show you some other property that already has data. Here I have access to a Google Analytics for demo account. And if I go to home, I can see a summary. I can also see recently accessed sections that I visited. But personally, I don't spend a lot of time in home. Then instead, let's go to the report section. Right here on the left sidebar, you will see a bunch of sections. In your case, depending on the objectives that you selected while creating a property, the collection names and the reports might look different, at least their names, but the content should still be quite similar. So, first we can go to real time
14:39 overview. If you have installed Google Analytics and you are already getting some data, you can see a nearly realtime information of what is happening on your website. you will see how many users did you have in the last 5 minutes, in the last 30 minutes, and some additional metrics right here. So, if you just want to check if you're actually getting data from the visitors, this is the place to do that. If you want to see your top pages that are visited right now by your visitors, you can go to realtime pages. And here you will see what kind of pages are currently visited by your visitors. Of course, keep in mind that the time span right here is the last 30 minutes. Then we have several collections of reports. The sidebar right here is quite
15:24 customizable. So in your case, the name of the collection might look different. Also, in the future, if you want, you can add or remove certain reports from here. Let's start with the acquisition overview. So this section right here gives you a bird's eyee view of your traffic sources and where the visitors are coming from. In each card right here, you can also see links and if you click those links then they will open a more detailed report with a chart and a table. Then we have the user acquisition report. So this report focuses on the first traffic source that acquired your visitor. For example, if a visitor landed on your website for the first time a month ago and that visitor came from Google organic search, then in this
16:10 report you will see that visitor included in the organic search row. Right here you can see how many users did you have that eventually landed on your site for the first time from Google organic search or some other traffic source. Then you can see how many new users, how many returning users do you have. Then some other metrics. For example, if you want to see how many visitors completed a particular event in this column, you can click here and then select some event. Here you will see those events that are tracked in your property. For example, in this property, they are tracking various e-commerce events like add to cart, purchase. out of the box they are not available in Google Analytics unless you either send those events with the help of developer
16:57 or Google tag manager or maybe your website's G4 integration maybe that one is sending some additional events but let's say that I want to focus on purchase so I will click here and I can see how many purchases did I get from each traffic source then there's another concept which is called key events so event is a regular interaction like any interaction that distracted by Google Analytics, but you can mark some events as more important to your business. For example, a purchase, a signup, or something like that. So, if those events are marked as key events, then they will be available in this section right here. And just like it was with the event count right here, you can click here and select a particular event and see how many interactions did you get from each
17:44 traffic source. But what's important here to understand is that this report focuses on the first traffic source of the visitor. If the visitor has five subsequent sessions, that user and all of its sessions will still be included in the first traffic source. If you care about each session individually and you care, for example, about the traffic source of the latest session of the visitor, then you should be looking for a report that mentions something about traffic acquisition. Most marketers are actually interested in the traffic acquisition report. So let's go here and we can see various groups of traffic sources and how many sessions did we get and if we move to the right we can also see the revenue. How much revenue did we
18:31 generate from each traffic source. If you want a more granular view because right now these are like very generic groups. But if you want to look at the source or medium then you can click here and select session source medium. And now if I move to the right and sort this by sessions. So I clicked here to add this arrow right here. And I see that a lot of my traffic is coming from Google organic search, but also from Google paid ads, from newsletters, and so on. By default, this chart right here focuses on the top five traffic sources. But I can unselect them right here. And if I want to look only at Google organic, for example, I can click here, plot rows, and now I see a chart only of
19:19 Google organic. And if I want to change the granularity, for example, from day to weeks, then I can click here and I can see the trend here. You can also manage the date range. For example, I can look at the last 90 days. Click apply. And this is how my Google organic traffic is performing. I mean, how many sessions did I get? If I want to use a different metric, for example, revenue, I can go to the table, then click on total revenue in order to sort by that metric. And once I do that, the revenue also is used by this particular chart. Another thing that you can do is let's say that you want to look at your email marketing campaigns. So you can either click email right here and this search
