What is it?
Google Analytics offers endless advanced features for understanding user behavior, tracking events, and measuring form submissions.
Paired with Google Tag Manager, Analytics can be streamlined to measure these types of actions automatically.
Before starting with advanced features, we strongly suggest first mastering Analytics basics and undergoing some of the more advanced (and free) training sessions available through the Google Analytics Academy.
Why is it important?
Utilizing more advanced features in Google Analytics can allow you to better understand the full picture of your audience and take action that would otherwise rely on just basic website performance metrics (e.g., page views, bounce rate, time on site, etc.).
These advanced features also create a better foundation for even more complex insights down the road. The more detailed and transparent your data, the more accuracy in understanding your audience.
How do I start?
Hire a website development agency or freelancer
We always recommend having a web development firm or solo developer available to implement code changes on the website or to support more advanced efforts prior to looking into the following options.
Set up separate views
Once you have Google Analytics installed, it’s important to have two separate views for data. One should be named Unfiltered View and contain pure, unfiltered data, while the Master Filtered View will contain any necessary filters (e.g., removing office IP addresses). Google provides instructions for creating new views here.
As mentioned above, it’s important to filter out any internal office IP addresses and IP addresses of work-from-home employees so that visitor data is only from outside individuals. On a Google search page, just type “my IP address” to locate the address of any given office/computer. Once you’ve collected the IP addresses to filter, instructions for placing them in the Master Filtered View can be found here.
Data Tracking Resources
Dashboards
Dashboards quickly visualize common pieces of Analytics data. Rather than having to pull sets of data individually as needed, dashboards allow for a variety of metrics to be compared and illustrated (in graphs, charts, tables, etc.) on the same page through widgets.
Tracking On-Page Events
Google Analytics is not initially set up to track on-page events such as link clicks, button clicks, and how far a visitor scrolls on a page. Rather, the platform tracks more top-level metrics such as page views.
There is an “event” section within Analytics for tracking on-page events when they’re custom developed. For custom-developed events, there are generally two methods of creation:
- adding code to each link/button/clickable object so that events are recorded in Google Analytics
- creating “tags” in Google Tag Manager that are triggered by on-site events such as a button click
Because manually coding events can be extremely time consuming and open to errors, we recommend the Tag Manager approach. However, for those wishing to understand how on-page events work, Google provides resources for developers and users alike.
Forms
If your website uses forms (such as a contact form), Analytics can make it easy to track submissions. The two primary methods are:
Thank you pages
If your form uses a thank you page (recommended) that a user visits after submission, you can track visits to this page as a “destination goal” in Google Analytics. For information on setting up destination goals, please reference Google’s related support page.
Tag Manager tags
Sometimes a thank you page isn’t available for the forms on your website or you want to track many forms at once without having to build individual thank you pages. In that case, Google provides form tracking triggers and instructions on creating them in Google Tag Manager.
Recommended platforms
Google Tag Manager
The benefits of Google Tag Manager include:
- management of tags on your website simultaneously rather than individual coding
- create a single Google Tag Manager code that “holds” these tags on a customized admin dashboard
- changes can be made on the dashboard dynamically
It’s important to note that Tag Manager is a very sophisticated system requiring considerable training and testing. Google offers Tag Manager training classes:
We always recommend having a web development firm or solo developer available to implement code changes on the website or to support more advanced efforts prior to looking into the following options.
Google Data Studio
The benefits of Google Data Studio include:
- reporting system connecting Google products and services data
- one unified platform
- ability to connect a variety of third-party marketing tools and data providers
Because of its complexity, we recommend that interested users first review training for the tool in the Google Analytics Academy and leverage Google’s support database for the tool.
