Welcome to the free Google Analytics (Universal Analytics) course for Makers!

Accessing the course

All the course lessons are on this website. Access it at any time – no login required.

Navigate through all the lessons in the course menu on the right.

This course is for GA Universal Analytics, not GA4!

Google Analytics is currently changing to a new version, called Google Analytics 4 or “GA4“. The version we have used for so many years is called “Universal Analytics”, which I’ll refer to as “GA Universal Analytics” or just “UA“.

On March 16, 2022, Google announced that Universal Analytics (UA) will stop processing new data on 1 July, 2023 and reports on historical data will only be accessible for a period of time after that (at least 6 months… but not forever).

You can continue to use this free course to learn more about how to take advantage of your existing UA account and reports until this end-of-life date. But you should also start to connect your ecommerce platform to GA4 as soon as possible (whether that’s right now or when your platform makes it available.)

What to expect in this course

This is a hands-on, practical course. You’ll dive into your own shop data and practice reading, understanding and making decisions from real reports. I’ve designed this course to give you top-to-bottom skills that you can apply to any Google Analytics Universal Analytics report.

Your lessons come in five different flavours:

  1. Set Up: These are tutorials for important configurations you should make to your account. They’ll give you more accurate or new types of data.
  2. Read a Report: Find and understand built-in UA reports.
  3. Customize Your Report: How – and why – to use various report tools to make your reports more useful.
  4. Concept: Basic analysis or statistics concepts made easy. These will stop you getting distracted or mislead by numbers.
  5. Activity: Apply everything you’ve learned to your own data!

What’s included:

We’ll walk through Google Analytics following the same sections you’ll find in your account. In each section, we’ll go through one example report top to bottom, leaving you with actual insights to apply in your shop, not just a list of reports to keep getting confused by!

 THE BASICS

Set up your Google Analytics Account correctly, so you’ll have the most accurate and useful data possible.

 AUDIENCE

Data related to individual shop visitors. You’ll use the Geographic Location report to compare your visitors to your actual shipping options.

 ACQUISITION

How do your visitors find your shop? You’ll analyze your best traffic sources and compare them to your real marketing efforts.

 BEHAVIOR

What pages and products do your visitors view? You’ll find out whether your best-selling products are also your most viewed – and what it means.

 BONUS!

Three bonus lessons, including a special “Define Your Success” worksheet.