Google provides a free demo account of google analytics which can be accessed by clicking here and then clicking on the “ACCESS DEMO ACCOUNT” button. This tool is both fun to play around with and informative as it allows you to run hypothetical goals and different filters.

Real Time

You can access Real Time Reports on the demo account when viewing from the home dashboard. This report gives insight into what’s happening on your site at that very moment. For example, you can see how many visitors are on your site, what pages they’re visiting, what social media platforms they’re coming from, where they’re located, and more.  

The “INSIGHTS” tab is also featured on this page and can be useful for generating quick reports. Google Analytics Insights offers great guidelines for your website. For starters, users can select questions from a standard list to get some direction. The Insights go-to list of questions cover everything from users, user behavior, traffic trends, content analysis, product performance and technical performance.

Audience

There are so many options to view in the Audience metrics. One of my favorites is the “Lifetime Value” report. According to Patel, “Lifetime value isn’t just another vanity metric. It’s THE metric. The one that stands head and shoulders above all others. If there was one and only one metric you were tracking, this should be it.”  This report allows us to see how valuable different users are to businesses.

I also really like looking at demographics and interests. This helps businesses to see if they’re reaching their target audience and what other interests their users have. Interests are broken down into affinity categories, in-market segments, and other. 

Social Media Examiner defined each as the following:

• Affinity Category - Affinity categories are used to reach potential customers to make them aware of your brand or product. These are users higher in the purchase funnel, near the beginning of the process.

• In-Market Segment - Users in these segments are more likely to be ready to purchase products or services in the specified category. These are users lower in the purchase funnel, near the end of the process.

• Other Category - These are more granular categories than Affinity or In-market, and let you identify users who are not in those other categories.

Acquisition

This type of report is also a useful tool. I love seeing how social media is driving traffic to my companies’ sites, which is exactly what Acquisition metrics measures. Through Acquisition, we’re able to get a breakdown complete with plenty of results including paid search, social traffic, and a report on social sites that serves as a referring network to your site. 

Behavior

The Behaviors tab is a metric I recently found to be incredibly useful for marketers. The behavior flow shows where a user started, their flow through the site indicated by the interactions, and at what point they dropped off. The behavior flow is a sample set, and does not reflect all site traffic. The Behavior tab also includes valuable data on site load speeds, search information, events, publisher, and experiments. 

Google states, “The enhanced ecommerce plug-in for analytics enables the measurement of user interactions with products on ecommerce websites across the user's shopping experience, including: product impressions, product clicks, viewing product details, adding a product to a shopping cart, initiating the checkout process, transactions, and refunds.” 

This plugin will record that an event has occurred whenever a user triggers the code to fire by performing an action that the owner has decided was worth tracking.

Conversion

In the Conversion categories, goals are another action that the owner can develop. For example, I could record a goal as someone who clicked on an ad on my site with the goal starting with the user clicking on the ad and ending with the user typing their email in a form for more information about the product. Creating goals can be easy or difficult, depending on what exactly you would like to see accomplished. 

The Ecommerce section includes additional metrics, however, to access these reports you must set up Ecommerce tracking first. Under the demo account, we will look at the Shopping Behavior report. This report proves to be incredibly valuable when looking at the online purchasing cycle. You can look further into why a session did not end up converting into a sale. 

Now that you have all of this data, it is time to interpret it.