UPDATED Google Analytics workshop by Brian Alpert and Elena Villaespesa, presented on 4/6/16, at Museums and the Web 2016, Los Angeles, California.

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Analytics Tune Up!
Insights and methods to achieve a manageable
approach to Google Analytics
Museums and the Web 2016
Brian Alpert & Elena Villaespesa

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Our Workshop Today
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• Analytics process
• GA Basics
• Culture of Analytics
• Dashboards
• Exercise!
• Break (30 mins - 10:30-11am)
• New-ish features
• Automation
• Migrating to Universal Analytics
• Google Tag Manager
• Q&A

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Usage of Google Analytics

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Google Analytics features

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Web analytics is often about:
“So What?”
Getty Images

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What web analytics is really about:

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Your goal: use data to tell a story
 What was happening.
 What it meant.
 What you did.
 What’s happening
now.
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forbes.com

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There is a systematic, step-by-step process
 Articulate your program’s goals.
 Decide strategies to achieve
those goals.
 Decide tactics to pursue the
strategies.
 Decide what and how to measure
to validate the tactics.
 Benchmark to get a sense of
what’s normal.
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homedit.com

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Articulate specific goals
 Express what you’re trying to
accomplish.
 Make high-level goals more
specific:
 “Increase influence” - too broad.
 “Become the definitive source on
Smithsonian history” - more specific.
 Specificity makes it easier to
identify strategies and tactics.
 Not too many!
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It’s a Wonderful Life
Start the conversation! Articulate
goals & next steps on your own;
work with management to finalize.

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Determine strategies & tactics
 Strategies – the plans you make to achieve the goals.
 Employing social media is a strategy.
 Tactics – the things you do to advance the strategy.
 Producing a specific type of content is a tactic.
 Individual channels (facebook, twitter) are tactics.
 Per the example:
 Goal: “Become the definitive source on Smithsonian history.”
 Strategy: Increase engagement with history of the Smithsonian
content.
 Tactic: Make SI-history content more findable and measureable.
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Decide how to measure your tactics
 Choose measurements to learn
if your tactics are succeeding.
 Choose a few measurements.
 Trend them over time.
 Per the example:
 Strategy: increase engagement with
SI history website content.
 Tactic: make website history
content more findable /
measureable.
 Make a “history-content” segment
and measure for engagement:
 Visit frequency
 Visit depth
 Bounce rate
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History-
related visits
All
visits
“Deep history visits” were 94% higher!

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You can’t set targets w/o benchmarks
 You need at least six months of
data.
 Data is seasonal.
 Depends on your traffic.
 Balance targets with factors
beyond your control:
 Are the improvements you’re
seeking difficult to achieve?
 How much resources will you have
to implement tactics?
Drinks Enthusiast

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Keep it simple!
 Don’t do too much!
 Minimize the number of
measurements.
 If they turn-out to be
inconclusive, change up.
 It’s an ongoing process!
arvinddevalia.com

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Army Times
GOOGLE ANALYTICS Basics

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GA Basics
 The most basic thing
 A couple traps to avoid
 GA in your world
Army Times

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 Dimensions describe the
data, or an attribute of the
user (“what”):
 Traffic source
 City
 Page
 Metrics measure the data
(“how many”, “how long”):
 Sessions
 Bounce rate
 Time on page
 Lunametrics
 Optimizesmart
 Dimensions & Metrics Explorer
(Google)
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Optimizesmart
Dimensions Metrics
GA’s familiar
color-coding
helps you
keep track of
Dimensions
and Metrics.
The most basic thing
Dimensions and Metrics

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Trap-to-avoid #1
“What is the Conversion Rate for that page?”
 Dimensions and
Metrics should be
matched.
 Mismatching of
hit- and session-
level metrics and
dimensions is
becoming more
commonplace.
 It’s possible (esp.
in custom reports)
to combine data
in ways that look
reasonable…
 …but are not.
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Google Analytics Academy
 Align Hits, Sessions, Metrics, Dimensions! (Avinash Kaushik)
 Hits, Sessions & Users: Understanding Digital Analytics Data (Cutroni)
 Difference between Entrances and Sessions (Google)
 Online-behavior.com
 Webanalyticsworld.net
 Dimensions and Metrics Explorer (Google)

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 Create a view that has no
filtering of any kind.
 Leave it alone – it is protection
against unintended
consequences.
 GA filters are powerful, but
irrevocable – if your data is
hosed by a bad or misapplied
filter you are out of luck.
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Marquette Educator
An add’l ‘playground’ view is
a good idea too, to test those
new filters (and anything else)
Trap-to-avoid #2
You need an unfiltered backup view

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 Improve your program?
 Yes! Good for you!
 Satisfy your boss with monthly
Big Numbers?
 Sure. It is what it is.
 Validate (or not) something
you’ve already done.
 Um, maybe.
Wikipedia
GA in your world
How can Google Analytics HELP?

