Today we will be going really in-depth with Google Analytics. I’m sure most of you have used Google Analytics before, but how many of you have really taken the time to learn all the small details and explored all the different features and data you can collect in it? There’s a surprising amount of information you can derive from the often-overlooked reports and analytics. So with that in mind, let’s get into it.
Cohort Analysis
One of the more niche features of Google Analytics is the Cohort Analysis. It is included within the Audience tab to the side. Cohort analysis is used for comparing different cohorts with each other and seeing how their behaviour differs regarding a wide range of metrics. Cohorts are divided into the acquisition date, meaning that everyone that visited your website yesterday is a single cohort, and those that visited today are another one. This is in the case that the cohort size is set by day, but you can choose to change this to ‘by week’ or ‘by month’ if you would like. So what can we use cohort analysis for?
As a marketer, one of the biggest aspects of your job will be to implement different strategies for your clients. You will have to experiment with what worked, and what didn’t for each iteration of the campaign that was in effect. Often, marketers will painstakingly analyse all types of different data sets such as traffic and bounce rate to try and come up with an answer to how effective a campaign was relative to its predecessor. This is where cohort analysis comes in. Using cohort analysis, you can isolate the impact of a specific campaign or a small change made to the website to compare how the cohort will react, relative to cohorts for other days. This removes the need for long-lasting and time-consuming campaigns which could take hundreds of dollars and weeks to complete. And it’s not just campaigning you can analyse the effectiveness of – website redesigns, target audiences, sales promotions, and ad content can all be changed short-term to quickly understand how users are reacting to these changes.
Cohort Analysis Limitations
However, there are several limitations of a cohort analysis. One is that Google may not be able to track your audience’s activity if they clear their cookies or change their devices. But overall, the benefits vastly outweigh the limitations, so it’s a great tool that you should definitely put to use. So let’s have a look at how it works
So this is the screen that you will see on the page. As you can see, the Cohort Type, Size, Metric and Date Range are at the top which you can alter. From there, the graph below will change. The column is segmented into different days and the rows represent different cohorts – groups of people that visited the website on different days. With this, we can see that if we make a change to the website, whether or not it affected the metric we are measuring among the cohort which experienced this change.
Behaviour Tab
Another section that is often left unexplored is the whole behaviour tab. However, there’s a wealth of knowledge that can be derived from this section to understand your audience by how they’re browsing your website. For example, the behaviour flow section shows a graphic of the different combinations of interactions that audiences perform within your website. Many will enter through the homepage, jump from one page to another, and eventually leave. Some may enter the website through the “contact us” page, then leave straight away.
If your end goal is for your audience to call your business for a quote or an expression of interest, you would hopefully see most of the behaviour flow leading to the “contact” page, where the interaction will likely end there. However, if this is not the case, you can derive that you may not be enticing the customer enough to do so. This could be changed by adding more calls to action within your content and pages, amongst other methods.
Well, that’s all for today. Look forward to part two of this video, where we will be exploring how to analyse the Site Search function, as well as learning to read Conversion Reports. Thank you all for listening.
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