When it comes to amplifying brands, Google Analytics is huge. It can also supercharge your career.
PowerToFly
's Senior Data and Web Analyst,
Vanina
, dropped gems about the tool during our April 6th webinar, "How Google Analytics Can Get You The Job." She discussed why hiring managers love candidates who understand Google Analytics, why it's so widely used, and how even beginners can dive into the data and feel at home.
If you missed Vanina's talk, you can catch a recording of the webinar below. We've also included answers to the questions asked during her Q&A session.
Q: How can I use Google Analytics to impress a hiring manager in an interview?
Vanina: The best way is to get a
Google Analytics IQ certificate
. Most hiring managers are HR professionals and most likely would not know much about Google Analytics. But your shiny certificate would 'wow' them! If you want to impress your future boss, be sure you know how to create custom reports, dashboards and how to do segments. Having a well-argued opinion about macro and micro conversions for the specific business also helps.
Q: Can anyone use Google Analytics? Do I sign in with a Google account?
Vanina: Yes, everybody can create a free Google Analytics account. You can use any email address. Go to
Google.com/analytics
,
sign in, and follow the instructions. A good overview is
here
.
Q
: What are the most important reports that you should download on a regular basis?
Vanina: That depends on the nature of your business, but every type of company can profit from these reports:
Acquisition > All traffic > Channels (to view where your traffic comes from)
Behavior > Site Content > All Pages (to view the best performing pages on your site)
Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages (to check if some of your Landing pages are having very high bounce rates)
Audience > Overview (to know general site stats plus split new vs returning users)
Q: How can more experienced professionals who are rebranding themselves re-enter the workforce with online classwork in data science? All the job listings I see want five years experience. (New hires seem to go through college placement.)
Vanina: It depends on your current job experience and the positions that you are applying to. A lot of your skills may be transferable for a new position, especially if you were closely working with data before and completed online classes to get a certificate or to broaden your experience. In your cover letter explain that although your certificate is recent, your practical experience is much older. If you are a project manager for example, or a marketer and have worked heavily with data for the past five years, and have several online classes in something like data modeling, it would be easier to switch to a data science career.
If you were an English teacher for 10 years and did two or three online classes in statistics, it would be more difficult to get accepted for a position that requires five years of practical data mining or data science experience. Try building some projects for close friends or NGOs to add to your portfolio, in such case. For example, if a friend has a flower shop and you can give you data on past orders: date, type of flowers, for what occasion, color of flowers, price — you can build a prediction model showing which flowers are more in demand and in which season. This could change the way your friend is ordering and storing flowers and also impress a potential employer.
Q: How does Google Analytics know which companies are your competitors for the benchmark report? How accurate are the numbers?
Vanina: In order to see the benchmark reports you have to allow your company's data to be shared with Google (anonymously). When you open your Google Analytics account you have to specify the industry vertical of your business and your location. Then, Google compares your data to the average data for all companies in this industry vertical, location and similar size site traffic. These are companies that have Google Analytics and have opted in for benchmarking. You can change your comparison by selecting a different industry, location and traffic size. On the right side of the graphic below, you see how many other companies are in the sample that creates the benchmark.
The numbers should be pretty accurate. The only potential issue is whether the companies have correctly assigned their industry vertical. This is really the only area where the model can go wrong. The rest is simply data collection and comparison. Google for sure got it right.
Q: How do you put the cookies on your site to collect this data?
Vanina: You don't need to put cookies on your site. You put a piece of javascript code that goes into the
part of your page source code, just before /. A code that looks like something like this:
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','
https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js
','ga');
ga('create', 'UA-xxxxxxxx-1', 'auto');
ga('send', 'pageview');
This piece of code is unique to your company and once you create your Google Analytics account you can find it here: Admin > Account > Property > Tracking Info > Tracking code. You have to make sure this tracking code is deployed on each page you want to track —
and Google Analytics takes care of the rest!
Q: What kind of training is good to enter this field? Do you recommend any particular path to Google Analytics Certification?
Vanina: Here is how you can get a
Google Analytics IQ certificate
. It's suggested is that you do two online courses before you take the exam. After each video lesson, there is an assignment to complete. All information is in the link provided above. But before you earn the certificate, try Google Analytics yourself! Create an account! Make a blog or a YouTube channel and
connect them to your Google Analytics account
. Start digging into the data. For areas that you do not understand, search for help online. There are tons of great resources on YouTube, for example. Learn by doing!
