Google Analytics sounds very intimidating even from its name. It sounds like you need a specialist to work with it or to hire someone to do the tracking using Google Analytics for your website traffic tracking. But, it certainly is not! You can use GA even though you are not a “certified” or a “specialist”. You just have to familiarize the materials and it should be as easy as possible.
GA (Google Analytics) is a free tool that gathers information from your websites and apps to have reports that give you insights into how well your business website is doing. This is where you can examine, track and understand the performance of your website.
Read this post to never visit Google Analytics and be directed to a page where you have exactly no knowledge of what you are in. Take notes as you learn more about Google Analytics!
How does Google Analytics work?
Given the fact that this tool is free for anyone who has a Google Account, this web analytics is very popular, especially for small to medium-sized services.
Google Analytics is where websites and business owners can see where traffic comes from and what is the best source of traffic for their website. So the question is, how does Google Analytics work?
This works by gathering website visitor insights and turning the data collected into useful information. There are so many functions of Google Analytics to help you in monitoring and tracking your business!
Before hopping on how to sign up and the features that Google Analytics has to help you with marketing and other purposes, first let us know what are the reasons why you are here (in GA) in the first place.
Traffic
In Google Analytics, you will be able to see who are the ones that are visiting your website and know how many people visit your website. This is good to know more about who are the type of people that are mostly on your website and to assess if you are reaching your target market. When you know this, you will be able to work more on your marketing and advertising.
Drive
Another thing is you will know how they reached your website and what brought them there. Is it a Google search, an ad, a social media post, etc? You will know how the traffic was able to come to your website and you will know what is the most effective way to drive traffic to your website which means that you can focus on it more and maximize it as much as possible.
Behavior
Also, you will know their behavior and what actions they are doing on your website. You will see their behavior. Do they complete call-to-actions? Or do they just stay for 10 seconds? Do they scroll to see different pages on your website and etc?
But where can you find all this stuff on Google Analytics? You can find the traffic, drive, and performance on Google Analytics. In your dashboard go to the left corner and you will see tabs there. You can see these three important things in the left corner. The Audience is where you see the traffic, the drive, or what bought them to your website in the Acquisition tab, and the behavior, of course, is for the behavior of your traffic!
Now that you know where to look for them, it’s time to sign up and actually check these tabs yourself! Times to sign up!
Sign Up on Google Analytics
In signing up for a Google Analytics account, all you need is a Google Account. If you do not have one yet, create one here.
- Just go to Google Analytics.
- And Sing Up using an email address
- If you do not have an account, you can always press the “Create an account” on the bottom part of the box
- Once you are logged in, click the “Set Up for free”
- Add an account name, it can be the name of your business or your website
- Leave the boxes ticked and Click next
- Next is to choose if you want to measure between an App or a Website or both
- Choose web and then enter the name of your website and also the link
- Select your time, and then click “Create!”
- Review the terms and you’re done!
You now have a Google Analytics account! You can now track the three main things that you want to see! Now, time to install the Tracking Code on your website!
Install the Tracking Code
Once added to a website, the tracker code (or ID) for Google Analytics serves as a special identification that enables data collection. This report covers how long visitors stay on a page, the query phrases they used to find it, and how they found it. The method through which Google Analytics gathers data is the tracking code. Your tracking code should be displayed after signing up for a Google Analytics account.
By including Google Analytics on your website, you can track a variety of things, including the volume of visitors to your site, the key terms they used to access it, the amount of time they spent there, aim conversion, and much more.
Here are the ways to install tracker code into your website:
- Go to the bottom left corner of your dashboard and click “Admin”
- Click the “Tracking Info” and then “Tracking Code”
- Copy the Code ID and paste it to the Marketing Integrations tab of Google Analytics on your website
Make sure that you do this right after signing up for an account on Google Analytics. This will be the wire that will connect Google Analytics and will allow it to collect data from your website so you will be able to see and track things.
Note: In installing your tracking code on your website, make sure that you do not get a single thing wrong. Because this will be your key to having excellent tracking from Google Analytics. Copy and paste the whole thing to make sure nothing si altered as you are entering the code.
Importance of Google Analytics to your Website and Business
You will see on the internet a lot and I mean a lot of materials and step-by-step instructions on Google Analytics (which I will also link some at the end of this post). But here, you will know the importance of Google Analytics and why should you use it.
Some, especially those who are not very familiar with this tool and concept of tracking the business might say:
Why is it important? Our business survived without it for decades.