20:07 field will look at all rows that contain the word email or you can add a quick filter. So click here then enter medium select session medium exactly matches and then email right here and click apply. So now if I clear this then in my case the chart is now broken. So maybe I should refresh it. Oh, it's not showing anything because I have not selected any rows. So, let's say that I want to look just at the total plot rows. And now this is displaying some data. And if I want to see which email campaigns are now generating most of the revenue, I have sorted that right here. And I see that this newsletter generated most of the revenue, which is quite expected
20:53 because Black Friday happens in November. Once you're done with your analysis and if you want to remove this filter, you can just quickly click this X right here and you will start seeing the data of all traffic sources once again. Then let's take a look at some other reports. I will not be going through each and every report. I will just show you the ones that are the most popular based on my usage. So in the engagement section or maybe in your case that is named something else, I have the pages and screens and also landing page. So we will take a look at both of these. First let's start with the landing page. So these are the pages where the sessions started. So in other words, these are the first pages of each session. For example, in this property,
21:40 a lot of people are landing on the homepage because slash means homepage and then they do something on a page. So out of those sessions that started on a homepage, the revenue was generated and we can see that number right here. A lot of people also landed on other pages. So if I sort by total revenue, I will see that a lot of people also added on a list of new products on apparel on some clearance. The reason why we see a checkout right here is a bit more technical and there are some nuances. So in this case a default session duration of this property is 30 minutes. So if a visitor goes to a checkout but then does not finish a purchase let's say goes to
22:26 get coffee or something like that comes back after 1 hour this will start a new session and landing page will be treated as the checkout which means that the checkout becomes the landing page and it will be displayed in the report right here. In order to mitigate this, you could technically increase the default session duration. And later in this video, I will show you how to do that. So, the landing page report shows you the first pages of the sessions. This is where the people land on your website and then do something. But if you don't care whether the page is the first page of the session or the last page, then you should be looking for a report which says something about pages and screens. So I can click here and then I can see that this is how many times this page
23:12 was viewed. Views means page views. Then we also see how many people went to look at your new products. Then how many people visited the checkout and so on. We can also see the number of users. So there is a term in Google Analytics called active users. Active users are those users who have spent at least 10 seconds on a page or they have converted which means that Google Analytics tracked a key event like purchase or that visitor viewed at least two pages in the session or one more condition is that the user is a new user which means that if the visitor lands on your site for the first time that visitor will also be included in the active users at least for a while. Then we see how many events did we get on each page. And then
24:00 if we scroll to the right, we will see how much revenue did we get. However, keep in mind that this revenue is attributed to the page where that conversion happened. For example, a purchase and it's logical that most of the revenue happens at the checkout. So personally, I don't think that revenue metric makes a lot of sense in this particular report. Then we have the monetization section or in your case it might be related to something like revenue. So here I can see the overview. I can see the revenue, how was it changing on each day. Then we can look at the e-commerce purchases. So these are your top products and their performance. So we can see how many times that product was viewed by your visitors, how many items were added to a
24:46 cart, how many items were purchased, and the revenue. So if you sort by item revenue for example, the best performing product is this sweater right here. Of course, in your case, it will be something different. But again, I want to emphasize that out of the box, Google Analytics does not track this information automatically unless you specifically send the product and the purchase and the revenue data to Google Analytics. But explaining how to do that goes out of scope of this tutorial. So I will post a link to a documentation. I also talk very in-depth about e-commerce tracking in my courses. I will post a link to them below the video as well. We also have some additional reports here. For example, we can go and click on checkout journey. And we can see the
25:34 drop off between different funnel steps and I mean checkout steps. For example, this is how many people started the checkout. then how many people added shipping information, then payment information and then purchased. And you can also choose the breakdown dimension. For example, you can look at how different device categories perform. For example, maybe on a particular device category, the drop off between two steps is much higher. An example here could be to do some technical troubleshooting. For example, if you change the dimension here to browser, then you can check maybe on a particular checkout step, users with particular browsers drop off more significantly. That might indicate that for that particular browser, there
