Or watch the video here:
G4 is the new version of Google Analytics that you can switch to now, but will be fully in effect in July 2023. Some things have changed, but I want to point you to a few things in particular.
Transcript:
Welcome to The Work your wellness biz podcast, a podcast for nutrition and fitness professionals. I’m your host, Jess Freeman here to help you save time and look good online.
I am a creative person, I’m a creative type. I mean creatives is literally in my business name. So there you go. I was never meant to be an accountant, a data analyst, any anything like that I need a creative outlet all the time. But I do love analytics, and love analytics. I don’t know why.
But for some reason, I love to look at website analytics, website traffic, and not just website even social media. But of course, I focus a lot on websites.
So in this video, today, I’m going to give you a quick little overview of Google Analytics four, or GA four, if you’ve heard that, I’m not going to be showing you how to install it switch over this is not a tutorial, this is just a quick overview for beginners who want to kind of get into looking at their analytics.
If you’re new here. My name is Jess, and this channel is all about helping you create a more smooth and profitable online business. And today we’re going to talk about analytics. I love looking at analytics in relation to my business in terms of what content is working, what marketing channels are working.
So that’s why I want to help you kind of figure out what to look at in your analytics, even if you haven’t ever looked at your analytics before. So first, if you have not heard about this new GA form.
Previously, we’ve all been on Universal Analytics. And now there is a GA for it’s a new analytics platform that Google has rolled out, it will be in full effect in July of 2023. But you can install it or connect to it now, in July 2023, Universal Analytics will stop working.
So I’m recommending all of my clients switch over now because you might as well just get used to the new platform, and start looking at the data and getting familiar with it and that kind of stuff. Because again, once July 2023 hits, I think it’s a particular day in July, the old data will stop being processed, like Universal Analytics, will stop tracking people on your website, you can still access that data, but you’re gonna have to reconnect and restart.
So there’s been a few changes in GTA four. Again, this is a high level overview, I’m not gonna go through each individual tab because that is probably going to overwhelm you if you’re wanting an in depth video. This is not the video for you. But one of the big things that has changed in GTA four is we are now looking at users and events and not sessions.
Everything in Universal Analytics was sessions like page sessions and length of sessions and that kind of thing. Now we’re on users and events. So each interaction, each thing that someone does on your website is an event. So each time they click, go to New Page, etc, that is an event.
So when you go to your analytics dashboard, you will see a snapshot a little bit of everything in terms of your data, then under that you’ll see real time and this gives you information that is real time on your site. So this can be helpful to look at.
If you are opening the cart to a new offer. If you have a product launch. If you just released a youtube video and you want to see the traffic to your site or something like that. You can watch it in real time. And then we have the lifecycle, which is the acquisition.
So how people are getting to our site, whether it’s organic search, paid search, social video referral, and then you have the engagement, which is what people are doing on your site. And then you have the monetization and retention.
But we’re really going to be looking at the acquisition and engagement today because that is typically the most helpful information for my clients who are just getting started with looking at analytics. So the first thing that I usually tell people to look at is their acquisition.
So again, how people are finding your site, how people are coming to your site. This really helps you look at what is working in terms of my content, in terms of ads, marketing, different platforms. I’m on like what is actually working, versus what maybe do I need to shift or change or completely stop doing so You’ll see this box.
And it tells you how many visitors you’re getting through search, video, social, etc. And you can just compare that to your own marketing activities. Are you really focusing on SEO and not seeing that reflected in your reach, maybe you need a new strategy, or you need to change what you’re doing on your site.
Next, I like to send people over to the engagement and then pages and screens tab, this is going to tell you what people are going to on your site which pages and posts are the most popular, which are not getting as much traffic, you can also change the date, the timeframe of what you’re looking at.
So maybe you just want to look at the last 30 days, maybe you want to look at the last quarter, or maybe you want to look at this year so far, it can also be helpful, I’d love to do this at the end of the year and look at the full year and see which pages and posts over the last year got the most traffic, which ones didn’t, this can be really eye opening in terms of SEO, but also which content are people more interested in and which content are people less interested in.
And that can help me come up with more content for the next year. And then the last thing I want to show you is the Explorer tab that shows you explorations or graphs basically, of your content. And this can be really cool to look at. I especially love the path exploration because it shows you where people are clicking.
And you can see like they go to this blog post and then this page and then this page, and it can really be an eye opening experience to see how people are actually moving through your website. So you’re gonna go to the Explore tab, and then path exploration, then you will see the tabs and the options on the left hand side.
And the graph on the right hand side. In the columns on the graph, you will see event name a few times in the second or third one, you can choose Page Title and screen name. And then from there, you can actually click on one of those page titles. And it will show you from this page, people clicked over to this page.
Again, these are very high level things you can do in GA four, there are definitely more in depth things you can look at. But for my clients and most of my audience, people are really new to analytics and are a little overwhelmed. So these are the places I like to have you guys look at because you can look at what’s working, what content are people actually reading and how are people going through your website.
This can all be very beneficial as you create more content update website pages or even reorganize your website. I’m going to put some links to resources down below if you want more information about GA four or if you want to switch over your analytics to GA four.
I will have a link to that below. If you have any questions let me know down in the comments below. And I will see y’all next time.
