If you have a website for your business, then Google Analytics is a must-have. It is one of the best, if not THE BEST web analytics tool available today, and best of all, it is completely free. More than 55 million websites around the world trust this powerful tool for their business. Any website can use Google Analytics to gain a deeper understanding of who is visiting their site, when, and what their visitors are doing on their site. But looking at the platform can be very overwhelming if you don’t know how to navigate to the information you need the most. I am here today to hopefully break it down and help you get the information your business needs to make the most of your website today.
What is Google Analytics and How it Can Help Your Business
First off, what is Google Analytics? Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that helps you measure your website traffic. It provides information about your audience, how they found your site, what they do on the site, and how much time they spend there.
As an example of what Google Analytics can do for you, it can help you understand the demographics of your visitors, which in turn will allow you to better target them with content to increase conversion rates.
5 Different measurements within Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides us with insights to help us improve our website traffic and also provides us with the opportunity to generate reports, which we can then share with other people in our organization s or use to make decisions about our marketing campaigns.
Within Google Analytics, there are five different measurements that we can use to learn about the people visiting our websites. They are real-time, audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions.
- Real-time data is what users are doing on the web right now.
- Audience data is about who your site visitors are and how they found your site.
- Acquisition data is about where people come from when they visit your site (social media, search engine).
- Behavior data tells you what users do when they visit your site (pages visited).
- Conversions tell you how many of those visitors are making converting decisions on your website. This may mean, making purchases, scheduling appointments, or downloading a file)
How to Analyze Data with Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an extraordinarily robust tool, and it’s fairly easy to get overwhelmed by all of the features and options that are available within its detailed interface. This makes reading and analyzing the data fairly complex if you don’t know what you are looking for.
To help navigate this here are some of the common data points that businesses are interested in measuring for the marketing planning and how to access them. These data points will provide you with some of the most important information you’ll need to make the proper changes and adjustments to your site, which will help you yield higher conversions and generate happy customers.
- Audience: demographics and location
This report gives you information regarding where your audience is located. At least where they were when they viewed your website.
- Acquisition: all channels, referrals
The next report I think many businesses will find useful is the acquisition report that will inform you of how your audience found your website. Where did they click before they landed on your page or did they type in the URL directly? This is helpful to know where traffic is coming from.
- Behavior: Site content, all pages
Another report that businesses find useful is the behavior report that shows the pages a visitor views when they are on your website.
- Acquisition: search console: queries
Lastly, another acquisition report that I find to be very helpful is the Search Console report. If you have your Google Search Console account linked to Google Analytics, you can get a quick report to show you want people are searching for on Google when your website shows up.
What is the Difference Between Google Analytics and GA360?
Google Analytics and GA360 are two of the most popular tools for measuring website traffic. However, there are major differences in the features and functionalities that these two tools offer.
Google Analytics is a free tool that offers website analytics data such as page views, bounce rate, and conversion rates. It also provides site speed insights and rich reporting. GA360 is a paid tool that offers more in-depth analytics data than Google Analytics does. It also offers customer insights to help with understanding the customer journey on the website.
Why You Should Start Using Google Analytics Today
It is important for any business to know how people are engaging with their content. Google Analytics provides this data in an easy-to-read way so you can make decisions to improve your content strategy.
Google Analytics is the most accessible and user-friendly way to track and analyze your company’s website and social media posts. It enables you to see who is visiting your website, what they’re looking at, how long they’re staying, and what they’re clicking on. This information can help you make decisions about the quality of your content in order to improve engagement rates.
And if it couldn’t get better than that, Google actually created a Free Course for you to learn more about how to use their system in their Google Academy. You can take the course for yourself. I will be sure to link it in the description for you.
Until next time, if you haven’t already taken advantage of your free 1-hour consultation where we will resolve any one of your marketing challenges, you can do so today. I look forward to meeting you and helping you weed through your marketing issues any day.
