Understanding the data behind your brand is crucial to making the right decisions and developing a strategy – you want to know how many people are visiting your site, where they’re coming from, if they’re converting, and more.
Without this data, you have no real way of knowing which marketing channels are working the most effectively. Google Analytics removes the guesswork and enables you to take a deep-dive into information about your audience.
Terminology
Using Google Analytics comes with a glossary that can look a little confusing to new users, but once you have a grasp on the terminology, understanding your data becomes a lot easier.
Getting Started
Once you’ve set up a Google account, you can log into the go to the Google Analytics page and follow the installation process.
An important part of the set-up process is inputting the tracking code, which will be provided as part of your installation, and needs to be inserted into the code for every page you want to collect data for.
Another key aspect of making the most of what Google Analytics can do for you is defining your goals and what you want your website to achieve.
Goals are specific actions that you want users to make on your site, such as transactions or engaging with certain pieces of content.
Maybe you’re looking to increase your traffic overall, or to track events such as social media clicks, whether videos are played or if a user makes a purchase.
Goals can easily be set up via the Admin link – once you’ve determined what you want to monitor, Google Analytics will track these actions and attribute them to the appropriate marketing channel, so you can run reports on how the site is performing.
Reporting
Google Analytics defaults to displaying the last 30 days when any report is generated, but you have the option to change this to examine how the site has performed during set time frames.
There are four core areas and reports you can create within the Analytics platform. These include:
There are sub-reports you can create within each of these sections too, such as Demographic or Technology, to see what devices users are viewing your site on.
Mobile reporting is particularly worthwhile, as mobile is overtaking desktop browsing, so it can (and should) influence your strategy and content creation. You also have the option to segment your data for a closer look at your audience.
For example, if you want to look at the data for users based in a particular location, or for users who have converted, segments are a great way to do that.
Conclusion
Of course, there’s far more to Google Analytics than just these features.
From creating campaign tags and using Google Tag Manager to linking up to Google Ads and Search Console, you can examine data at as granular a level as you want.
Bottom line is youneed to track the data in order to improve your campaign performance. If you need help with getting this set up for your business do get in touch...
