One of the biggest changes that has taken place in recent times has been to go from having practically no data in traditional businesses, to having not hundreds of parameters, but thousands, available through free tools such as Google Analytics in new digital businesses.
In the past, entrepreneurs made most of their initial decisions based on their sense of smell or intuition and, later, on observation of what was happening or demanded in their businesses. In other words, Mr. Perez was the manager of a small perfumery chain and he sensed that putting a skirt on a local newspaper might be a good idea to boost his sales.
Once he had done so, he observed that there was indeed a greater flow of potential customers and sales in the stores and made the decision to continue with similar actions in other local media or formats. In short, the advertising worked but it was very difficult to assess how many of the customers came as a result of the commercial impact of the ad or, on the contrary, simply through other channels such as recommendations from friends, former customers or any other.
With the advent of the Internet, and especially in recent times, we find ourselves with the diametrically opposite case. We have gone from having nothing, to count on a myriad of metrics: ages, countries, populations, interests, bounces, sessions, dwell time, etc. Not only that, but all of this data can also be used for arrive in different waysThrough paid advertisements, search engines, clicking on links, perhaps social networks, or simply because they have directly typed in our URL.
Google Analytics is a fantastic tool to obtain the necessary knowledge from our visitors and, consequently, we will help to make decisions aimed at improve progressively our results on the Internet.
Yes... This is all very well, but...!we need to order them somehow!. What happens is that... We have too much data and it's difficult to interpret it. A good option is to create several views depending on the traffic source. In this way we will be able to know all the metrics or KPIs but segmenting only for any of the 4 possible types of traffic: organic, direct, referral or paid.
Before explaining how to create these views, it is important to point out that it is always necessary to keep one of them with "pure" traffic without any type of filter, in order to maintain the history of the account. Therefore, always we will create new views and we will never apply any filter on the main account view.
To configure these views, log in to our Analytics or Universal Analytics account and click on "Administrator"and then in the column "See"and the option "Create new view"
Once this has been done, a screen will appear where we must enter the view name we want to create as well as the information about the time zone we want. The names of the views will be: Organic, Direct, Reference y CPC/PPC (paid traffic).
When we have configured the 4 views we should see it in the following way: Now we will have to create a filter for each of the views in order to show us the type of traffic we are interested in. To do this, click on one of them (Organic, for example) and click on the "Filter". A screen like the one I show below will be displayed. Here we will have to click on "+ New Filter"In the next screen we will have to indicate ".Create New Filter"and indicate the Filter Name. We will set, again, the name of the filter according to the view we are creating (Organic, Direct, Referral or CPC/PPC).
Then click on "custom filter type"and check the box for "include". Then select from the drop-down menu "Campaign Media" and in "filter pattern"The following depending on the view we are configuring:
- Organic: organic
- CPC/PPC: cpc|ppc (be careful with the bar, the inclined ones are not valid!)
- Reference: referral
In the case of the "Direct trafficIn the "Campaign Source" view, we will have to select "Campaign Source" (instead of Campaign Medium) and indicate the regular expression: \(direct) Once all the views have been made pWe will be able to see all the Analytics metrics segmented according to the type of traffic:
What a difference it makes to see all the data grouped according to the traffic source, isn't it?
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