26:21 is some checkout problem. Maybe something is not working and your visitors are not able to complete the purchase. Then we have one more section that I wanted to show you actually two of them. One is user attributes, the other one is tech. So let's go to user attributes then demographic details and here you can see where your visitors are coming from which countries. You can also change this to regions or you can also look at the cities. If you have enabled a feature called Google signals then you might get additional information about age, gender and interests. When it comes to these three dimensions, the data is not that accurate, but it can still give you a general sense about your audience. In the text section, we will have a similar report, but it will be focused more on
27:09 the devices of the visitors. So, if I go to tech and tech details, then I can see how visitors with different browsers are performing. Here, I can also change the dimension from browser to let's say operating system. Oh, and uh one more thing that I wanted to mention when it comes to standard reports. So I will go back to the traffic acquisition report and let's say that I will be looking at session source medium. I want to look at the email traffic. So I can add a filter where medium and to be precise session medium exactly matches email. Then I click apply. And I also want to see in this report campaign because I see session source session medium and I want
27:55 to see session campaign name. So I can do that by clicking this plus right here and then enter session campaign. Select it and here is that information visible right here. Now I can sort by sessions and now I have more granular data. The same principle could be applied for example to Facebook ads. I don't think that this property is running Facebook ads but let me just show you the principle of how I would configure that. So I can click on this filter and then instead of email I could select something like CPC if they are using that value for their Facebook ads and then I could add another condition where source contains and then I could enter facebook.com. This is like an example.
28:41 Of course, right now if I click apply, I don't think that I will get anything because they are not running Facebook ads. But if I was running, then in this table I would see Facebook CPC and then the list of Facebook campaign names and then I could check how many sessions did I get, how much revenue did I get from those campaigns and so on. Another section where you will be spending a lot of time and that allows you to create more complex reports is called explore. Here you can build explorations by using various techniques. Let's click explore and then here you have various exploration techniques. For example, free form which is mainly a table. Then you have funnel
29:26 explorations. You can see paths that your visitors take. Then you can see segment overlaps. look at the cohorts and several other things but mostly I find myself working with the first three which is free form funnel explorations and path explorations. Let's start with blank. This will default to the free form exploration. The interface of explorations is split into three parts. These are the variables or metrics with dimensions and segments that you are going to use in the reports. Then the second column is for settings. So for each exploration method, the fields and the options are different and then the biggest part is taken by the output of the report. So let's say that we want to look at the revenue this website
30:12 generates, but we want to compare different locations and device categories. To do that, let's click plus in the dimensions section and add the following two dimensions. Device category, click the checkbox here and then country. Select this one and confirm. Now these two dimensions are added right here to the sidebar. The next what we want to add is a metric. So in the metric section, click plus and let's look for revenue. Then select purchase revenue and confirm. Now let's add these dimensions and metrics to the settings column. In the rows I will add country and then device category will be added to columns. If you want, you can also doubleclick these dimensions and then they will be added to the settings
30:58 column. Then we can add the purchase revenue. Here I will just doubleclick it and it is added right here in the values. And now I can see top countries based on revenue and each country is split into three device categories. I can see how much revenue I'm getting from United States and desktop then mobile and tablet. You can also change the visualization method of the table. For example, instead of bar chart, you can use heat map where the darker color is, the higher the number is. Or you can just look at the plain text table. Now, let's look at another example. I know that this Google Analytics property is installed on a website where they have a site search feature. So let's say that I want to build a report of most popular site search keywords because this is a
31:45 great way to understand what people are looking for and maybe to identify certain gaps between what they are looking for and what the website is actually offering. So to do that you can click plus here to add a new tab and select free form. Then here we need to add certain dimensions but nothing on the left side is related to that. So we will add more dimensions by clicking here. Then let's add event name because we will use it to filter and to narrow down the report just to site search events. And then there is a dimension called search term. So select that and confirm. And then in metrics we can add event count metric because then we will
32:30 know how many times each keyword was searched for. So once you select that metric, click confirm. Now I will double click search term. So it will be added to rows and then I will double click on event count. So here we have various keywords but the first row is empty and its event count is very large. This is happening because right now this report includes all events like purchase, add to cart and all the other stuff. But we are interested only in site search. Therefore, we can scroll down and in filters, click here and select event name. This is the reason why we added event name right here. The list of dimensions here is the same as the list right here. So, if you cannot find some dimension here, you first have to add it
