Tracking User Site Engagement in Google Analytics

Name: Tracking User Site Engagement in Google Analytics
Author: Christopher Pittman

Learn the some of the advanced topics and techniques available for Google analytics 4

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Course: On-Demand

Welcome to introduction to user engagement. Google will define user engagement as any user action with your website or app. For example, content publisher engagement may be scrolling down a page slowly indicating that the user is reading the page versus clicking to the bottom to see the length of the article. For an e-commerce site, engagement may be viewing product details, clicking through the funnel, and going to purchase, also looking at things like on page time. For a banking app, engagement may be the ability to check an account balance. For a college site, engagement may be watching an informational video. So that's a lot into Google's definition of engagement. It actually breaks down quite a few examples, but really basically it's any action or activity that's going to lead to a user solving their individual problem that that website was designed to serve, is basically what it is. So, let's get into the fact that it's important to note that engagement is not new to Google Analytics, that it has always existed in past forms of Google Analytics, and that it's been used heavily to rank websites. Think about if you are a search engine, how do you determine what websites are solving user problems or providing them with engaging content, or even helping them find and buy items? All of these things are engagement and are important for the website rankings. How engagement works in Google Analytics 4 is by tracking key factors that are indicators of someone enjoying the content or website and finding it useful. Engagement on each site will look a little bit different. Think about the major differences between a news website with long blogs or a small e-commerce store. I think you can understand the engagement on the news blog would be time on site, as a primary factor to check with an e-commerce store, we're going to be looking at conversion funnels and those kind of pieces. Looking at the Overview tab here in Google Analytics 4, and go to Engagement, the reporting snapshot actually gives us users and new users. And this is going to give us a quick overview as to if we're growing, if we're attracting new users, or if we're just attracting existing users. Time on site on Google Tracks, this is average engagement time, so it's not the mouse sitting in one spot for 30 minutes, all right? So it's tracking actual something's happening on the website, so the average engagement time. All right. So for this example, this is a e-commerce store, I'm gonna go through and talk about a few of the things here under Engagement that Google Analytics tracks by default. An upcoming video, I'll go through and I'll show you some of the custom setup we can do with engagement, and why I prefer that personally over some of the other settings in these default settings in Google Analytics. Okay? So we've got engage time, we've got average sessions, and we've got average session time. We've got views and event counts, we've got active users over time, how many active users have I attracted our pages, and then down here, we've got user stickiness. Okay. If we go to Events and Conversions, you can go through and what events are being tracked, again this is the default Events and Conversions within Google Analytics, and we'll get into this in an upcoming video. But for now, that's the base overview, over Google Analytics and engagement. So to recap, user engagement is used to measure how well a website or webpage meets the visitor's needs, and is measured by a number of factors including time on page, clicks, scrolls, and other website interactions. The Engagement tab in Google Analytics 4 provides key metrics that most websites can use measuring and projecting their marketing efforts, such as time on page, number of users, new country, traffic sources, and with an e-commerce site, you can even track conversions and e-commerce orders. At its core, engagement is a measure of trackable actions on the website and the time it takes to complete these actions. The number of actions taken on a website and how long this takes is used by search engines to determine how well a website is performing at the task of meeting people's needs. This is in turn used to determine how well a website is ranking in most search engines. Meaning that user engagement is a key factor not only in understanding Google Analytics 4, but also for search engine optimization more broadly. This has been a brief overview of engagement and why it is important. I will have more information on engagement including how user engagement is tracked and how to set up a custom dashboard for quick views in an upcoming video.

Advanced Provider : Christopher Pittman 3 Lessons · 22m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Urdu, Chinese

Course Description

Google analytics has been the industry standard for website data monitoring platforms for decades. This course will cover Advanced topics and explore many of the new features of Google Analytics 4. This course introduces the advanced tools available such as creating custom tracking metrics, troubleshooting issues with tags and tracking, and even how to find and correct customer pain points. These lessons will take you step-by-step through advanced options in Google analytics.

What You'll Learn

Define user engagement within Google Analytics
Navigate and interpret the engagement view
Explain the differences between eCommerce and non-eCommerce engagement factors
Create and track engagement as it relates to user funnels
Set up cross-device tracking and meet its requirements
Configure the User Management report

Key Takeaways

The course covers advanced topics and explores new features of Google Analytics 4.
It introduces advanced tools such as creating custom tracking metrics and troubleshooting issues with tags and tracking.
It explains how to find and correct customer pain points.
Lessons walk through advanced options in Google Analytics step by step, including how user engagement is tracked.
Engagement factors differ between eCommerce and non-eCommerce websites.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this course cover?

It covers advanced topics in Google Analytics and explores new features of Google Analytics 4, including creating custom tracking metrics, troubleshooting issues with tags and tracking, and finding and correcting customer pain points.

What will I learn about user engagement?

You will learn how to define user engagement, understand the engagement view, explain the differences between eCommerce and non-eCommerce engagement factors, and create and track engagement as it relates to user funnels.

Does this course cover cross-device tracking?

Yes. It covers the requirements for cross-device tracking and how to set up cross-device tracking.

What skills does this course build?

It builds skills in Google Analytics, usage tracking, user tracking, web analytics, website monitoring, and website visitor tracking.

What lessons are included?

The lessons include User Engagement, How User Engagement is Tracked, and Configure User Management Report.