What is Google Analytics and why is it so important to me?

Have you researched how you can track data on your website? While researching, you must have gone through Google Analytics. But, what does Google Analytics do?

Google Analytics is a service offered by Google to track and report the traffic that comes on a particular website. Launched in 2005, it is the most widely used web analytics service on the Internet. It gives you detailed data insights on how your users (visitors or customers) find and use your website. Moreover, you can track ROI for your online marketing efforts.

Nowadays, every business has an online presence over the internet. Thus, it becomes crucial for you to understand the inner structure of your website. It helps in learning whether the website is accomplishing its purpose or not.

Irrespective of whether you are running an online store or a simple service website, you would want to understand the behavior of your visitors or customers such that effective results are achieved.

What does Google Analytics measure?

The main blocks that Google Analytics uses are dimensions and metrics.

Dimensions are the main attributes of your fetched data. It includes the source of traffic, social media channels, and more.

Metrics are the quantitative measurements for the dimensions measured above. For instance, if you’re looking at how your ads are performing in a particular area, the number of sessions you have recorded are the metrics.

Dimensions and metrics make up the reports in Google Analytics.

Important Google Analytics Key Terms

Google Analytics is a tool that can give you comprehensive data on how your website is performing. However, you have to get involved with some learning if you want to get the best out of this tool. You need to get familiar with some terms and concepts.

To help you out, let’s dive into some key terms that you need to know to make sense of the data.

• Users: Users are individuals that interact with your website.
• Sessions: A single session is counted when a user visits your website. Any session might include a page visit, product purchasing, filling out a form, or performing any other activity.
• Session Duration: It starts from the time when a user lands on a page to the time they leave it. With Google Analytics, you can get reports like average session duration, events per session, and more.
• Page Views: It is the time a user views a page. In the report, you can see the most clicked or searched pages which makes it easier for you to identify the best content or page of your website.
• Events: These are the user interactions with forms, links, downloads, and everything else other than the page views.
• Engagement Rate: In this, you’ll get data on whether a user stays on your site and presses the exit button rather than exploring it. It gives data on whether they get converted to your website.

How to Add Google Analytics to your Website?

Before you get into accessing the data, you need to ensure that Google Analytics is properly set up on your website. If you’re not able to track the performance of your website, you’ll get unreliable data that can lead to informed and wrong decisions.

To set up Google Analytics, you have to begin by creating an account. Next, you need to connect the website with the tool and add the tracking code snippet in the head section of your website.

After you’ve set up your analytics, it will take some time to see data insights and reports. But what should we consider? And how can you understand the Google Analytics data?

Don’t worry, we’ll make you understand that too.

How Google Analytics data can help you?

Google Analytics can give you comprehensive data on how your website is performing over the internet. Now, let’s move on to the ways to leverage Google Analytics data and improve your website subsequently.

1. Study Bounce Rate:

One of the most important chunks of data is the bounce rate. If you notice that a large percentage of visitors are driving away from your website, there’s an issue.

With Google Analytics report, you can identify the number of users who visited any page on your website and then exited it with the next click.

You can optimize that particular webpage with call-to-actions and better content, such that people stay on the website for longer durations.

2. Top Keyword Searches:

Google Analytics can be used to reveal the keywords your prospective customers are using related to your products or services.

Google Analytics gives you a bifurcation of the top keyword searches that land the reader on your website. Hence, this helps in identifying if your web page is catering to the correct set of clients.

If not, you can work on optimizing the page better and improving the keyword searches, or you can alter the content to match the keyword searches.

3. To Know the Demographics of Your Audience:

With Google Analytics, you can know valuable data about your audience to understand which channels drive most of the traffic to your website.

The audience section in demographics can help you get information based on age, gender, locality, country, language, education, and more of the user. It can assist you to identify the demographic that regularly visit your page.

Google Analytics gives you data on how your visitors were driven to your website. It can help you modify current online marketing strategies to capture more leads.

4. Viewing a Specific Page:

The length of time that people spend on a specific page can help you leverage the most attention-grabbing pages into sales-converting web pages.

Getting the traffic levels and traffic sources data with the length of time that any visitor or customer spends on a webpage can help you maximize the conversions for your website or online store.

Google Analytics helps in differentiating the active pages viewed frequently by users from the dormant ones that need optimization to gain more views.

5. Lead Quality:

With Google Analytics, you can calculate the number of visitors to the actual number of users subscribing to your page or purchasing your product.

Are people clicking on the posts or links on a particular page? Are readers heading toward your main page? Such actions of the visitors show that your visitors are interested in your offerings and are considering you above anything else.

Better lead quality ensures that your website is making more sales and generating more revenue. And using Google Analytics can help you improve the quality of your leads.

Why use Google Analytics?

For the above-mentioned reasons, you must have got a clear sense of how Google Analytics can help you. Being an online business owner, you can get detailed information about analyzing the data that’s presented. It shows past and current marketing performances and makes informed decisions about future campaigns.

What are the Benefits of Google Analytics?

If you’ve reached this point, you would probably be thinking about the benefits that your marketing campaigns can gain from Google Analytics. To help you know that, we have curated data that can help you with the same!

Below are some of the benefits that Google Analytics offers:

1. Measuring

• Tracking the website performance in Google
• Providing custom reporting tools
• Tracking user engagement over webpages
• Track conversions

2. Analyzing

• Judging whether marketing tactics are working or not
• Discovering target audience
• Gaining details on how the user behaves

3. Strategizing

• Planning new marketing campaigns
• Optimizing content or webpage that isn’t performing well
• Building remarketing efforts
• Designating the usefulness of resources

Conclusion

It’s no secret anymore that Google is one powerful search engine. Alongside, Google Analytics is a valuable tool that plays a crucial role in taking your marketing campaigns to the next level.

Irrespective of whether you are using it actively or passively, it can help you serve endless data insights that can be used to gain meaningful actions.

We hope that the above-mentioned details about Google Analytics can help you improve your website’s bottom line.

If you need more help from us, you can reach out to us. We’ll be happy to guide you!