Introduction
Google Analytics is a free service and is offered by Google in which, when activating the service through a Google account, and when registering a site, a code is received to be inserted in the registered page and, at each display, visitation statistics are sent to the system and presented to the website owner. It was created primarily as an aid to webmasters to optimize their sites for marketing campaigns and for Google AdSense. It is incorrect to think that this service solves the problems of a website automatically without a webmaster behind it, it only demonstrates the information to be corrected.
Resources
Analytics is able to identify, in addition to the traditional rate of display and hit of a page, geographic location of the visitor, the way it arrived on the page (through links from other sites, search engine, AdSense or directly by address), operating system, browser, browser and operating system combined and their versions, screen resolution, Java, flash player installed, among others, in daily, weekly, monthly and annual periods.
Although many people see Google Analytics only as a traffic monitoring tool, this tool actually works as a powerful tool for decision making in Internet related businesses.
Technology
The system has a short java script code on each page of the website that the visitor accesses. This code sends the data to Analytics, which in turn passes it on to the owner. For each new website registered in the system, Google Analytics scans the source code for the code provided. If not, he continues to access the page periodically until he finds the expected character string. If not found, the system will not provide data to the registrant. This serves as a way to confirm that only the owner of the page registers their sites and only he has access to the data.
Objective
The purpose of this laboratory is to demonstrate access to website visitor data through the Google Analytics tool and then create dashboard reports in Power BI with the purpose of supporting decision makers.
Below are the steps for creating the account in Google Analytics.
The connection configuration between Power BI and the site must be done by the site administrator.
Utilities
All data from google analytics can be used in Power BI, R language, Python, among others to develop dashboard tools, descriptive and predictive statistical analysis, machine learning models according to the behavior of your audience and even perform behavioral forecasts. according to possible changes made to your product, service, support and customer service. and the possibilities are many for any type of business.
Digital Marketing Metrics with Web Analytics
Digital marketing are communication actions that companies can use through the internet, cell phones and other digital media, in order to publicize and market their products, winning new customers and improving their relationship network. It encompasses the practice of promoting products or services by using electronic distribution channels, so that they reach consumers quickly in a relevant, personalized and more efficient manner.
This type of marketing translates into actions adapted to digital media, in order to obtain, in these channels, the same efficiency and effectiveness as direct marketing and, simultaneously, to enhance the effects of traditional marketing. Digital channels, means and tools are normally used to make them operational.
This type of marketing translates into actions adapted to digital media, in order to obtain, in these channels, the same efficiency and effectiveness as direct marketing and, simultaneously, to enhance the effects of traditional marketing. Digital channels, means and tools are normally used to make them operational.
Below are some of the main metrics of digital marketing:
• Visit (or session)
• Visitor
• Pageviews
• Bounce Rate
• Departure percentage
• Traffic sources or channels
• Age
• Location
• Schedule
Knowing your audience is fundamental for improving products and services in a more customized way to your target audience, discovering new markets and thus applying horizons of opportunity.
Next step is to connect Power BI to google analytics and for that you need to have an account created with google and this account must be enabled in google analytics, as we did in the first steps above.
Connecting Power BI with Google Analytics
There is a limitation of metrics that can be used with google analytics, so look only for metrics that will really be useful for managing your business, creating dashboards and analyzing in general.
We can unite the data collected by google analytics and associate them with the company's internal data, so it is possible to make correlations and generate greater adherence in models of descriptive, predictive analysis, insights and even machine learning.
Let's see as an example some of the metrics below.
The important thing is to identify which metrics to use and it depends on the type of business and the analyzes that you want to manage.
For our example in our test lab, we will create a dashboard in Power BI with data from Google Analytics.
It is worth remembering that the data history of google analytics is available for a maximum period of only 6 months, so it is important to work with Power BI, so we can manage the data history to improve future analysis.
These are some examples of information that we can collect from Google Analytics and through this tool we can generate insights for decision making in different business areas.
Our dashboard model above is only illustrative due to the information security policies.
Conclusion
We saw then that Google Analytics is a free tool for managing access to web sites and can be manipulated and managed through the Power BI tool, which allows us to create real-time dashboard reports and correlate the site data with the internal data and even other external data of the company, which greatly expands the ability to generate insights in support of decision making in a world where today there are more than 2 billion users on the network and seen the trend of increasing this number of accesses every day More and more.
Therefore, every business should consider using these tools to make its competitiveness increasingly feasible, to better understand its target audience, its opportunities and weaknesses, strengthening its business further and making it increasingly competitive.