Our goal with this article is to help you understand what Google Analytics is and how to use it properly. It is an amazing website analytics software that is offered for free by Google. You can easily install Google Analytics on your website and monitor audience, acquisition, real-time, and behavior data.
What is Google Analytics
About Google Analytics
Launched in 2005, Google Analytics is a platform that provides website owners with comprehensive data about visitors to their website. The statistical data includes information about traffic, sales, the source of traffic, page views, site visits, the percentage of new visits, bounce rate, pages per visit, average time on site, and more. Google Analytics can also be used to track Paid Advertising campaigns from every channel so you can see how the results look. All in all, Google Analytics helps provide you contextual stats to base your marketing decisions and to spend your time and budget effectively.
Apart from the free Google analytics version, there are 2 more subscription versions: Google Analytics SDK for mobile applications that collects data from Android and IOS apps and the Google Analytics 360, designed for enterprise users.
How Google Analytics Works
Website owners and marketers utilize the service by first creating a Google Analytics account and then inserting a HTML code provided by the platform into their website. The system then tracks all the activity on the website and displays the information on a dashboard. The information helps sites determine which social media websites are bringing in traffic, which websites are driving referral traffic, what marketing techniques are driving sales, and which keywords are directing traffic to the site. In addition, the reports are usually customizable, so you can decide what information you want to track and what you don’t want to track.
Google Analytics Highlights
Below is a list of just some of the things you can do using Google Analytics.
- Track paid avertising campaigns to determine where your budget is spend the most efficiently.
- Monitor search queries and keywords that drive revenue to your business.
- Determine which sources of traffic have the most opportunity.
- Optimize underperforming paid advertising campaigns
- Track ecommerce revenue for websites that use Shopify or other similar platforms.
- Optimize exit pages and determine why website visitors leave before converting
- Create custom dashboards for your website based on your Key Performance Indicators
- Understand your website visitors demographic, geographic, and interest data.
There is so much more that Google Analytics can do but this is a high-level overview of why it is so important to utilize. And you need to not just collect this data, you also need to use it to guide your business decisions, save money, and save time.
Google Analytics and PPC Advertising
Whether you are in an in house marketer or you are a marketing agency, the platform offers very important insights on various marketing campaigns including pay per click that you cannot afford to ignore. By analyzing this information you can easily pinpoint areas that need improvement, determine ways to alter campaigns and minimize costs and ultimately enhance conversions for a lower cost. The service can also help you with:
- Identifying Keyword Improvements
- Comparing Performance by Hour and Day
- Identifying underperforming ads
- Analyzing strengths and weaknesses of campaigns
- Understanding Desktop/Tablet/Mobile performance
- Determine what ad targeting is profitable and what ad targeting is underperforming
In Conclusion
Google Analytics is a great way to track your traffic and discover ways to drive more conversions. This is a simple guide to Google Analytics but there are a lot of advanced features that advertisers can take advantage of. There’s always something to learn from Google Analytics whether you can include or exclude certain keywords, optimize your ad targeting, or optimize your landing pages.
