Advanced Google Analytics Interview Questions You Must Know!

Management thinker Peter Drucker said, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Google analytics has grown in popularity and usage in the past few years. Knowledge of Google Analytics will help you measure the success of your digital marketing efforts. It also helps you with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Knowledge of Google Analytics is a must to be a well rounded Digital Marketer.

Knowing Google Analytics does not mean that you have the entire Google Analytics help articles in your memory! It just means that you are strong with the fundamentals of Google Analytics. The fundamentals will help you find and effectively utilize Google Analytics documentation.

The answers to the questions are short and are intended to give you an hint. If you feel that you are uncomfortable with a question, consider revising the topic.

Advanced

1. What is a cookie? Why is it useful?

Cookies are small files that contain information about your activity on a website. It is stored on your local machine.
It is useful to create a better user experience and for remarketing.

2. What is a Hit?

With each user interaction on the website, the Google Analytics tracking code sends what’s called a ‘hit’ to Google Analytics. It is a URL containing data related to the interaction.

3. What are some common type of hits?

Types of hits in Google Analytics:

• Pageview hit
• Event hit
• Transaction hit

4. What is Google Tag Assistant?

Google Tag Assistant is a free Chrome browser extension that shows you whether the Google Analytics tags (the tracking code) are firing correctly.

5. Can the ’30 min session timeout due to inactivity’ be altered?

Yes.

6. What are the possible ways in which a session ends?

The different ways in which a session ends in Google Analytics are:

• Complete exit from the site
• 30 minutes of inactivity
• Midnight
• Campaign change during an active session

7. What is the maximum number of times a particular goal be achieved in a session?

A goal can be achieved only once in a session. So, if you’ve defined an Event goal of downloading a PDF, and the user downloads the PDF five times in the
the same session, the event count will remain one.

8. Can the same filter be used by multiple views?

Yes. Filters are account-level objects. If you edit a filter at the view level, you are also changing the filter at the account level, and any other views that use the filter are also affected by the change.

9. Is it important to maintain a completely unfiltered view called Master view?

Yes. You should maintain an unfiltered view of your data so that you always have access to your full data set.

10. What is the importance of hit in calculating a duration based metric?

Duration is calculated as the difference between timestamps generated by hits. So, even if a user spends time on a page, but doesn’t send another hit and quits, it is considered to be a bounce and the duration is 0.

11. Explain the different scope of metrics and dimensions in Google Analytics with examples

The different scopes in Google Analytics are:

• Hit Level Scope
• Session level Scope
• User level Scope

12. Why is scope important?

Metrics and dimensions can be paired only if they are both in the same scope.
Also, it is important to specify the scope when creating custom metrics and dimensions.

13. What is client id?

The client ID is a unique value that is generated by Google Analytics tracking code and is stored in a cookie. It is used to track returning website users.

14. What are custom reports?

A Google Analytics report created using custom metrics and dimensions is called a Custom report.

15. What does Google Analytics do when huge raw data has to be processed to create a custom report?

Google analytics resorts to sampling, to process huge raw data to create custom reports.

16. How does sampling differ in a standard account and a analytics 360 account?

In Standard accounts, occurs at sampling at property level.
In Analytics 360 accounts, sampling occurs at the view level after the filter is applied.

17. Does sampling happen for default reports?

No. Default reports are not subject to sampling.

18. What is cross domain tracking/site linking?

Cross-domain measurement makes it possible for Google Analytics to see sessions on two related sites but of different domain names as a single session.

19. What is Rollup reporting feature in Google Analytics 360?

The rollup reporting feature is used to merge/aggregate data from multiple properties.

20. How properties and views can an account have?

Each Analytics account can have up to 50 properties and each property can have up to 25 views.

21. Does the order of the filters matter when applying multiple filters on a view?

Yes.

22. What is Google tag manager?

Google tag manager is a tool to manage Google Analytics tags (and other analytics tags) on the website. With Google tag manager code in the source code, just add other tags in the Google tag manager tool and it takes care of the rest.

23. What is segmentation?

Ans. Segmentation in Google Analytics is a way to view a subset of data in reports. You can add segments to immediately filter your data without permanently deleting any of the data you’ve collected.

Example: Creating a segment of users who came to your website using mobile devices. All reports will now correspond to these users only.

24. Explain Conversion path

It is the various touchpoints through which the user visited the website before converting.
Example: Organic Search (4 days ago) →Facebook (2 days ago) → Email Campaign (1 day ago) → Direct visit → Conversion

25. What is Attribution modeling?

Attribution modeling is a set of rules that determine how the credit for sales and conversions gets attributed to the various touchpoints in a conversion path.

26. What is the default Attribution modeling in Google Analytics?

By default, Google Analytics will attribute all of the credit (100%) to the last touchpoint in the conversion path. This is called a “last-click” attribution model.

29. Explain all the attribution modeling types?

The different attribution models in Google Analytics are:

• First interaction attribution model
• Last interaction attribution model
• Last non-direct click attribution model
• Last Google ads click attribution model
• Linear attribution model
• Time decay attribution model
• Position based attribution model

30. Explain Position based attributions modeling?

In the position based attribution model, 40% of the credit is assigned to the first and last touchpoints each. The remaining 20% of the credit is distributed evenly to the touchpoints in between.

31. Who is a 7-day active user?

Ans. A user who initiated at least 1 session in the last 7 days is considered to be a 7-day active user.

32. What do Benchmarking reports tell?

Ans. Benchmarking reports enable you to compare your data with anonymized aggregated industry data from other companies who share their data. To see benchmarking data, you must share your data anonymously with Google and others.

33. Can custom dimension be used as a primary dimension in default reports?

No. Custom dimensions can be used as a secondary dimension only in a default report. But it can be used as a primary dimension in custom reports.