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 Under Audience >> Behavior
 Frequency
 Recency
 Page Depth (“Engagement”)
 “New vs. Returning” (e-nor post)
 Use with advanced segments.
 Traffic from search
 Traffic from mobile
 Do not solely rely on ‘time on site’
(“Engagement”) or ‘time on page.’
 Due to technical issues
 Kaushik: “unworthy” metrics
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Improve your program!
Metrics as proxies for user engagement

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Improve your program!
Segmentation: GA’s most powerful feature?
 Analyze subsets of traffic.
 Search engine visits
 Social media visits
 Demographics
 Import expert-made
segments from the “Gallery”!
 Google Blog
 Kissmetrics Overview
 Examples (Cutroni)
 Examples (Kaushik)
Segments are accessed
from this pull-down arrow.

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 Create your own reports.
 Import expert-made
custom reports from the
“Gallery”!
 Reports can be scheduled
for delivery via email.
 Create and manage Custom
Reports (Google)
 12 Awesome Custom Reports
Created by the Experts
(Kissmetrics)
 3 Awesome, Downloadable,
Custom Web Analytics Reports
(Kaushik)
 5 Google Analytics Custom Reports
FTW! (Kaushik)
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Create and access
Custom Reports from
the ‘Customization’ tab.
Improve your program!
Custom Reports can save you time & effort
Careful! Custom Reports make it easier to
mismatch dimensions and metrics!

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 A conversion is any measureable behavior
with an implicitly (or explicitly) higher value.
 You learn more by studying conversion rates.
 Typical conversion goals:
 Destination (ex: thanks.html)
 Duration (ex: 5 minutes or more)
 Pages/Screens per session (ex: 3 pages)
 Event (download PDF, play video)
 REQUIRES CODE
 Even if you’re not selling stuff, you should add
a “value” to an Event and a completed goal.
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Kaushik: re goals and
goal value: “If we don't
have those two we are
not really doing analytics,
we are wasting Earth's
oxygen supply.”
Improve your program!
Deeper understanding with Conversion Goals

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 More sophisticated Goals typically involve creating “Events”:
 External links
 Sign-ups, form submissions
 Downloads
 Many types of conversion goals
 To use Events:
 Define and categorize your events.
 Configure and add the javascript code, usually right in the link (not always).
 Many social-share widgets automatically add Events.
 Google Analytics Event Organizer (Michelle Herman)
 The Complete Google Analytics Event Tracking Guide Plus 10 Amazing
Examples (old code, good examples)
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Improve your program!
‘Event Tracking’ is super-important

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 No actionable data
 Sessions (previously Visits)
 Users (previously Visitors)
 Pages (a.k.a. Pageviews)
 Establish scope / context.
 Measure growth / acquisition.
 You can’t improve your site by
measuring these.
 Reporting them out of context can be
misleading.
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Satisfy your boss!
The inevitability of “Quantity of Stuff”
Source: Occam's Razor
“All data in
aggregate is crap.”

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 AAA wanted to make their
content more accessible to
younger students.
 They worked with Wikipedia
to expand their offerings.
 We compared segments of
Wikipedia visitors to other
visitors.
 Wiki-referred visitors were
increasingly less likely to
(need to) visit the AAA site
many times.
 This contrasts with the stable
trend of all visits.
All visits, high
frequency
Wikipedia visits,
high frequency
Validation!
Archives ofAmericanArt Wikipedia Case Study

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Here is the bottom line!
 Your measurements validate your
tactics (or not).
 To work the process and improve
your site, you need meaningful data:
 Engagement metrics
 Segments
 Goal completion / Conversion rates
 A-B tests
 Qualitative data (surveys)
 If your goal is purely audience
acquisition, you can use “quantity-of-
stuff” metrics to tell your story.
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NY Daily News

