The best way to learn something in this life is to put it into practice. If you are one of those who want to master Google Analytics, no matter how much articles you read or how many courses you do, the best thing for this purpose is to try it yourself on your website.
The main problem is that it will take some time to capture enough data to start drawing interesting conclusions by reviewing the Google Analytics reports. And if on top of that your website has little traffic, it will be even more desperate to start putting into practice what you have learned.
Luckily for you, there is a solution so you don’t have to wait to have a Google Analytics account full of data to work on it and become an expert of this web analytics tool. But before we get started, let me tell you a little about the Google merchandise store 
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The Google Official Merchandise Store
It’s possible that you didn’t know about it, but Google has an official merchandise store where they sell a whole series of different products with their brand and those of their other star websites, such as YouTube. To be able to enter this store, you only have to go here.
The first thing you may think when you see this store is if there will be many people who buy this type of products. Is there really a market to sell T-shirts, pullovers, glasses, stickers and other products with the brands of Google, YouTube, Android and so on? How much does Google earn each month selling swag?
What if we tell you that you can see this data without expending a single penny? Would you like to access the Google Analytics account of the Google Merchandise Store? Then continue reading…
Learn by Exploring Real Data From The Google Merchandise Store
Google Analytics provides a demo account so you can test all the features that this web analytics tool offers. And the data for this account comes directly from Google’s merchandise store. A curious exercise of transparency that we all applaud here.
To access this demo account simply visit this link. There you will find all the explanation of the demo account and you will be able to include it in your Google account, as if it were just another website you control in Google Analytics. Remember that you will need to have a Google Analytics account, something obvious to be able to see all this.
The Google Analytics demo account data corresponds to what you might find on a conventional e-commerce website and includes the following information:
- Traffic source data: Information about where website users originate. This includes information about organic traffic, paid search traffic, and display traffic.
- Content data: Information about the behavior of users on the site. This includes the URLs of pages that users look at, and how they interact with page content.
- Transaction data: Information about the transactions that occur on the Google Merchandise Store website (purchases).
All users of the Google Analytics demo account have read and analysis access; that is, they can view configuration and report data, work with report data (e.g., filter a table, add a secondary dimension, or create a segment), but they can’t modify account settings or defined goals. This is normal, since as we said before, the access is read-only.
In the following screenshot of the Google Analytics demo account you can even see the sales funnel of the Google merchandise store. Note that all these data you see here is real data taken from the online store itself. And who knows? If you propose some improvement to their website to make them sell more, they might even hire you at Google 
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If you want to know which product has sold most in the last 30 days or in any period of time, you only have to check it in the corresponding section of the Google Analytics demo account. It’s curious that when I’m writing this the thing that most benefits produced to Google was a security camera 
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Don’t waste another minute and see what you can discover with the Google Analytics demo account. To have a real example of analytics from an online store surely serves you well to learn a lot about it.
Final Remarks
Now you have discovered the possibilities that Google Analytics provides you with the Google Merchandise Store demo account. In this account of Google Analytics you have the real data of a web with an interesting number of visits and you can investigate the complete analytics of a real e-commerce system.
This resource is very interesting if you are starting to familiarize yourself with Google Analytics but you are still a little bit scared or you don’t have a decent website in which to install a tracking code and start collecting data. You will be able to touch and watch as much as you want without fear of breaking anything, since you are in front of a safe demonstration environment. The dream of every student!
We encourage you to take a look at it and start messing around with this demo account. You’ll learn a lot about Google Analytics and you’ll be able to apply your learning to your own website in the near future.