33:17 right here. So, event name then exactly matches and there is an event for that which is called view search results. Select that and apply. And now I see the top keywords and how many times each keyword was searched for. And there are many other settings right here in the settings column. But explaining them would go out of scope of this tutorial. I don't want to make it too long. But if you are curious how to work with free form explorations, then I will post a link to a tutorial below the video. Now let's take a look at a second exploration method, which is funnel explorations. You can either go to explore and then create a funnel exploration or you can click a plus right here and select funnel exploration. This will create a new tab. The main part where you can configure
34:05 funnels is in the steps section. So click the pencil right here. And let's build a basic e-commerce funnel. So since this property is tracking e-commerce events like add to cart or purchase, we will use them to build this funnel. The first step let's say is viewed product and in this case it's any product. Then we can enter a condition. Let's say view item is the event name. But I want to emphasize that in your property you might not have view item or other e-commerce events. These are not tracked by Google out of the box. You must send those events or maybe your built-in Google Analytics integration already supports those events. But also it's completely possible that your property does not track this automatically. So going back to the
34:50 funnel, the first step is to view any product. Then we can add another step and let's call this add it to cart. And here the condition will be add to cart event. If you want to make your step more precise, you can click add parameter here and then look at what kind of parameters do you have. for example, item ID because maybe you want to narrow down this funnel just to a particular product or you can add more conditions right here. For example, you can narrow down this particular step only if page host name or page location contains something. But in my case, I will keep this more generic. So just add to cart. Then we have the third step. So we can call this checkout. And then the step name is begin checkout because
35:38 that's the recommended event of e-commerce that Google Analytics kind of requires. And then the last step, let's say, is called purchase where the event name is also called purchase. And then apply. Once I do that, then Google Analytics will show how many users viewed any product, how many out of those users added any product to a cart. Then how many out of these users started a checkout and then how many users purchased. You can also add a breakdown dimension. Let's say we can look at device category and then we can better understand where completion rates are higher. For example, in this case, on desktop devices, the completion rates are higher, which might indicate that
36:23 maybe the experience on the mobile devices is not as good, and it's worth taking a closer look. There are also other settings right here, but again, explaining them would go out of scope of this tutorial, but I will post some resources below the video. And the final exploration method that I wanted to show is path exploration. So, click plus right here and select path. Here you can see how your visitors are navigating the website and what kind of actions are they taking next. So here I could for example switch from event name to page path and I see that sessions start most often happens at the homepage. Now if I click here I can see other places where the visitors are going further. Also a useful feature is the ability to start
37:09 the path exploration from the end. So you can click start over and select not the starting point but the ending point. So here I can click then select event name then search and let's say I will enter purchase. Once I select the event I can go backwards and see what was done before the purchase. Maybe in this case it will be useful to have the page path dimension. And obviously before the purchase there is a checkout page. This is natural but then I can go backwards and then keep expanding until I find some non-checkout pages and maybe it will give me better idea of what is happening. Another example could be to start over then select a starting point where the event name is begin checkout.
37:58 Then I will select the page path again. Then let's expand this. I see that some people go to the account then they go back to checkout. So maybe the user experience and flow is not very convenient because people have to go kind of in circles and jumping between checkout then something else then checkout. So maybe the login feature looks a bit confusing at the checkout or you know maybe something else. But this is definitely worth investigating further. Now speaking of sharing the reports, every report that is available in the report section is visible to all users who have access to this property. But when it comes to explorations, all of these explorations by default are visible only to you. So if someone else
38:44 creates an exploration, only that person sees their exploration. But if you want to share it, then you can click on your exploration and click this share icon. I don't have enough permissions in this property, so I cannot click it. But in your property, you would be able to click it. And then once you click okay, you will share that exploration with other users in the property, which means that they will be able to see that exploration. But at least right now, they won't be able to edit that exploration. If they want to change something, they will actually have to make their own copy and modify their copy, which is in my opinion not very convenient. But maybe in the future this will change. By the way, did you know that I have a bunch of free ebooks on Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics?
