Google Analytics Courses

Between the google analytics platform principles course and the google analytics fundamentals course I was able to obtain some new knowledge and freshen up on some of the things we had gone over previously. Taking these two courses made me understand and appreciate how you can get the most of google analytics. I found it particularly interesting to study the way google analytics collects and transforms data while processing it. From raw collection, to database tables and organizing hits it provides a tremendous amount of feedback and furthermore shows the importance of using this tool. I also liked that you can configure your specific settings for how that data appears when you are viewing it. Through channel groupings, filters, and goals the google analytics user is able to adapt the tool to their tailored needs and get the most use out of it. There were a ton of new concepts and valuable points made in the two courses and I believe they have helped me further understand our course concepts. 

Google Analytics

The first concept from this week that I would like to cover is “cookies”. Cookies are small files that are stored and tailor web pages for users to be used from one page to the next. With cookies enabled they are constantly monitoring our needs and updating our resources for us. For instance an example of cookies is the storage of your username on your Gmail account. There are two main types of cookies including first party cookies and third party cookies. Google analytics uses first party cookies to track users and develop further analysis from there users activity. Cookies can be a very complicated concept for someone to understand because of their many varieties and uses. I believe this is an important concept to understand because we have all heard of cookies before but many of us, including myself, have no idea of how they actually work. Cookies surround and build the internet harmlessly every day, even when we don’t realize it. While cookies seem to create a lot of data I wonder if in some cases they are creating too much data for tracking? From our reading this week it seems as if cookies can become almost an overload of information in some circumstances.

The second concept I would like to discuss from our reading this week is the tracking ability of Google analytics. As I mentioned above tracking user information can be very complicated and overwhelming. Google analytics allows its users to use advanced tracking through its customization techniques. This customization includes being able to track items such as page category, Ecommerce, interactive objects, user-provided data, and dynamic page content. Because there are so many trackable items in Google analytics there are multiple types of categories most commonly known as direct, referral, or organic as the default set of categories. There are also two ways to track campaigns, you can use the auto method of linking your adwords accounts or by manually tagging you can also tag adwords links. The concepts included in tracking with Google analytics are pertinent because of how they can affect your campaigns. results. Proper techniques in the above areas and dedication to your tracking is what can make or break the results of your campaign and should not be taken lightly.

The most important skill set I learned from this week’s reading includes the above two topics, that being how and why it is important to use Google analytics. The above two concepts are just two pieces of the puzzle that Google analytics can offer to users looking to track and have a better understanding of their user activity. The skill of using Google analytics has offered many companies the safekeeping over the campaigns that they have been looking for. In addition I find the skill of knowing how to operate and control Google analytics to be most important from this week because our campaigns will be starting shortly. I would caution that with Google analytics comes many features that the reader may not be used to and should thus do as much research as possible before implementing these techniques. Does anyone else plan to use Google analytics to help get the most success from their campaign?

This week’s material has been the hardest for me to comprehend so far in the course. We had many subjects and a variety of articles presented to us this week which have introduced a whole new meaning to the analytics offered to users. I found the material especially associated with the quiz to be very heavy this week and full of challenging concepts. After learning more about Google analytics I believe I need to do even more research and possibly watch some YouTube videos on the features in order to grasp its techniques for our campaign use. If as a group we are able to understand Google analytics properly I believe it will have a positive outlook for our campaign and allow us to get the most out of our advertising for our client. It was a great two weeks for global marketing, many challenges were presented to me and I believe once we are able to start out campaigns because of those challenges this week we will be better prepared.