Google Analytics Platform Principles

Instructor Justin Cutroni introduces the topics about the Google Analytics Platform

Unit 1 - Platform Fundamentals
Course overview

The platform components
Collection
For example, you’ll use the JavaScript tracking code to collect data from a website, but a Software Development Kit, called an SDK, to collect data from a mobile app.

Processing and Configuration
You can also configure Google Analytics to import data directly into your reports from other Google products, like Google AdWords, Google AdSense and Google Webmaster Tools. You can even configure Google Analytics to import data from non-Google sources, like your own internal data.

Reporting
Using the API you can build your own reporting tools or extract your data directly into third-party reporting tools.

The data model

Users: visitors
Sessions
Interactions: Individual interactions are called hits.

Each interaction that Google Analytics tracks belongs to a session, and each session is associated with a user.


Unit 2 - Collection
Data collection overview

• it’s the tracking code that gathers and sends the data back to your account for reporting
• Using hits to collect and send data
• In the example, everything after the question mark is called a parameter. Each parameter carries a piece of information back to Google’s analytic servers.
• utmul=, which shows the language that the user’s browser is set to.
• In addition to creating hits, the tracking code also performs another critical function. It identifies new users and returning users. 

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For your own account, you can find the tracking ID in the account administrative settings.

Website data collection
Understand how the Google Analytics JavaScript website tracking code collects data.

To track data from a website, Google Analytics provides a standard snippet of JavaScript tracking code. This snippet references a JavaScript library calledanalytics.js that controls what data is collected.

• Adding the Google Analytics JavaScript code to your website

1. Simply add the standard code snippet before the closing </head> tag in the HTML of every web page you want to track.

• Functions of the web tracking code

1. The Google Analytics tracking code executes JavaScript asynchronously, meaning that the JavaScript runs in the background while the browser performs other tasks.

Mobile app data collection

• Using the Google Analytics mobile SDKs

1. Instead of using JavaScript to collect data like you do on a website, youll use an SDK, or Software Development Kit, to collect data from your mobile app. 

• Dispatching

1. When a user navigates through an app, the Google Analytics SDK stores the hits locally on the device and then sends them to your Google Analytics account later in a batch process called dispatching.
2. For these reasons, the SDKs automatically dispatch hits every 30 minutes for Android devices and every two minutes for iOS devices, 

The mobile SDKs provide a simple way to track user activity from an app, and collect most of the data you’ll need without any customization. But keep in mind, there are many ways to modify your code to collect additional information about your users, their sessions and their interactions with your app.

Measurement Protocol data collection
what if you want to collect data from some other kind of device? For example, you might want to track a point-of-sale system or user activity on a kiosk.

• Collecting and sending data with the Measurement Protocol

1. For instance, let’s say we want to collect data from a kiosk. Here’s a sample hit that will track when a user views a screen on the kiosk:
2. http://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UA-XXXX-Y&cid=555&sr=800x600&t=pageview&dh=mydemo.com&dp=/home&dt=homepage
3. Notice there is a parameter in the hit that contains the screen resolution. This particular parameter will become the dimension Screen Resolution during processing. 

With the Measurement Protocol, you can use Google Analytics to collect data from any kind of device.


Unit 3 - Processing & Configuration
Processing & configuration overview

Processing data and applying your configuration settings

1. Google Analytics organizes the hits you’ve collected into users and sessions.
2. data from other sources can be joined with data collected via the tracking code. For example, you can configure Google Analytics to import data from Google AdWords, Google AdSense or Google Webmaster Tools. 
3. Google Analytics processing will modify your data according to any configuration rules you’ve added. 
4. the data goes through a process called “aggregation.” 

Understanding how Google Analytics transforms raw data during processing, and how your configuration settings can control what happens during processing, will help you better interpret and manage the data in your reports.

Processing hits into sessions & users

• How hits are organized by users

1. Google Analytics creates a random, unique ID that is associated with the device. Each unique ID is considered to be a unique user in Google Analytics.
2. It’s possible for these IDs to get reset or erased. This happens if a user clears their cookies in a web browser, or uninstalls and then reinstalls a mobile app.

• How hits are organized into sessions

1. A session in Google Analytics is a collection of interactions, or hits, from a specific user during a defined period of time.
2. By default, a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. 