39:29 So, if you want to better learn these topics, then click the link below the video, download those ebooks and get started. One more feature which is available in Google Analytics properties is analytics advisor. It is artificial intelligence that you can have conversations with and this feature has direct access to your Google Analytics for property which means that you can ask questions related to your data to your settings and then get answers. To access analytics advisor you should click this icon right here at the top right corner and here you can ask questions to get answers. Analytics advisor is powered by Gemini. If you find it difficult to navigate the interface of Google Analytics 4, this might be an option for you to get
40:14 answers to your questions quickly. But as it is usual with AI, it might hallucinate. So you should be careful with that. Nevertheless, for more generic questions, you can still save some time. Below this video, I will post a documentation about Analytics Advisor. And here you can find certain examples of questions that you can ask. For example, we can take a look and ask it to return the number of purchases coming from organic search that happened in the last week. So, I copied this example. Then I can paste it right here and let's see what the reply is here. We can also see the thought process that this advisor is doing. What kind of things it is checking and then eventually we will get our answer. So, in the last week, we
41:03 got 125 purchases coming from Google organic search. But as I've said, not everything is perfect. Right now, this feature is in beta. So, normally, if I clicked this link, I would expect to see the report that shows this kind of information, but that's not always the case. Now, if I click view traffic acquisition, it will open the traffic acquisition report, which is okay. However, sometimes I had situations where the date range is not correct. But in this case, it looks like this is okay. And now if I look at organic search and then I select purchase key events, I have 125 which is the correct number. So in this particular case, the advisor worked well. But you should not trust this blindly. There still might be
41:49 some situations where AI will hallucinate or it will use incorrect information sources. Therefore, the answers might be skewed. For example, if I go to reports and then look at the landing page report, I will see a lot of not set values. So, I might ask why are there many landing pages and maybe not set landing pages like that. It is now analyzing my request. It might retrieve certain information. It's scanning knowledge base and let's see what kind of reasons it will list. And even though I was asking for the reason why, it gave me more information which is not necessarily what I needed. It gave me the numbers. It showed me the
42:34 trend, but I was asking for reasons why. Now, eventually at the end of this response, I see several certain reasons that are supposed to cause the not set landing page. And one of them is here where the advisor is saying that if I send some custom event before the page view, it will cause the not set landing page. Now, this is a myth and even though there are multiple resources online like blog posts that say this, this is actually incorrect. I've done multiple experiments and event that fires before the page view does not cause not set landing page. But in this case, the advisor is still mentioning this, which again honestly is incorrect and misleading information. So, you should look at this with a grain of salt. But if you have some simpler questions where you just ask to return a
43:22 certain number, it looks like this is doing a fairly good job. Now, if you ask me if this feature is useful, I would say for simple questions, yes. But it's still very much necessary for you to understand how Google Analytics works because then you can quickly identify whether the response is correct or not. So for experienced users, this can be a timesaver, but for complete beginners, it might be a bit misleading, at least in some cases. So use this with caution. By default, Google Analytics can track a bunch of events. Let me show you some examples. For example, it can track when someone clicks a link to a file like PDF link or when someone views a page or scrolls or watches a video. But that
44:09 list is limited. What if you want to track more events that are not mentioned in the list of automatically collected events? In that case, you can send custom events. Let me show you how this can be done with Google Tag Manager. Here is the container that I have already used in this lesson. And right now the only tag or in other words tracking code that I have is the Google tag that activates Google Analytics on a page. Here I have a demo website and let's say that I want to track menu link clicks. So when someone clicks a link in the menu, I want to send this as an event to Google Analytics 4. Now in Google Analytics documentation, there is nothing mentioned about menu link click tracking. So I could send a custom event every time a click happens. Even though Google Analytics can track link clicks,
44:57 by default this feature is not enabled. So we can go to Google Tag Manager, go to triggers and then click new. Then trigger configuration and for now I will just select just links. I want to look at all link clicks and then I will name this all link clicks and click save. Then I will click preview to refresh the preview mode. And if it's not working then I can close the preview mode, close the website and try again. So click preview to enable the preview mode where Google tech manager is installed. Then I will enter the URL of the page where I want to try this and click connect. Once the preview mode has connected, I will click the first link or maybe the second one. I will do that by holding the control key on my keyboard because I
