Google Analytics provides you with a fantastic way to analyze your website traffic. However, you may find it difficult to check all the data on all levels. That is where the User Explorer comes in. If you’re looking to learn how to use it to export your data, you are on the right page.
The User Explorer can help you to get the details regarding the behavior of a specific user on a session-level. This facilitates you in analyzing your website traffic.
In this article, you will see how to use Google Analytics User Explorer Export to export data into a format of your choice.
Table of contents
Pre-requisites
You should have the following:
- A Google Analytics account.
- A website or an app (Android or iOS).
What is User Explorer ?
The User Explorer is a set of reports that helps you analyze anonymized individual interactions with your apps and websites. Normally, the User Explorer shows each user’s behavior on a session level. With Google Analytics, data is shown on all levels. So, with the User Explorer, you can isolate individual user behavior rather than aggregate user behavior.
Understanding aggregate user behavior is important when you are managing large efforts such as campaigns targeting large geographic areas. Understanding individual user behavior is important when you need to personalize the user experience or when you need to troubleshoot or gain insight into the behavior of an individual user.
A good example is when you need to see where a particular user ran into trouble when placing an order. The User Explorer associates each individual user behavior with either a Client-ID or a User-ID. This is then used to identify the user uniquely.
What is Google Analytics ?
Image Source: pcmag.com
Google Analytics is a web traffic analysis suite that helps companies in understanding and analyzing web traffic. Over 50 million websites around the world use it. You have to add a piece of JavaScript code to your page (more on that below) for Google Analytics to track visitor activity on your site. It will then collect these activities and present them as statistics and visualizations in your Google Analytics account.
You can learn more about the geographical information of your audience, how they spend their time on the site, which pages they interact with, when they are coming by, and how they are finding your site. By analyzing data with Google Analytics, you can optimize your traffic sources, improve content strategy, track marketing campaigns, find pages with the highest bounce rates, and adjust the website to better serve your audience.
What is User Explorer in Google Analytics?
The User Explorer Report allows you to examine individual user behavior rather than aggregate behavior. Client ID and User ID are both related to individual user behaviour.
When managing huge efforts, such as campaigns that target wide geographic areas, it’s critical to understand aggregate behavior. When you want to personalize the user experience, or when you need to gain insight into or troubleshoot a specific user experience, for example, if you want to analyze the behavior of a user who has an unusually high average order value, or see where a user had trouble placing an order, understanding individual behavior is critical. Google Analytics with its in-built features carries out these processes easily.
Method to Add a Website/App to Google Analytics
For you to analyze traffic on your website/app, you have to add it into Google Analytics.
You can do this by following the steps given below:
Step 1: Sign in to your Google Analytics account. You can access it by opening the following URL on your web browser.
https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/
You will be taken to the Google Analytics Home page which looks as shown below:
Image Source: Google Analytics
Step 2: Click the “Admin” button located on the bottom left part of the window.
Image Source: Google Analytics
Step 3: You will be taken to a page with three columns namely Account, Property and View. Click the “+Create Account” button located on the “Account” column.
Image Source: Google Analytics
Step 4: In the “Account setup” page, enter a descriptive name for the account. Also, activate the “Link this account to your current organization:” checkbox to link the account to your organization. Click “Next”.
Image Source: Google Analytics
Step 5: Click either “Web” or “Apps”or “Apps and web” based on what you need to measure.
Image Source: Google Analytics
Step 6: Enter the details of the website or the app.
Note that for web, you must enter a well-formatted URL as shown below. You must also select the industry category to which it belongs. Also, select the reporting time zone. Click “Create”.
Image Source: Google Analytics
Step 7: Click the two check-boxes to accept the terms.
Click “I Accept”.
Image Source: Google Analytics
You will then be taken to a page showing the Tracking ID.
Congratulations! You are done.
Next, I will be showing you how to use the User Explorer to view the details of users who visit your website/app.
Steps in using the User Explorer
Now that you have added a website/app to your Google Analytics account, you can use the User Explorer to explore your web/app visitors.
You can access the User Explorer by following the steps given below:
Step 1: Sign in to your Google Analytics account. You can access it by opening the following URL on your web browser.
https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/
You will be taken to the Google Analytics Home page.
Step 2: Click “Audience” from the vertical navigation bar on the left. Choose “User Explorer”.
Image Source: Google Analytics
You will be taken to a page with the list of users who have visited your website.