Q: Can Google Analytics be used on a random site? Can it be used on an existing website?
Vanina: You can use Google Analytics on any site, as long as you have access to the source code of the site and can deploy the Google Analytics tracking code (pixel) in the page source code. You can add it to an existing website, but you need to paste the tracking code into each page that you want tracked and push it live. However, you cannot install the tracking code on your Facebook profile or a competitor's site, unless you have access to their original source code.
Q: For small businesses that want to expand over time, what would be the cost of Google Analytics tool?
Vanina: Everything I displayed in the webinar is based on the free version of Google Analytics. There is a premium version of Google Analytics, but it is targeted to Enterprise clients and costs about $150,000 annually, which is out of reach for many small and mid-range businesses. The difference between the free and the premium version is not really the features, it's the support you get from the Google Analytics team! There are plenty of resources online on how to do your implementation. It would actually be much more economical to hire somebody who knows Google Analytics really well to go over your implementation and audit it —
rather than pay the premium price.
Q: What do you mean by conversions? What are some examples of B2B conversions?
A conversion in Google Analytics is when your customer does an action that you and your business care about (e.g. registers on your site, buys a product you sell). This is something you define for your Google Analytics account yourself. As long as you have a website and people are visiting it, information is sent to your account and Google Analytics does not care if your customers are other businesses or individual clients. In the case of PowerToFly, for example, we work both with businesses (to supply the jobs) and with individuals (to supply the talents). We have conversions/goals defined for both types. Depending on the nature of your B2B, your conversions might be sales transactions, if you sell software subscriptions for business, for example.
Q: Since there is no user consent or agreement prior to collecting information, how secure is user privacy due to Google Analytics?
Vanina: It is very secure! When you create an account in Google Analytics, you agree to its Terms and Conditions. The key is that you are under no circumstances allowed to collect personally identifiable information and send it to Google Analytics! That mean: no names, no addresses, no phone numbers, no Skype names, no email addresses, Social Security Numbers, credit card numbers of your customer should ever make it into Google Analytics! If that happens, your account and all information would be deleted. Additional measures may also be taken against you. You can only make your users identifiable with a unique user ID (e.g. something like 123455325367 or hjwTYW1234). This way, the information you collect and store on Google Analytics can never be used to directly identify any customer. Google Analytics would know that user hjwTYW1234 bought sneakers on your site, but it would never have the information who user hjwTYW1234 is, where he/she works, etc. This way, even if your Google Analytics account is hacked, the information leaked cannot identify, expose or harm any of your customers.
Q: How are the events registered in Google Analytics?
Vanina: Events are actions. To trigger an event, your client needs to do something on your website: push a button, fill out a form, watch a video, share an article, or buy a product. This action causes something to happen on your site and Google Analytics tracks that. For example, when a button is clicked, the javascript tagging of Google Analytics
detects that and sends information to your account about it. That is how the event is registered.
Q: Can you please provide overview or business benefits of using Google Analytics? What are the cost and data analyst requirements to manage the tool?
If a business has a site and this site is used by clients, then you definitely need to be thinking of using a web analytics tool. Some reasons include: to determine if your marketing spending is working, if you are attracting your target audience, and if you have some pages with high dropout rates. If you are in the market for a web analytics tool, Google Analytics makes a lot of sense because it is free. There are a lot of support and resources online. And you can push tracking with Google Tag Manager and basically be independent of release cycles and processes. If you go with the free version of Google Analytics your cost would be to that of an employee who knows her way around the tool. Ideally you should get somebody with more experience, who can define tracking strategy for your company and implement it through Google Tag Manager. If you already have somebody on board who knows Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager well, you might get a junior web analyst.
Check out Vanina's presentation slides
here
, and m
ake sure you check out the notes under the slides for some bonus information and links.
Have more questions? We've got you covered
. Email Vanina at hi@powertofly.com.
You can also check out our previous webinars:
How To Land Your First Remote Job
,
How To Write The Perfect Resume And Cover Letter
,
Remote Work Decoded
and
Rest APIs
.
Join
PowerToFly
today to become part of our fast-growing network of all-star women in tech. Y
ou can also learn about the best ways to hire and manage a distributed team by
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