45:43 want this link to open in a new tab. If you are on Mac then you should hold command key. So I click the link a tab opened. Then I go to the preview mode and here I see the link click and here if I expand this section right here I see all the information that is available related to that link click. So this is the first step we identified that we can track this link click. Now in Google Tag Manager, we should go to variables and then in the built-in variables section, we should be looking for click variables, but I don't have any. So I will go to configure and then click checkboxes next to all click variables right here. Now I can close this, refresh the preview mode by clicking the preview button and let's
46:29 try again. So I go to the website, I hold the control key on my keyboard, I click the link. Now if I go to the preview mode again and select the latest link click event and I go to variables I will see the information that Google Analytics fetched about that link click. So I have things like text of the link the URL of the link and I could send this information to Google Analytics together with the event. Also I see the click classes. So in this case the click classes might be useful because other links on a page might have different class. This one clearly says that this is navigation link and of the main menu. So my next step could be to make the trigger in Google tech manager more
47:15 precise. I want this trigger to work only if click classes contains this value right here. Websites are coded in different ways. So in your case click classes might contain a different value. I will go to Google tag manager then triggers then open this trigger and then instead of all link clicks I will select some link clicks and in the variable I will select click classes contains and then this part right here without quotation marks like that. So if a link click happens and click classes contains this value I will want Google tech manager to send an event to Google Analytics. Now let me rename this trigger and click save. We have prepared a condition when we will send the event
48:01 to Google Analytics. Now we need to create a tracking code known as a tag that will actually send the information to Google Analytics. Let's go to tags and first I will need to get the measurement ID of my property. You can either do that by going to admin then data streams and select your website data stream. This is the ID. Or you can go to Google Tag Manager, open your Google tag and copy that ID right here. So copy. Then in tags, click new tag configuration Google Analytics and then G4 event. Paste the measurement ID. If it is correct, then you will see a green check mark right here. And then you have to enter the name of the event. Since I am going to track menu link clicks, I
48:46 can name this event menu link click. All event names in Google Analytics 4 should be lowercase and instead of spaces you should have the underscore. Then together with this event we should also send additional information. For example the text of the link and the URL of the link. So let's go to Google tech manager expand event parameters and then we will add two parameters. We can either try to use one of the standard parameters or we can come up with our own. Just for sake of a demonstration, I will show you how to send a custom parameter. So let's call this menu link name which will be the text of the link and then menu link URL or maybe not link maybe item like
49:32 that. So menu item name and menu item URL. Then here we need to add variables. In Google tech manager we have click text variable which fetches the text of the URL. So let's go here and click this button to insert a variable and select click text. Here we want to use another variable that fetches the URL and that variable is click URL. So click this button and then select click URL. So when this tag fires, it will send a menu link event to Google Analytics and together with that event, it will also send the text of the menu item and then the link or URL of the menu item. Finally, let's go to triggering and click anywhere. Then select the link
50:19 click trigger. To sum up, when a visitor clicks a menu link, this trigger is activated and then it fires this tag which will send the event to Google. Let's name this tag. For example, you can call it like this and then click save. Now let's test if this is working. So click preview. This will refresh the preview mode. And now if I go to the website, I will click the first link, the second one, and so on. I will do that by holding the control key on my keyboard. So first link, second link, third link, and so on. Now I go to the preview mode. I see several link clicks right here. I can click it. And I see that my tag fired here. Also here and here. Ignore this unknown tag type issue. It's just a bug in the preview
51:05 mode. But your tags still work fine. Now we need to test if the events were received by Google Analytics. So let's go to Google Analytics property. Then close this. In the admin panel, select data display and then debug view. And here we see the manual link click events. You can click that event and see what kind of parameters were tracked. Most of them are automatically tracked but we also have menu item name and menu item URL. If you want to use these two parameters in reports of Google Analytics interface, you must register these as custom dimensions because these are custom parameters. So we need to tell Google that we are interested in these parameters and we want to use them in reports. To do that we should go to
