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As Digital Marketers, one of our first tasks is to set up Google Analytics for websites to track essential metrics such as website traffic, user behavior, and conversions.
How to use Google Analytics (GA)?
GA is one of the most popular digital analytics software. Setting up your Google’s free web analytics account allows you to analyze in-depth details about your website’s visitors via Google Analytics reports. It allows you to add a tracking code to your web pages. This Google Analytics tracking id provides valuable insights to help you shape your business’s success strategy. Nowadays, almost all businesses have an online presence through a website. Therefore, it becomes crucial for you to learn the inner structure of your website to see whether it is accomplishing its purpose. For this, you need to know what people do when they visit your website, how long they stay, and what pages they visit on your website. Irrespective of whether you are an eCommerce website or a consumer services business, you would want to understand and study the behavior of your visitors to deliver better results. Below are some reasons you use your Google Analytics account to get better insights into your website and visitors.
1. Add Google Analytics for free to your website
The account setup process is easy. You must have heard the saying, “There is no free lunch.” So is Google Analytics free, or is there a catch? But in the case of Google Analytics, it’s a win-win situation. Google doesn’t charge you anything for using this tracking code. You don’t have to pay a thing to use this product, and you can combine its power by adding Google Tag Manager and even linking your Google Ads account for marketing purposes. Furthermore, it provides essential information, numbers, and statistics to maximize your website’s performance for free, including event tracking across your global site or specific web pages. Add additional data streams for specific pages and applications, or set up another Google Analytics property for sub-domains you wish to track.
2. Automatic collection of data
Google Analytics has a feature that reduces the work required to put Google Analytics data into Google Docs, Sites, or Spreadsheets. How to get Google Analytics code? You only need to set up your code once and copy a simple code on your website. This will enable Google Analytics to collect data from your website and make reports accordingly automatically. The Google Analytics metrics handle all the work for you regarding reports. You can even access your reports immediately without any delay. This feature of Google Analytics saves your work effort and gives you immediate access to the reports. With this, you can soon implement strategies for the better performance of your website.
3. You can create customized reports
With GA, you can track everything from basic traffic metrics to more advanced user behavior, such as where visitors are coming from, how long they stay on your site, and what pages they visit. By utilizing these insights, you can make informed decisions about improving your site’s user experience, increasing conversions, and ultimately driving more revenue. The customization options in Google Analytics are nearly endless, allowing you to focus on the metrics that matter most to your business and optimize your website accordingly.
A custom report is a report that you create. In GA, you can choose one of the many reports that Google Creates or build your customized audience report using the drag-and-drop interface. You can pick the dimensions and metrics and decide how they should be displayed. By defining custom dimensions, website owners can gain deeper insights into their audience and tailor their marketing strategies to better meet their customers’ needs.
How to create a Custom Report:
- Sign in to GAto view settings
- Navigate to your view
- Click “Customization” and select “Reports” from the drop-down menu.
- Click Customization > + New Custom Report
- Enter a title
- Click+Add a Report Tab (Optional)
- Select a report type: Explorer, Flat Table, or Map Overlay
- Define your dimensions and metrics
- Click +Filter to limit the report to specific dimensions (Optional)
- Select where the report should appear. Use the drop-down menu to select specific views or selectAll views associated with this account to allow this report on all views you have access to.
- Click “Save”
4. Easy integration with other tools and platforms
Another remarkable feature of Google Analytics is that it can be easily integrated with other tools and platforms. GA presents a clear and easily usable interface like all other services. It works well on the desktop and is perfectly usable for Smartphones and Tablets through its app on the Google Play Store. Google Analytics also has a robust integration with Google AdWords. When you link AdWords account with Analytics, you align two tools and enable them to work together. This combined work will provide you with actionable insights that will lead to the success of your AdWords Campaigns. Hence, you can use Google Analytics with all your devices to easily implement data to other well know Google products like Google AdWords and Google Search Console.
5. Ability to measure internal site search
The internal site uses site tags to reveal what potential customers are looking for after arriving on your website. It also reveals the area of growth opportunity by uncovering the situations where certain situations may be unclear or lacking on your site. Thankfully, GA allows you to track internal searches with some customization. With this internal feature, you can better understand what people search for on your website. With these insights, you can make necessary changes or additions to improve your website’s performance. You can effectively change your website navigation and product/service offers.
