Kick Start to Google Analytics in Simple Terms.
“For every $20 you spend on web analytics tools, you should spend $80 on the brains to make sense of the data.”
— Jeff Sauer, Digital Marketing Speaker, Professor & Google Analytics Consultant
Google Analytics is a very important tool for Digital marketers to understand so many things about customer behavior and needs. But it is highly underused by businesses. We gather a lot of data daily about businesses and turning that data into insights is one heck of a task. Google Analytics measures real-time campaigns and compares the results with previous times.
Why should you use Google Analytics?
When you start a new business you do brainstorm through every aspect of getting it running. You gather information from potential customers, define marketing campaigns, build a website, and whatnot. But until you do not analyze the data it is gambling. You don’t know if the campaigns that you are running are really effective? or the kind of money you are spending is actually worth it? It is quite possible the current traffic you are getting on your website is not because of the advertising and the advertising is useless.
That is why gathering data and analyzing it very important in terms of growing as a company. That is where Google Analytics comes into the picture. It helps you understand Who are your users? Where are they actually coming from? What actions are they taking and Ultimately what are the results of their actions? If you ask me, Conversion rate optimization is all about gathering data, analyzing it, visualizing it, and getting insights out of it. GA helps you achieve exactly this. Analytics shows you data from all channels that are directing traffic to your website. GA helps you track conversions completed, customer engagement, and makes reports around it. And yes it is Free!
Using Google Analytics you can get to know your visitors well and enhance their experience. When you know who your site visitors are by their age, gender, geographic location, interest topics, etc., you can take proper measures to enhance their user experience. It helps you understand the behavior of visiting customers. You can get to know if your landing page is working or not. Well, it is an analytical tool so it can not directly improve marketing strategies or conversion. But it surely will help you figure out what is working and what is not. Which all decisions you are taking for your business are turning out to be good ones and which are turning out to be bad ones. Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects in determining your business growth. Analyzing website traffic’s demography you can advertise it more effectively.
Few important Metrics to track on Google Analytics:
- User Types — People get a lot of traffic through various ads on their websites. You need to identify the people who are visiting your website for the first time and people who are returning again to your websites. By this data, you can figure out what attracted new customers and what made people return you your website. And you can define your advertising strategies around it.
- Traffic Sources — From where your website is getting the traffic. It helps you define your target audience. Sources may be categorized into google search links, ads, direct links, etc. By this, you can also figure out if your advertising campaigns working or not.
- Behavior Flow — GA helps in generating a flow diagram of behaviors of users visiting your website. By this, you can track conversion, if users are taking certain actions before buying something. This behavior flow is nothing but the path followed by the customer on your website. This can also help you reduce friction on your website.
- Bounce Rate — It is the rate of users visiting your website and returning without doing anything. This rate is very helpful in figuring out the important concerns of the landing page. This also helps in landing page optimizations and checking if primary CTAs are well defined or not.
- Pages Visited — This helps you understand what all pages are visited by potential customers. A “Pageview” is any view of a page that is being tracked by Google Analytics. You can define a value per visit. After all, it is all about converting visitors into customers.
- Sessions — GA records sessions every time any user visits your website. A session starts right away when someone loads a page and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. Every page view, click, transaction, etc., tracked during this period of activity makes up one “Session.” One user can log multiple sessions.
There are various other reports that are generated by Google Analytics which, if used correctly, can help you grow conversion rate. You can create customized reports and can easily integrate with various other tools provided by Google. Google Analytics is very good at storing information but not as good as Google Tag Manager in collecting information. Also not as good as Google Data Studio in generating reports. Hence to get optimized insights you can use Google Tag Manager for collecting data, Google Analytics for storing data, and Google data studio for generating reports.
The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.
Small businesses can use the Google Analytics service without paying a monthly charge, but if you want more advanced features or the ability to do more with the service, there is a recurring fee.
If you are curious about getting to know all these features of GA and do not have your own website you can explore GA using the demo account provided by Google. The Google Analytics demo account is a fully functional Google Analytics account that any Google user can access. It’s a great way to look at real business data and understanding various reports generated by it.
Google Analytics is a very important and most popular analytics tool available for any digital marketers or website builder. It has been a great learning journey with CXL until now, excited to explore more about GA.