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Analytics culture

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Dashboard and data visualization tools
• Data wrapper
• Google charts
• Raw
• Picktochart
• Canva
• Infogram
• Venngage
• Easelly
• Google Analytics apps
• Tableau
• Ducksboard
• Geckoboard
• Chartio
• Dash This
• Silk
• Power BI

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Embedding evaluation in the digital
production processes

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Digital Analytics Dashboard

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Building a dashboard
• Selection of metrics
• Type of dashboard: strategic, tactical, operational
• Automation and update process
• Share options (internal / external dashboard)
• Frequency of updates (real time, weekly, monthly, snapshot of the
year)
• Data sources (Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics,
Surveys…)
• API available?
• Type of widgets (number, graphs, text, real time feed, embeds…)
• User interface
• Design and brand

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Dashboard examples in museums

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Smithsonian Dashboard

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Google Analytics dashboards
Examples: Overview, Ecommerce, Mobile, Social Media,
SEO, PPC, Content, Online Collection, Real Time
dashboard

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Views (profiles) - Filtering your traffic
- Main profile
- Main profile showing full URLs (useful for microsites,
subdomains)
- Specific website section (e.g. Online Collection, Blog,
Visit, microsite…)
- Users using your website at the museum (filter via IP
address of the Wi-Fi)
- Mobile, Tablet, Desktop traffic
- SEO (filter organic traffic only)

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How to create a GA dashboard

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Adding widgets

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Adding widgets from the GA reports

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Google Analytics Solutions Gallery

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Exercise: Create your own dashboard

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Share your dashboard
Share the template or give access
to the whole team > Shared
dashboards
Schedule emails to send the
dashboard in PDF format

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Coffee Break – 30 Minutes
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New(ish), Game-Changing Features
Source: Keith Srakocic, AP
Virginiasports.com

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Demographics and Interests Reports
 Demographics
 Age (traffic by age ranges)
 Gender (traffic by gender)
 Interests – behavior by
 Affinity Categories
 In-Market Categories
 Other Categories
 No PII is tracked!
 You have to add a line of code to your pages
 You have to modify your privacy policy
 https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2799357

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Insights from Demographics and Interests Reports
 Cyclic Defrost is an online magazine that covers independent electronic music,
avant-rock, experimental sound art, leftfield hip hop and everything in between.
 The largest visitor segment is 25-34 year-olds.
 But… older visitors (45-54) engage the content at a higher rate.
Avg. Visit DurationVisits

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Benchmarking Reports!
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 Compare your site to others in the same
category (or across categories).
 Compare by:
 Channels (traffic sources)
 Location
 Devices
 How to find it:
 Search box, or:
 Audience  Benchmarking
 Use top left pull-down; click ‘Reference’
 Scroll down to ‘Libraries & Museums’
 Benchmarking Reports (Google)

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User segments are a big step forward
 “A user is the tool’s best-guess of an
anonymous person.”
 User segments represent all data
associated with a user.
 I.E., all session data the user generated
during the timeframe.
 Built-in segments:
 Single-visit users
 Multi-visit users
 Create your own:
 "Users in Massachusetts who spent > $100." User segment: facebook
mobile users who stayed
>30 seconds.

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There are various types of User Segments
 Under
 Demographics
 Traffic Sources
 Ecommerce
 Conditions
 Sequences
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Google’s “Analytics Academy”
 Free video-based courses
 Digital Analytics
Fundamentals
 Google Analytics Platform
Principles
 Ecommerce Analytics: From
Data to Decisions
 Mobile App Analytics
Fundamentals
 Google Tag Manager
Fundamentals
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analyticsacademy.withgoogle.com

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Boston Dynamics
Automation

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Supermetrics
 Commercial Excel add-on.
 Easy-to-use and customize.
 Exceptional charting capabilities.
 Schedule reports to run
automatically.
 14 days free.
 $348 per year.
 Limited documentation and
support.
 Free version for Google
Sheets now available.
http://supermetrics.com

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Supermetrics Custom Dashboard
 The two spreadsheets work
together.
 ‘Engagement’ oriented metrics
 Visit Frequency
 Visit Length
 Visit Depth
 New vs. Returning Visits
 Bounce Rate
 Conversion Rate
 Search Engines
 A foundation to make data
actionable
 “Key Trends and Insights”
 “Impact on Site/Museum”
 “Steps Being Taken”
The easily updated, trended data is
what makes the dashboard powerful.