51:50 admin then in data display select custom definitions and then create custom dimension. Here we will register both of those parameters as custom dimensions. So the first parameter is let me quickly check the first parameter is menu item name. So I will copy it paste it here and then give it a name menu item name. The scope should be event and click save. Then let's do the same thing for menu item URL. So click custom dimension then I will copy this paste it right here and then enter menu item URL scope is event and click save. So once you have tested that your event setup in Google tech manager is working properly. I did that and it worked fine. Then in
52:37 Google tag manager you should click submit to publish this container version. So we can name this let's say menu link click tracking in G4 and publish. From this moment my Google tag magic setup went live to website visitors and I should wait for at least 24 hours to start seeing that data in Google Analytics reports. After you started sending events to Google Analytics 4, patience is key. you will need to wait from 24 to 48 hours. Even though some events might appear sooner, they are still not fully processed. Therefore, information such as traffic acquisition reports will remain inaccurate for a while. But after
53:23 24 or 48 hours, things will be displayed properly. Now, you might be wondering where will you see that event information? And there are several places. Let me show you some of them. So first of all the events will become available in the reports section and if you find a report that mentions something related to events in this list you will see those event names. In my case 24 hours still have not passed. Therefore I don't see my manual link click event. But if I checked this report tomorrow I would see that event. Since I have registered two parameters as custom dimensions, I will be able to see those parameters inside the event report. Let's imagine that view search results event is actually called menu link click. So if I click here then I
54:10 would see some charts and also I would see two widgets because I've registered menu item URL and menu item name as custom dimensions. In this property search term is registered as a custom dimension. So here I see what kind of search terms did the visitors enter. But on my own property, I would see what kind of menu links are clicked the most. Another place where you will be able to see and use event data is in acquisition reports. For example, if we go to traffic acquisition report, I will see various traffic sources. And let's say that I want to select the menu link click event. So in the event count section, I would be able to select that event. But again not enough time has passed. Therefore I will imagine that
54:57 view search results is manual link click event. So if I click here I will see how many events did I get from each traffic source. Another place where you can find the event data is the explorations. So I could create a free form exploration. So I will select blank. And let's say that I want to display a table where the first column shows the menu link click text. Then the second column would show the URL and then the third column would show how many times was each menu item clicked. So to do that I would go to dimensions or actually no maybe I should switch to a different property because this one does not have that dimension. So I will now pause the video and switch to a different property. All right here I am in my own property and in
55:43 dimensions I will click plus and I will add three dimensions. The first one is menu item name. then menu item URL and then event name. I will use event name to filter the list of events. Then click confirm. In metrics, I can add total users. I usually prefer using total users rather than active users. So click this checkbox and then event count. Click checkbox and then confirm. So to build a report, we would need to add menu item name. I will double click it. Then menu item URL and then both metrics. So I doubleclicked them as well. Right now it tells me that there's no data because not enough time has passed. But soon I will show you a visual example. And then we will want to
56:29 filter this report and narrow it down just to menu link click events. Therefore in the filters I will click this event name exactly matches menu link click. I can also double check that event name in my Google tag manager container. So I will go to tags and I see menu link click. So I entered the same thing right here and then apply. Even though this report does not display any data because not enough time has passed. It would have looked something like this where I have in the first column the menu item name then menu item URL and then in metrics I would have had the number of total users for each link and also the number of times each link was clicked. That's what event count
57:15 means in this case. If you want to learn more how to work with explorations, then I will post a link to a description of this video below. And for the end of this video, let me show you five things that you should configure in your property or at least thoroughly consider that. In Google Analytics, go to admin. And here you will see the admin panel where certain settings can be configured on the account level and most of them are managed on the property level. So the first thing that you should do is to go to data retention and change event data retention from 2 months to 14 months. If you are using a premium version of Google Analytics then you will be able to select even longer period. Now what
