Platform Principles: Unit 1. The Platform Components

Google Analytics Platform Principles

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Prerequisites
If you’re new to Google Analytics and haven’t yet taken the Digital Analytics Fundamentals course, we recommend completing it before getting started with this course.

Course Instructor
This course is taught by Justin Cutroni, Digital Analytics Advocate at Google.

Analytics Academy

Platform Principles: Course Overview

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Introduction

Hi, and welcome! My name is Justin Cutroni and I’ll be your instructor throughout this course. In my role as a Digital Analytics Evangelist at Google, I try to help people understand how important it is to make digital analytics an integral part of their business.

What this course is about

In this course, we’re going to cover the principles of the Google Analytics platform. You’ll learn what the different components of the platform are, and how they all work together. When you know how Google Analytics works, you’ll be able to make informed decisions about how to collect the data you need. And, understanding the platform will help you better interpret and analyze your data since you’ll know where the data came from, and why it looks the way it does in your reports.

We’ll start this course by reviewing the structure of a Google Analytics account, and we’ll introduce you to the Google Analytics data model. From there, we’ll focus on the four components of the platform:

• Collection
• Processing
• Configuration
• Reporting

We’ll explore how each of these components allows you to control the quantity and quality of the data you collect.

Preparing for this course

If you’re new to Google Analytics, we suggest you check out the Digital Analytics Fundamentals course before getting started. It’ll give you an overview of important analytics concepts, terminology and best practices, some of which we’ll explore in greater depth in this course.

Conclusion

We hope this course helps you make better decisions when it’s time to set up or change your Google Analytics implementation. And that with this information, you can better understand how to use Google Analytics to collect and analyze digital data to improve your business. We’re really excited to bring you this course. Let’s get started.

Analytics Academy

Platform Principles: The Platform Components

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Introduction

With Google Analytics, you can collect and analyze data across a variety of devices and digital environments. Most organizations use Google Analytics to get a better understanding of how their customers find and interact with websites and mobile apps, but Analytics can be used to measure behavior on other devices like game consoles, ticket kiosks, and even appliances. You can even use Google Analytics in really creative ways to collect “offline” business data, like purchases that happen in your retail stores, as long as you have an accurate way of collecting and sending that data to your Analytics account.

In this lesson, we’re going to give you an overview of how Google Analytics works to collect data from various environments. We’ll define the different parts of the Analytics platform, and talk about how the data gets from the tracking code into your reports. This lesson will provide the foundation you need to understand the tools you’ll eventually use to set up Google Analytics.

The four components of the Google Analytics platform

When we talk about the platform, we’re referring to the technology that makes Google Analytics work, and not just the data and tools you see in your account.

There are four main parts of the Google Analytics platform:

• Collection
• Configuration
• Processing
• Reporting

All four parts work together to help you gather, customize and analyze your data.

Collection

Let’s take a look at collection first. Collection is all about getting data into your Google Analytics account.

To collect data, you need to add Google Analytics code to your website, mobile app or other digital environment you want to measure. This tracking code provides a set of instructions to Google Analytics, telling it which user interactions it should pay attention to and which data it should collect. The way the data is collected depends on the environment you want to track.

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.

Each time the tracking code is triggered by a user’s behavior, like when the user loads a page on a website or a screen in a mobile app, Google Analytics records that activity. First, the tracking code collects information about each activity, like the title of the page viewed. Then this data is packaged up in what we call a “hit”. Once the hit has been created it is sent to Google’s servers for the next step -- data processing.

Processing & Configuration

During data processing, Google Analytics transforms the raw data from collection using the settings in your Google Analytics account. These settings, also known as the configuration, help you align the data more closely with your measurement plan and business objectives.  

For example, you could set up something called a Filter that tells Google Analytics to remove any data from your own employees. During processing Google Analytics would then filter out all of the hits from your employees, so that this data wouldn’t be used for your report calculations.

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. It’s during the processing stage that Google Analytics then merges all of these data sources to create the reports you eventually see in your account.

It’s important to note that once your data has been processed, it can not be changed. For example, if you set a filter to exclude data from your employees, that data will be permanently removed from your reports and can’t be recovered at a later date.

Reporting

After Google Analytics has finished processing, you can access and analyze your data using the reporting interface, which includes easy-to-use reporting tools and data visualizations. It’s also possible to systematically access your data using the Google Analytics Core Reporting API. Using the API you can build your own reporting tools or extract your data directly into third-party reporting tools.

Conclusion

Throughout the rest of this course, we will dive deeper into key topics about collection, configuration, processing and reporting. Having a comprehensive understanding of each of these platform components will help you better understand the data you see in Google Analytics. It will also prepare you for more advanced topics about how you can customize your data.

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Analytics Academy

Platform Principles: The Data Model

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Introduction

Most digital analytics tools, including Google Analytics, use a simple model to organize the data you collect. There are three components to this data model -- users, sessions and interactions. A user is a visitor to your website or app, a session is the time they spend there, and an interaction is what they do while they’re there. You can think of users, sessions and interactions as a hierarchy. Let’s talk through the details of this hierarchy using the analogy of a restaurant.

Users (visitors) and sessions (visits) in Google Analytics

Restaurants have many customers, some that visit for just one meal, and some that visit regularly. During each visit, a person can have one or more interactions with the restaurant staff. A customer that checks in with the host and leaves right away because no tables are available has just one interaction during that visit. In another visit, they may check in, get seated, order dinner, and pay the bill. This visit has four interactions.

Like a restaurant, your website or mobile app also has visitors, or users. Some users visit just one time, and some visit multiple times. In Google Analytics, we refer to each visit as a session. Later in this course, we’ll talk in greater detail about how Google Analytics identifies the same user across multiple sessions. But for now, it’s important to remember two things:

• First, there is a relationship between users and sessions, like the relationship between restaurant customers and their visits.
• Second, Google Analytics can recognize returning users from multiple sessions over time - just like a restaurant staff recognizes its regular customers.

Sessions (visits) and interactions in Google Analytics

A visit to a restaurant is made up of interactions, like ordering a meal and paying the bill. Similarly, a website or app session is made up of individual interactions.

For example, a user might visit your homepage and then leave right away. This session would have one interaction -- a page view. In another session, a user might visit your homepage, watch a video, and make a purchase. That session includes three interactions.

In Google Analytics, we call each individual interaction within a session a “hit.” There are different types of hits -- for example, pageviews, events and transactions. Each one is designed to collect a different type of data.

Conclusion

You can now see that each interaction that Google Analytics tracks belongs to a session, and each session is associated with a user. We’ll revisit the three components of the data model -- users, sessions, and interactions -- as we discuss the Google Analytics platform throughout this course.

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