Running a business without a website nowadays is like trying to climb a mountain in a pair of slippers. And running a website without looking at statistics is as useless as driving a car without steering. You have no idea where you are going and you are more likely to hit a rock.
Luckily, you have Google Analytics to help you steer your business in the right direction.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool developed by Google to track website performance, providing website owners with the basic statistics and analytics tool for search engine optimization and marketing purposes. It can track up to 200 different metrics to evaluate website performance, including users or unique visitors to the website, bounce rate (% of visitors who only viewed a single page before exiting), average session duration, pages per session, goal completion, and many others. It is a very powerful tool that every business owner should be using daily.
Analytics also offers features that help users make sense of the data, like data visualization and monitoring tools, data filtering, manipulation, and funnel analysis, predictive analytics, custom reports for advertising, acquisition, audience conversion, and much more.
Because it is free to anyone with a Google account, Google Analytics is popular among small and medium-sized businesses, particularly among retail websites. Collecting website visitor insight, can help businesses determine top sources of user traffic, discover patterns and trends in user engagement, obtain visitor demographics and measure your advertising ROI.
How does Google Analytics work?
Stage 1- Data Collection
Google Analytics can collect data in a number of different ways. The most common is using the Google Analytics tracking code and it is most commonly implemented using Google Tag Manager. Using Google Tag Manager, you deploy the tracking code on your website.
Stage 2- Data Processing
The next stage in Google Analytics is data processing. This is where the configurations you’ve made inside Google Analytics are applied to the data as its processed. For instance, things like filters will be applied at this stage, goal configurations and so forth.
Stage 3- Reporting
This is the stage where we can finally access the processed data through the web interface or make use of other tools for example Google Data Studio, Google Sheets, and more. Pulling the data into different tools will help you represent, visualize the data and present it in different ways.
You can make customizations at all these stages.
What are the major benefits of using Google Analytics?
Track traffic
This feature in Google Analytics enables you to know how many people visit your website every day and also the source of the traffic. Traffic Reporting Feature also lets your track which pages of your website get more traffic. This will help you understand what needs to be added or altered to the website so as to carry forward your marketing strategy.
Check Bounce Rate for your website
This feature in Google Analytics will help you to know the percentage of people who land on your website but leave without making any kind of action or visiting another page. Bounce Rate will roughly highlight the number of people who clicked on the back button on their browsers or exited your web page.
Track Pages per Session
This feature in Google Analytics will show you the number of pages visited by each visitor after landing on the web page. Pages per session will help you to compare the performance of the landing pages.
Track Average Session Duration
This feature in Google Analytics will help you to know the average time spent by the visitor on a web page after landing on your website. This report even lets you compare the metrics of landing pages to determine their performance.
Understand Audience Demographics and devices used
Google Analytics gives you in-depth data about your audience. This report in gives close insights into the age, gender, and interests of the audience. Also, it can give you data on what device someone is using, what browser they are using to look at your site, and a lot of other information that will really give you a full picture of who your prospect customers are.
See Acquisition Reports
This feature in Google Analytics will help you understand how users landed on your website or apps whether organically, through a search engine, emails, or paid ads.
Understand User Behaviour Reports
This report gives a clear picture of the path used by the audience to navigate throughout the web pages. Understanding behavior reports will help you find out which content is most engaged by the users, and accordingly fix issues in the content that is not receiving any engagement.
Site Search
This feature helps you to know the search terms used by the audience to visit your site. Site search will show you the effectiveness of the search results in creating engagement with your site.
Site Speed
Side speed is the average time (in seconds) the site’s server takes to respond to users’ requests. This feature helps you to know how quickly users are able to see and interact with the content on your site. It will enable you to know the areas that need improvement and act accordingly to improve the site speed.
The difference between ‘dimension’ and ‘metric’ within Google Analytics
If you want to do deeper analysis or create a custom report, dashboards, or scoreboards, you have to know the difference between ‘Dimensions’ and ‘Metrics’. Dimensions and Metrics determine what data you get and how it’s filtered or processed.
Dimension
Dimensions are attributes of your data. They describe the data in a little more detail and allow you to segment it.
Dimension Examples:
- Country: India, Canada, United States, etc.
- City: Mumbai, Bangalore, Mangalore, etc.
- Page: Title, URL, etc.
- Source: Organic, Social, Referral, etc.
- Browser: Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Bing, etc.
These aren’t actually numbers, they’re not able to be quantified.
Metrics
Metrics are quantitative measurements. These are the actual values in your data sets.