58:01 does this mean? By default, the data in exploration is available only from the last two months. If you want to be able to use the date of the last 14 months, you must change the retention period to 14 months. Do this as soon as you create your Google Analytics for property. So once you change this, click save. Then if you are tracking multiple websites with the same Google Analytics property, you have to inform Google Analytics which domains belong to your business. So you can do that by going to data streams then select your website data stream scroll down and click configure tax settings then here go to configure your domains. So if you track multiple domains with the same Google Analytics for property add those domains
58:48 right here. Let's say that one website is exampample.com and the other one is called another website.com. You don't have to enter the subdomain because if I just enter the main domain like this, it will cover all subdomains of example.com. If five domains are tracked by this property, then add those five domains right here and then click save. This setting is related to crossdmain tracking. Then if most of your employees are working from office or they have static IP addresses then you should exclude their data from your Google Analytics reports because otherwise your data might be somewhat polluted. To do that while you're still in the Google tax settings click show more and then define internal traffic. Then here click
59:35 create and add a rule which will tell Google Analytics that these particular IP addresses belong to your own employees. So for example, you can name this office IP if a lot of employees are working at the office and your office IP remains static. And then here you can enter let's say IP address equals and then enter that office IP address right here. Of course this is an example so you should enter a real IP address. You can find that by clicking this link. You can also add multiple conditions here but just make sure that you include those IP addresses. Then once you do that go to data collection section then data filters and
1:00:20 activate the internal traffic filter. So right now it's in testing but you should click here and then select activate filter from this moment. Once you activate the filter it will exclude traffic of your employees from Google Analytics property. Then this is my personal recommendation. Some people might disagree with that, but I prefer to extend the default session duration. This will reduce the number of not set landing pages, for example. But of course, it will also reduce the number of sessions because if the visitor visits your website a couple of times a day with longer session duration, Google Analytics might treat those two sessions as one long session. But personally, I prefer that and I recommend that you do
1:01:05 the same thing. So to do that, go to data streams, select your website data stream, then configure tax settings, then show more and adjust session timeout. And the default is 30 minutes, but I usually do at least 4 hours or very often I select the maximum, which is 7 hours and 55 minutes. Also, I like to increase the timer for engaged session because in my opinion, if someone spends 10 seconds on a page or on your website, it's still not engaged enough. So, I do at least 30 seconds or maybe even more. Once you do that, click save. Then earlier, one of the reports that I mentioned in Google Analytics was the user attributes report and demographic details. In this report, we
1:01:53 had various dimensions and some of them were age, gender and interest. By default, out of the box, they are not enabled in Google Analytics. I mean, you will see them, but they will contain no data. So, if you want to start collecting this data, you should go to Google Analytics admin panel, then data collection, and then Google signals data collection. Here you will need to turn on and turn on right here. But keep in mind that if you enable this feature, you will start using some of the Google advertising features and if your company is quite strict with legal requirements, maybe first you should discuss this with the legal department of the company before enabling this feature. But once you do that, then Google signals will be activated and after a while you should
1:02:39 start seeing some data being populated for these dimensions. But it might take even weeks for this data to start coming in. Hopefully, this video helped you take the first step with Google Analytics, but we were just scratching the surface here. There are many other things to learn about this platform in order to really benefit from it. If you want to learn how to track what's important, how to configure your setup, how to build and customize various reports, how to get insights out of your analytics, then take a look at my Google Analytics course. I will post a link to it below the video. If you found this video useful, hit the like button. that will help me understand what videos do you like and what should I create in the future. Also, if you want to learn more about Google Tag Manager or Google Analytics, then subscribe to this
1:03:24 channel. My name is Julius. This is Analytics Mania and I'll see you in the next video. [music] >> [music]