It’s just another job to add, we are busy enough with the business.
We don’t need another tool that does nothing for our business.
We are just a small business, we don’t need that.
You will know the rebuttals to all these statements and you will see the benefits and importance of Google Analytics to businesses!
How does it benefit small to medium-sized businesses, websites, marketing and etc?
You might be someone or you might know someone that has been in the business for many years and thinks that Google Analytics will not be beneficial for business. But actually, it is quite the opposite. Aside from the things that are mentioned above that Google Analytics does, here are a few more reasons why you NEED Google Analytics for your business website.
Google Analytics Tracking Powers
This is the ultimate purpose of Google Analytics. To help small to medium-sized businesses track, see, and understand the performance of their website. So why is it important?
Online visitors are measured by Google Analytics, which categorizes it into channels based on its major source:
- Organic – Searchers that found you on Google or other search engines
- Social – People that found you or discovered your website through social media posts on your social media accounts
- Referral – Links from other websites to your website
- Direct – Directly accessed traffic
- Email – The ones that are acquired from your email marketing
- Paid Search – Mostly the ones that clicks your paid Ads to rank high on Google
- Display – These ones are the traffic from you display advertising
- Other – custom campaigns or ad campaigns you run
Imagine your website, now let’s say you are doing everything you can to make it rank high on social media, you optimize it, you produce excellent content, and basically, you have an excellent website. Good customer experience and etc.
Now, won’t you like to find out how many people are visiting your website? Or what brings them there? What about what is the best source of traffic for your website?
If you know, so what? How does it benefit you or your website if you know all about these things?
You will be able to maximize the best traffic source for your website to gain even more
This is important! For example, you are making content and social media promotion posts and you are running ads to drive traffic to your website.
Now, if you use GA, you will see that the top source of traffic for your website is the free social media posts and that not a lot of traffic is driven by the ads you are running and spending your money on. But if you do not use Ga for tracking which is the best traffic source for your website, you will continue to waste money on the ads because you “THINK” that it is where you get most of your traffic. You might lead to compromise because you might just disregard the main source of your traffic which is free.
But if you know that the main source of traffic is from let’s say YouTube, for example, you may stop running ads and then focus on working on your YouTube content to gain even more traffic.
You will know who are the majority of people that visits your website
You will know if you are targeting the right group of people. Or you may also realize that you have been targeting the wrong audiences your whole life. For example, your website is a business that sells guitars and you are targeting musicians. But according to the data in Google Analytics, you discovered that most of the traffic that goes to your website are beginners in playing guitar.
Because most musicians get their guitars from famous guitar sellers, but beginners are the ones that are most likely to buy your guitars since you do not have a brand that is as famous as Fender and other brands. Now, you will know what to adjust in your content and to change the approach and etc.
But if you do not use Google Analytics, chances are you will never find what type of people are visiting your website.
You will know if you have an effective call to action or if you are optimized for conversion
Finally, you will know if the call-to-actions on your website are effective and if your website is actually optimized to make the visitors do the call-to-action. Or if it is interesting enough to keep the visitors scrolling on your website. You will also see the number of conversions, the time people spent on your website and etc.
The value of knowing how clients, visits, and users interact with your websites is unlocked by Google Analytics. The effectiveness of your internet business can be greatly enhanced by behavioral data. It is difficult to optimize a click-through rate without behavior data.
If you know what are the lower numbers, then you know which are areas you should work on.
Google Analytics will help you work smart!
Working hard is working hard on all the areas of your website at the same time. Working smart is knowing exactly what areas to adjust, develop even more, and focus on. And Google Analytics will definitely help you with that, for free!
You will be able to know if you are doing the right thing
Google Analytics will be your guide. It will help you to monitor your business like no other tool. It will help you with reaching, representations, bounce rates, average session duration, pages per session, goal completions and so much more.
You need Google Analytics, regardless of how much time you have been in the business industry you are in, or the size of your business, you need Google Analytics’s help. You will know where to spend more time and effort in terms of your website and you will be able to stop the things that do not benefit you and only wastes your money.
If you do not track your business or your website, you will never know how far you’ve gone, if you are improving or if your business is taking steps backward.
Marketing
It’s essential to set up Google Analytics when using online marketing if you want to understand whether your ads are performing on your specific website.
Even though all online ad platforms allow you immediate access to advertising outcomes, especially conversions, if Google Analytics is not implemented on your homepage and landing pages, you won’t get a full view of how your marketing is doing.