Users and sessions are a critical part of the digital analytics data model. All of the reports you see in Google Analytics depend on this model to organize the data.

Importing data into Google Analytics
The most common way to get data into Google Analytics is through your tracking code, but you can also add data from other sources.

• Importing data into Google Analytics

• Account linking

You can link various Google products directly to Google Analytics via your account settings. This includes:

1. Google AdWords
2. Google AdSense
3. Google Webmaster Tools

• Data Import

There are two ways to import data into Google Analytics:

(1). Dimension Widening

1. if you’re a publisher you might want to segment your data based on the author and topic of your online articles. 
2. With Dimension Widening, you could import author and topic as new dimensions for your content pages. You could use each article’s page URL as the “key” that links the new data to your existing Google Analytics data. 
3. You can add data using Dimension Widening either by uploading a file or by using the Google Analytics APIs. Uploading a file, like a spreadsheet or .CSV, is easy, but it can be time consuming if you need add data often. To save time, you can build a program that uses the APIs to automatically send data into Google Analytics on a regular basis.

(2). Cost Data Import

1. You use this feature specifically to add data that shows the amount of money you spent on your non-Google advertising. Importing cost data lets Google Analytics calculate the return-on-investment of your non-Google ads.

Although you’ll collect most of your data using the tracking code, account linking and data import are two powerful ways to add more context to your Google Analytics data. By choosing the right data sources to link or import into Google Analytics, you can better measure the performance of your business.

Transforming & aggregating data

• The role of configuration settings during processing

1. including data, excluding data, or modifying how data appears in a reporting View
2. Filters, Goals, and Grouping.

• Common configuration settings: Filters

1. Filters provide a flexible way you can modify the data within each view.
2. Example, create a filter to exclude traffic from a particular IP address or to convert messy page URLs into readable text.

• Common configuration settings: Goals

1. Goals let you specify which pageviews, screen views or other hits should be used to calculate conversions. 

• Common configuration settings: Channel Grouping and Content Grouping

1. aggregate certain pieces of data together so you can analyze the collective performance.
2. You can create two types of groups in Google Analytics: Channel groups and Content groups.
3. A Channel Group is a collection of common marketing activities. For example, Display Advertising, Social media, Email marketing, and Paid Search are four common channel groups that are each a roll-up of several marketing activities.
4. Content Groups are like Channel Groups, except you use them to create and analyze a collection of content. 

• Data aggregation

1. During aggregation, Google Analytics creates and organizes your report dimensions into tables, called aggregate tables. 

Unit 4 - Reporting

Reporting overview

• All Google Analytics reports are based on different combinations of dimensions and metrics. 
• In addition to the reporting interface, you can use an API, or an Application Programming Interface, to extract your data directly from Google Analytics.
• Most of the time, when you request data from the reporting interface or the APIs you’ll receive your data almost immediately. But in some cases, where you request complex data, Google Analytics uses a process called sampling.

Building reports with dimensions & metrics
Understand how metrics and dimensions are combined to build reports and which dimensions and metrics can be used together

• Dimensions in Google Analytics

1. a dimension of a session is the traffic source that brought the user to your site.

• Metrics in Google Analytics

1. Metrics are the quantitative measurements of your data. They count how often things happen, like the total number of users on a website or app. 

• Combining dimensions and metrics in reports

1. Most commonly, you’ll see dimensions and metrics reported in a table, with the first column containing the values for one particular dimension, and the rest of the columns displaying the corresponding metrics.

The reporting APIs

• To use the reporting APIs, you have to build your own application. This application needs to be able to write and send a query to the reporting API. The API uses the query to retrieve data from the aggregate tables, and then sends a response back to your application containing the data that was requested.
• the reporting APIs give you the power to automate and streamline complex reporting tasks for your business.

Report sampling

• When does sampling happen?
• Google Analytics checks to see how many sessions should be included in your request. If the number of sessions is small enough, Google Analytics can calculate the data for your request using all of the sessions. If the number of sessions is too large, Google Analytics uses a sample to fulfill the request
• Adjusting the sample size
• The sampling limit
• Google Analytics sets a maximum number of sessions that can be used to calculate your reports. If you go over that limit, your data gets sampled.

Final Assessment