6. To understand why visitors are bouncing off your website
Bounce Rate is one of the most critical metrics, which refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website after visiting only one page. Moreover, it is essential to reduce this rate as much as possible. A lot of businesses witness massive traffic but not sufficient conversions. This means that visitors are coming to your website but are not finding what they are looking for. This leads to a high bounce rate. A high bounce rate calls for immediate action to identify the reason behind it. However, Google Analytics provides a detailed report of the pages experiencing a high bounce rate. The high bounce rate could be because your website is not optimized correctly or your landing page is not attractive enough for them to sign up. Therefore, with the detailed report on bounce rate, you can find ways and means to reduce the bounce rate of your website.
7. To know the age, gender, interest, device, and location of your audience.
With Google Analytics, you can uncover valuable data about your audience to determine which channels drive most of the traffic to your website. The Audience section provides much information about the people who visit your website, like their age, gender, interests, devices, and location. It also gives you data on how the visitors were driven to your website. (i) Age: It is one of the best indicators of where your audience spends most of the time. Knowing your website audience’s average age can help you optimize your website accordingly. (ii) Gender: The gender variable helps you to describe your audience. The audience’s gender plays a vital role in communicating and engaging online. (iii) Interests: With Google Analytics, you can very well understand the interests of your audience and can optimize your website following their interests. (iv) Device: Google Analytics also gives you views of what kind of device they use. With this information, you can help your website get more responsive on various devices. Not only this but with Google Analytics, you can also have a view of which kind of smartphone or tablet your audience uses. (v) Location: Understanding where your customers come from helps you to formulate marketing strategies according to the physical location of your potential customers. The geolocation feature of Google Analytics lets you know the country from where your visitors are coming, the city from where they are, and even the language they use.
8. To understand which social platforms to target
Social platforms are a great way to drive traffic and engage potential customers. With Google Analytics, you can view what catches the users’ attention and place the ad accordingly. To choose the best platform to advertise to your customers, you must set aside a generous budget for social media ads. For example: If you see a maximum of your customer engagement on Facebook and a substantial amount of traffic from Twitter, then according to this data, you can set more and comparatively less on Twitter to acquire more customers. With GA, you can gauge the performance of all the social platforms that you are using. You can also check how much conversion value each social platform brings, traffic entering from social referrals, and how many users are talking about you.
9. To understand what kind of content you should write
Content is king and, if created remarkably, can help you to get a lot more traffic and potential visitors. Good content is one of the best ways to reach your customers. This is why so many businesses create blogs, infographics, and slide shares that can add value to your customers. GA helps you track all the content that receives views and shares. With this data, you can enhance the top-viewed blogs to appeal to the customers more productively. GA generates a breakdown of the page views each of your blog posts receives. You can rework the top-performed blog to generate more traffic.
10. To check if you are achieving goals
The goals in GA help you to track how much your business is moving ahead and progressing. You can also assign several goals that will help you to track the customer’s journey based on their actions. There can be different goals, like purchasing, filling out a lead generation form, subscribing to newsletters, and downloading an ebook if a new visitor arrives at your landing page and completes the given form, including the email address. He just completed a goal decided by you. Hence, with this information, your website just converted a visitor into a customer, thereby adding to the success of your business.
Summary Conclusion
GA can do wonders for your business in more advanced ways. It provides valuable insights that can be used to improve the performance of your website and increase conversions. Although there are many other analytics management platforms, GA remains a free, highly relevant solution for managing your website’s analytics.
Privacy Law Compliance for Collecting Data
With more and more states passing privacy laws, many clients ask what they need to do to ensure their website is compliant today and into the future for data privacy to avoid legal issues. For a website to meet data privacy compliance requirements, depending on the geography, it must comply by providing access to information collected, including:
- The correct privacy policies outlining any third-party data collection and sharing
- The ability for customers to manage their cookies
- The ability for customers to exercise their privacy rights, including receiving a copy of any data collected and having it completely removed upon request
It’s also important to note that collecting any user-identifiable information on your website, such as IP address, age, sex, or other demographic information, does require you to have in place several additional safeguards and notifications to your website users. This is true whether you use Analytics or any third-party collection tool. In addition, if you do business within Europe or California, for example, there are additional restrictions and policies you must make. See our Web Compliance & Consent service to manage these regulations efficiently.
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