The only approach to improve the outcomes and reduce the expenses of promoting throughout all ad platforms is to optimize ads with site data. You may never be aware of the portions of your funnel that need the greatest care if you don’t know the way visitors act on your websites after responding to internet advertising.
With the help of Google Analytics, you could determine which campaign is progressing faster on the website, plus you can then adjust the other ads to fit it.
The advantage of using Google Analytics for internet marketing advertising is that you can find the ideal areas to promote and not just depend on one data source by monitoring the statistics of all marketing streams in one location.
Content Production
As mentioned, in Google Analytics you can also see through graphs which contents perform the best. You will be able to see which ones are interactive and has more engagements. You then will be able to determine what type of content to produce, what type of content to remove, what type of content to replace and etc.
Google Analytics will help you be wise with your content production. And if you use GA you will know what exactly to make more and what to focus on to be able to bring more traffic to your website. Isn’t that awesome? To know exactly what and where to work on. Saves you more time and energy which you can pour into different tasks that will be beneficial for your business.
Using Google Analytics to assess every aspect of your content marketing strategy can help you develop a more robust and stable plan including methods to replicate effective sites, regardless of what objectives you have. Whether your objectives are to boost traffic, sales, or brand awareness.
Conversion
Google Analytics will track the conversion in your website. The success of every online business must be evaluated in part by evaluating and tracking conversions.
In order to grow your business and monitor the success of any effort, Google Analytics gives you the ability to monitor the most crucial business goal and conversions. You may monitor user behavior on your site by using GA.
Knowing your conversion rates enables you to evaluate the effectiveness of various marketing initiatives, including social media marketing, SEO, and digital advertising.
Sometimes, you might feel like you have been getting a lot of conversions, but when you check it with Google Analytics, turns out you don’t. Google Analytics will not just help you work smart, it will also give you a visual representation of how your website is performing through graphs. So you will be sure and not just based on your FEELING that you got a good amount of conversions for this month. Google Analytics is a certainty, not a hunch.
Help you find your Target Audience
Important population profile about your existing traffic and clients is available through Google Analytics.
Connecting your potential customers as effectively as possible improves each facet of their interaction. A website can expand to its full potential by having an interesting intended audience.
A strong digital marketing plan includes reaching and recent posts and products that assist your intended reach, and Google Analytics may assist you in determining that group. The demographic can then be utilized to optimize the services and content offered on your website.
Accessible traffic descriptive statistics in Google Analytics:
- Language
- Country
- City
- Age
- Gender
If you know who you will target exactly, you will be able to cater to the right people to benefit from your business. Google Analytics, keep you on track.
SEO Improvements
This is one of the best benefits of Google Analytics, and you know what improvement in SEO means! Highest ranking on searches! A tactic that improves online results is researching your top pages overall to determine which ones drive the highest conversion. For example, maintaining monitoring for popular natural landing sites will enable you to determine what contributed to their initial success.
One of the many factors that make websites rank high on search engines is keywords. And in Google Analytics, you will be able to see what are the key phrases or words that searchers use to find you and to see your website when looking for you. This means that you will be able to use those words as a reference to distribute these keywords on your website. Read this article about Keywords for more knowledge. It will not only help you rank high on search engines and be discoverable by the searchers that are looking for your business, you will also be able to highly target your potential customers or target audiences using the keywords you will see on the Google Analytics report. So make sure to read the article about keywords!
Understand the Behaviour of your Traffic on your Website
Knowing the way users, traffic, and clients engage with your websites is made powerful by Google Analytics. Understanding behavioral data can significantly boost your internet business’s performance. Performance optimization of a site is unrealistic without behavior data.
The main advantage of behavioral analytics is that they give you useful knowledge about which pages receive the most traffic and engagement.
There is the metrics of Google Analytics for the behavior of the traffic in websites:
- Bounce rates
- Behavior flows
- Pages / Sessions
- Avg. Session Duration
- Page Views and Unique Page Views
- Exit Rates and Pages
- Top Pages and their performance
- Custom events and conversions
- Site Search
Google Analytics will help you so much in terms of keeping you on track, giving your certainty and sure data with visual representation and to help you work wisely!
Watch this video on Google Analytics
To learn more on the technical side of how to use Google Analytics, how to control it, where to find what you want to find, how to read the data and etc. Watch this video!
Pay attention and learn more! Make sure that you are taking notes because Google Analytics can be overwhelming and intimidating. Enjoy!