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All Visits data tells a nice story...
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Minimal
frequency group
(purple)
downward trend
indicates
improving content
engagement
High frequency
group (blue)
upward trend
indicates same
Impact of this Data on the Site or Program
• This good-looking chart may indicate high content engagement and/or perceived value
• This data may correlate to increasing conversion behaviors
Acting on this Data
• Identify moderate and high loyalty pages as a means of duplicating, or improving others
• Examining conversion behaviors of these segments may yield add'l insights
• Correlating high bounce rate pages to one-time visits may yield add'l insights
• Test different content types in an attempt to move 'minimal' visitors into 'moderate' group
Key Trends
and Insights

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This Impact of this Data on the Site or Program
• Organic search listings are driving poorly-targeted traffic
• Will result in decreased organic search performance over time
Acting on this Data
• Refocus title tags, meta-description tags and page content for important pages
• Perform link analysis to see where other SEO improvements can be made
Minimal
frequency group
upward trend
indicates organic
listings are not
appropriately
targeted
Moderate
frequency group
downward trend
indicates same
High frequency
group trending
slightly downward,
in contrast to
previous chart’s
upward slope
Key Trends
and Insights
…But applying segmentation tells a different story

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Google Sheets Spreadsheet Add-on
 Create (simple) dashboards
and visualizations.
 Being well-versed in Google
Sheets’ data manipulation
features helps a lot.
 Schedule reports to run
automatically.
 Embed visualizations on
websites with automatic
refresh!
 Introductory video
 ‘Building a Dashboard’ video
 Google Group
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Google Sheets spreadsheet add-on

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Analytics Edge Excel Add-on
 Wizard-driven interface is clean
and (relatively) intuitive.
 Auto-refresh and schedule reports.
 Import data from text files,
worksheets or other workbooks
 Support via online community.
 Free and paid versions:
 Free Social Shares connector.
 More features - $6/month.
 Optional connectors - $4/month.
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http://www.analyticsedge.com

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Resources
 Google Analytics Academy
 Google Analytics Blog
 Absolute Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics (moz.com)
 Avinash Kaushik’s “Occam’s Razor”
 Analytics Talk (Justin Cutroni)
 Cardinal Path Training
 Kissmetrics
 Lunametrics blog
 Lunametrics Training
 Universal Analytics Upgrade Guide
 Supermetrics Data Grabber
 Automate Analytics (Supermetrics) Google Group
 Analytics Edge
 Discover the Google Analytics Platform (advanced tools)
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Universal Analytics

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Universal Analytics
• Universal Analytics is the latest version of Google Analytics. It
replaces the asynchronous version (classic analytics)
• New features are only being developed for the new version
(Enhanced ecommerce, integrations of offline transactions, users
tracking across devices, new options for custom dimensions…)
• Google will disconnect the classic analytics but the date has not been
announced yet.
• To upgrade:
– Recommendation: use Google Tag Manager and run both codes in
parallel
– Change the GA code
– Update ecommerce, event tracking
Universal Analytics upgrade center
https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/upgrade/#upgrade-guides

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Google Tag Manager usage

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Google Tag Manager
• Tags: Google Analytics, third party tags, custom
html tags
• Trigger: when and where to activate the tag (e.g.
PDF download, purchase a product, share on
social media)
• Variables: information obtained from the web
page (e.g. URL, PDF clicked, element clicked,
page shared…)

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Google Tag Manager - New Tag

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Google Tag Manager - Tracking downloads
(tag)

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Google Tag Manager - Tracking downloads
(trigger)

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Google Tag Manager - Debugging tool

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Google Tag Assistant

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Google Tag Assistant Recordings

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Omnibug: web metrics debugging tool

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LunaMetrics - GTM recipes

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Questions?

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Filter-out internal-traffic
 If you want to exclude visitors surfing from within your network
 Account >> Admin >> View >> Filters >> +New Filter >> External Traffic Only
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Use the ‘Campaign URL Builder’
 For more granular data about
specific Campaigns:
 Email Campaigns
 Social Media
 Banners
 Anything that uses a URL-based click-to
format
 Like Events, the work is up front, in
the categorization:
 Campaign Source
 (referrer: google, citysearch,
newsletter4)
 Campaign Medium
 (marketing medium: cpc, banner,
email)
 Campaign Term
 (identify the paid keywords)
 Campaign Content
 (use to differentiate ads)
 Campaign Name
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URL Builder (Google)
How To Use UTM Parameters (Kissmetrics)
URL Builder for GA (Raventools)

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Thanks!
 @balpert
 @elenustika