Wondering what is Google Analytics and why do you need it? In this article, we’ll help you understand how to use Google Analytics to collect data, improve your site, drive more organic traffic, increase your conversion, and ultimately grow your business.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that helps you track your website’s audience thus helping you tailor the best digital marketing strategy, measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and fetch a high ROI. It is an effective tool that helps you understand your site’s traffic and gives in-depth reports about your site so that you can make informed decisions.
By giving detailed data on the demographics and behaviors of your online visitors, Google Analytics allows you to set your business goals, target a specific audience, detect errors, discover unusual traffic, strengthen the SEO, and most importantly, convert your visitors into customers.
How to Set Up Google Analytics
People who understand the deep technicality of Google Analytics can achieve the most successful results out of it. It is hence, better to hire an SEO specialist to use GA to collect and analyze data. However, if you want to set it up yourself, here is how you can get started with it:
- Register with Google Tag Manager.
- Set up a “container” which is basically a collection of all rules, macros, and tags.
- Once you proceed with the prompts and agree to the Terms of Service, you receive your container’s installation code snippet which you can paste in the script of the Headers and Footers plugin of your website.
- Now, sign up for your Google Analytics account.
- Once you fill in all necessary details about your website and accept the Terms and Conditions, you get a unique tracking ID by GA.
- Add this tracking ID right after the <head> tag of your website.
- Now, it’s time to set up an analytics tag with Google Tag Manager for Google Analytics wherein you will be required to enter your GA tracking ID. Once you fill in all the required details, you have a new Google Tag tracking that sends essential data to your GA account.
- Further, log in to your Google Analytics dashboard and set goals by clicking on “Admin”. These goals let you control which web page your users visit or how long do they browse it.
- Lastly, find the “Add a site to Search Console” button in Adjust search console > Property > Admin > Google Analytics to crawl your site to Google and appear in search results.
How to Use Google Analytics?
Once your Google Analytics account is properly set with other important tools, it is time to dig deep into the data-driven world by understanding your site’s metrics through Google tracking. Here is how you can use Google web analytics to collect important data and use it to make the right business decisions.
1. Create Goals
As listed above, creating goals helps the Google Analytics tool fetch the related data so that you can measure if your goals are performing well or not.
2. Check Total as Well as Real-Time Views
One of the first things you will find in your analytics dashboard is the total visitors per day along with real-time traffic.
3. Discover Your Traffic Sources
Your Google web Analytics dashboard also helps you find the traffic sources of your website’s homepage, landing page, as well as each specific web page. This not only helps you find where your audience is coming from but also helps you understand which platform drives more organic traffic your way.
4. Find Where Your Traffic Audience is Located
With Google Analytics, you can determine worldwide stats on where your visitors belong to. Your dashboard highlights the top ten countries/regions where your audience is located but you can explore further by adjusting the settings. Along with the countries, you can also find the daily visits from each location along with the average time spent on your site and the bounce rate.
5. Determine Your Site’s Top Performing Keywords
You can also find a brief list of the highest performing keywords on your website on your Google Analytics dashboard. This also enables you to understand and rework the keywords that are not working.
6. Track the Searches on Your Site
Through the Google Analytics tool, you can also track what people search for on your site to understand if you can accommodate the missing elements, products, and services later.
7. Set Up Intelligence Events
Most importantly, Google Analytics instantly fetches reports about unusual traffic patterns or unusual metrics related to your site. Such extraordinary events are registered in your Google Analytics Intelligence Reports when you sign up for the Google Analytics Intelligence Events tool.
8. Compare Historical Traffic
Along with Real-Time traffic reports, Google Analytics also offers you to select and compare date ranges to analyze the historical data with the present one.
The Bottom Line
We hope we helped you understand how you can effectively use Google Analytics to track important metrics related to your audience and thus generate more leads. Google tracking along with other effective free web tools helps to create a highly optimized, effective, and error-free site. Understanding the data collected by your site further helps you make informed decisions related to your business.
