By Charlie Cummins – bbmm.ie
Today’s breakfast briefing at Google HQ in Barrow Street was the 9th in the current 2016 series. It provided a more in-depth look at Google Analytics and the level of data it can provide. However, the point was made that Google analytics is only as good as the initial client set up: the old adage of “garbage in – garbage out” can be applied to the Google analytics platform and the quality of data it can deliver to the user.
The presentation looked at 3 areas in relation to using analytics in a more in-depth fashion for effective insights.
- Evaluating Website Data
- Improve/ Automate Reports
- Move Analytics beyond websites
Evaluating Your Website:
To derive the best possible insights from Google Analytics data, it is recommended that clients have a measurement plan in place. Knowing what you want (need!) to measure and how it relates to your business objectives will result in better insights from the wealth of data available.
This simplified measurement plan was shown as an 
example of how business objectives can be translated into goals which are to be measured by Google Analytics.
Another key area where analytics can help provide meaningful data is when goals are setup to be tracked. Some actions which can be set as goals would include the following events:
Improve and Automate Reports;
A fairly simple and time saving feature within the Analytics platform is the ability to set up custom dashboards. These can be configured by users to display only key highlighted sections of data based on a measurement plan. The benefit of this is that the dashboard is automatically populated with your key metrics and can be instantly shared with colleagues as needed. It is also possible within Google Analytics to configure customised reports and apply deeper segment analyses.
Beyond The Websites:
While Google Analytics primarily tracks website traffic and provides an abundance of information on the structure, behaviour and sources of the website traffic, it can do more. Data from any internet connected device can be setup to share to analytics. This needs to be set up via a measurement protocol, but once it’s configured it will allow a measurement of how users interact with your business from almost any environment such as user activity in new environments and can tie in online to offline behaviour.
if you’d like more information on how BBMM can help you with Google Analytics please email us at [email protected]