For each client or user ID, you will see the following details:
- Client Id
- Sessions
- Avg. Session Duration
- Bounce Rate
- Revenue
- Transactions
- Goal Conversion Rate
To know the meaning of each, just point the mouse cursor at the “?” symbol located next to each item.
If you want to see the details of users who visited your site within a particular period of time, you can use the “Date Range” dropdown located on the right side of the window.
This is shown below:
Image Source: Google Analytics
To know more details for any user’s session, just click their ID.
You will be taken to a page that shows more details for that session including the profile of the user, their first visit date, the devices they used to visit your site/app, how they found your website/app and little symbols that show different events or page views.
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Understanding Client ID and User ID
Client ID is unique to the browser or device, whereas User ID represents a unique logged-in user. The main aim of the Client ID and User ID is to find the visitors on the website. However, The main aim of the User ID is to identify users across browsers and devices to provide unique IDs.
Client ID is generated by Google Analytics cookie and does not need any additional configuration. However, to capture User ID, you must make additional configurations in your Google Analytics account.
Understanding User Explorer Reports
There are two key aspects of understanding User Explorer Reports. These are as follows:
Mobile App Views
You can get the report in mobile app views as follows:
Image Source: optimizesmart.com
This report resembles the User Report available in a non-user ID view. It also shows mobile app data usage instead of website usage data for each user. This includes bounce rate, average session duration, revenue, sessions, etc.
This report highlights individual user’s activity on your mobile app instead of your website.
AMP View
AMP is an abbreviation for Accelerated Mobile Page. It refers to an open-source mobile page format that is used to build mobile web pages with static content. This content generally loads instantly on mobile devices.
AMP view would only include the AMP traffic and resembles the User Report available in a non-user ID view. It also shows the website usage data for each mobile user.
Client ID generally is a combination of a unique random number coupled with the first timestamp. In the case of AMP, the Client ID is a string that starts with the word ‘amp-‘ and contains alphanumeric characters.
Understanding the working of User Explorer Reports
You need to analyze the journey of people who are completing a goal conversion or making a purchase, to better understand their conversion path. Since you can see tens of thousands of User Reports for each unique Client ID.
Therefore, you need to sort this Report by transactions, revenue, or goal conversion rate before you read it or access a particular subset of this report.
Image Source: optimizesmart.com
Understanding User Reports
User Explorer Reports are made up of several User Reports. To access a User Report you simply need to click on one of the Client IDs in the Explorer Report, which brings you to the User Report.
Image Source: optimizesmart.com
To see more details for a particular user’s interaction, just click on it to read the further details.
Image Source: optimizesmart.com
These are the different aspects of User Reports covered in this article:
Interactions in User Reports
The various interactions in a User Report are classified as one of the following five categories:
- Goal
- Appview
- Pageview
- Ecommerce
- Event
You can take a look at these categories by clicking on the ‘Filtered By’ drop-down menu:
Image Source: optimizesmart.com
You can filter out a particular type of user’s interactions like events.
Advanced Segments in User Reports
You can also create an Advanced Segment in your User Report. To create this, you need to carry out the following steps:
- Step 1: You need to select the user’s interactions that you want to use as conditions for your advanced segment.
Image Source: optimizesmart.com
- Step 2: Once you’ve selected one or multiple user’s interactions, the ‘Create Segment’ will become enabled. Click on the button as shown in the figure below, which will open the ‘Create Segment’ dialog box.
Image Source: optimizesmart.com
- Step 3: You can accordingly name your Segment, select the GA view, and choose where you want this segment to be available. If you wish to apply this segment to the ‘User Explorer’ Report, you can click on the checkbox, ‘Apply the segment to User Explorer Report after Saving’.
Tips and Tricks
1) Use Lighthouse
If emails are submitted to your website, you can use Lighthouse to connect with random user IDs. This allows you to associate user behavior with a certain identity.
2) Set proper filters
You can choose the number of sessions from lowest to highest for a more accurate check. When it comes to E-Commerce, the first thing to look at is Revenue or Transaction. If you’re talking about non-E-Commerce websites, such as blogs, the average session duration is something to consider.
3) Exclude yourself from Tracking
To get a more accurate Analysis, you can turn off Google Analytics’s tracking of your visits. There are several options for doing so. The simplest is to install the “Block Yourself from Analytics” Google Chrome plugin.
Conclusion
In this article, you have learnt how to add your website/app into Google Analytics. You also learnt to export User Explorer data to the preferred format. You can now move your data easily for integration or analysis.
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