Metrics Examples:
- Sessions: The number of visits to a site over a period of time.
- Pageviews: The number of page views over a period of time.
- Bounce rate: The number of bounces/sessions over a period of time.
- Session Duration: Length of a session.
These are the things that can be quantified in your data sets. Hence, we use dimensions to describe or segment and use metrics to understand the numbers behind each of the elements.
Features in Google Universal Analytics (UA)
Conversion reports
This feature in Google Analytics provides data to examine and measure the value of your online business be in terms of revenue or other valuable events like signups, leads, subscribers, and so on. Conversion reports will allow you to keep a close eye on how to attract your audiences to increase sales and revenue.
Campaign Tracking
This feature in Google Analytics will help you track the performance of your online advertising and also lets you identify how users reach your site.
User ID
This feature in Google Analytics will help you to incorporate persistent ID for a single user to obtain more precise user count reports. When user ID is connected with Google Analytics, you’ll be able to know the user’s relationship with your website or business.
Segments
This feature is a subset of analytic data that enables you to isolate and evaluate subset data like users, sessions and hits. Wherein a user is a person who interacts with your website, the session is a combination of interactions done by the user, and hits are interactions done by a user during sessions like page views, events, transactions, etc.
Events
This feature in Google Analytics will enable you to gather information on audience interaction with your content other than pageviews like Downloads, link clicks, form submissions, and video plays. To view the event data reports you need to embed a code onto your site or app.
Custom Reports
This feature in Google Analytics will enable you to set how the reports need to be displayed by picking at least one dimension and metric. Custom reports feature can be found under ‘Customisation’.
Important indicators to look out for using Google Analytics’ Reports
Visitors
Understanding how many people have visited your site, how long they have spent on each page before they complete a form, or call you, or simply decided to leave, how many more visitors you’re getting from the previous month or the previous year, etc. will give you invaluable insights on your overall website performance. Pay attention to peaks and dips in the number of users and the number of sessions. If you notice anything unusual you must understand why it is happening so you can learn from it.
Source of your Traffic
Understanding the source of your traffic is another crucial metric you need to keep an eye on because over time you can figure out what channel works best for you and where you should concentrate most of your time. To find out where most of your traffic comes from click on ‘Acquisition’ and then select the ‘Overview’ option. This report will give you the breakdown of where all your visitors are coming from for each channel.
Landing Pages
A landing page is a page that a user arrives at after clicking on the link that leads your website. It can come from social media, a google result, an email campaign, etc. It is important because it helps you understand if the content of your landing pages is good enough and matches with what your audience is looking for. To access your landing page report, go to the menu on the left-hand side and select behavior then choose site content and choose landing pages.
Conversion
Getting visitors to your site is one thing but ultimately you want them to complete an action such as filling in a booking form asking for a quote or downloading a coupon. To check the conversion performance, select the ‘Conversion’ option, click on Goals, and select overview.
Understanding Google Universal Analytics (UA) Interface
Once you have signed in to your Google Analytics Universal Account (UA), you will see an overview of the performance of your website. In most cases, you will have access to the data of one website but if you have more than one Google Analytics account associated with the Gmail address you have logged in with, you will be able to toggle through each website set of data by using the dropdown option on the top left corner.
Starting with the menu at the left, lets first understand the ‘REPORTS’ section which is where you are likely to spend most of your time. The Reports section is composed of five main categories.
- Real-Time: As its name indicates, real-time report shows you what’s happening on your site right now such as the number of visitors, where they are located, where they found you on the web, what content they are currently visiting, etc.
- Audience: This is where you will find out about your visitor’s demographic, what kind of device they used to access your site, and much more. These reports will help you understand your visitors in more depth
- Acquisition: Acquisition Report is where you will find out the source of your web traffic.
- Behavior: The Behavior report is where you will learn how visitors behave on your site, what pages are most visited, how long people stay on your site, and very importantly, the bounce rate, which indicates if people stick around while they’re visiting a page. The bounce rate really helps you understand if your content appeals to your audience or not.
- Conversion: The conversion report will allow you to track specific actions that your visitors are taking on your website such as filling in a form, making a phone call, etc. This is very useful as ultimately you want people to not just visit your site but also to get in touch with you and this is where you will see the results.
Other elements of the interface are
- the Search option which helps you find helpful documentation when you are stuck,
- the Home option takes you back to the main overview of your site’s performance,
- the Customization option where you can create your own reports,
- the Discover option where you can find out about the latest information on Google Analytics, and
- the Admin option where you can modify the settings of your analytics account.
