What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free service that allows you to track the behavior of your website visitors on the web. It’s very useful for tracking how many people are visiting your site, what pages they’re visiting and what they do after they get there. Google Analytics can also tell you which websites are linking to yours, how much traffic you’re getting from different sources and which advertisements are driving most of your traffic. Google Analytics reports can be viewed in a few different ways: as a simple list of statistics and information; as a graph with click paths; or by viewing historical data.
Why Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool built by Google. The tool lets you see website traffic, engagement, visits, and much more. It’s easy to set up and use, so you’ll be able to get started right away. Google Analytics helps you increase revenue by showing you exactly where your visitors are coming from, how long they spend on your site and how successful they are in converting their visitors into customers. With Google Analytics, you can track visitor behavior across devices (desktop vs mobile), view demographics of each visitor and even see the value of advertising campaigns to your site.
Setting Up Google Analytics:
The first step to setting up Google Analytics is to create an account. If you already have an account, you can skip this step and go directly to the next section.
- Go to https://www.google.com/analytics/
- Click the Create Account button
- Enter your name, email address and password (the latter is optional)
- Select a country from the list that appears on the next page
- Review the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy (if applicable), then click Accept
- On the next screen, select whether you want to use Google Analytics for website traffic analysis or for app activity:
- Now Google will ask you to add tracking code to your website.
- When you add that code to your website, done. It will start tracking your website visitors.
Website traffic analysis will enable you to see how visitors interact with your website and measure their behavior across devices by sending anonymous data about their visits to Google Analytics. This information helps us understand what content people find most interesting, how they move around your site, where they spend time and how they interact with it. You can also see how long visitors stay on your site by viewing session replay data that includes unique IDs for each visitor’s session (to allow us to track which pages are most popular) or by looking at clickstream data that shows which links were clicked on during each visit. The information collected through website traffic analysis is used in reports such as heatmaps, which show.
The Basic Navigational Structure of Google Analytics:
Google Analytics has a very robust set of features that allow you to measure how people interact with your site. One of the most important parts of Google Analytics is the ability to view the navigational structure of your website. This is called a “page” in Google Analytics and it shows how visitors move around your site, where they go, and how long they stay on each page.
A page can be any logical container within your site. For example, one page could include everything from the home page to an individual product page within an online store. As another example, one page could be all products in one category while another can be all products in different categories.
Real-Time Reporting with Google Analytics:
When you make changes to your website, you need to be able to see how those changes are impacting performance. Google Analytics helps you do this by giving you real-time insights into how users are interacting with your website. Real-Time Reporting is a powerful tool for optimizing your site for conversion and measuring effectiveness of marketing campaigns. It allows you to see how users are interacting with your site as well as what pages are performing better than others.
Real-Time Reporting gives you the ability to see which pages on your site are performing better than others and identify what actions people take on them. For example, if you have a page that gets 100 visits per day but only 20% of those visitors convert then it would make sense to focus on promoting that page instead of another that gets 200 visits per day but only 10% of those visitors convert.
Overview of the Acquisition Reports in Google Analytics:
Acquisition reports are a great way to track the performance of your marketing initiatives. They’ll give you a good idea of what’s working and what isn’t, and they’re particularly useful if you need to measure the impact of any changes you make to your campaigns.
The following reports are available in Google Analytics:
Acquisition Overview – This report gives you a quick overview of which marketing channels are driving new visitors to your website.
Top Acquisition Sources – This report displays the top 20 sources of traffic for your website, including search engines, social media, direct visitors and more. You can drill down into individual channels by clicking on them in this list.
Organic Search Traffic – This report shows how much organic search traffic each campaign drove over a month-long period. Organic search is traffic from people who typed keywords directly into their browser rather than searching online for products or services that might be listed by Google AdWords (Google’s advertising service).
Direct Traffic – This report shows how much direct traffic each campaign drove over a month-long period. Direct traffic is traffic from people who clicked on links posted on your site directly, rather than typing keywords into their browser search bar (i.e., organic).
Overview of the Behavior Reports in Google Analytics:
In Google Analytics, you can view a variety of reports that give you insight into your website’s performance. These reports can help you understand how your visitors interact with your site, what types of content they prefer, and whether or not they’re leaving your site. The following are some of the most important behavior reports in Google Analytics:
Conversions – This report shows how many people converted from a specific source (such as search engine, organic search, social media or direct traffic). If someone converts from one source and not another, it’s an indication that they weren’t satisfied with the experience they saw on your site.
Viewability – This report measures how long people stayed on your site before leaving or abandoning their visit (the longer they stay, the better). Viewability should be used alongside other metrics like conversion rate to determine which pages or areas need to be improved.
Impressions – Impressions is a metric that shows how many times users viewed your website during a set period of time (30 days is common). It’s important to note that impressions do not necessarily correlate with actual visits.
Overview of the Conversion Reports in Google Analytics:
The Conversion Reports in Google Analytics are one of the most powerful features in Google Analytics. They allow you to track your website’s performance on key aspects such as conversion rate, number of transactions and bounce rate.There are three types of Conversion Reports:
Conversion Rate Report: This report shows the percentage of visitors who convert into a lead, sale or any other action. It also provides insights on how many leads were generated, how many clicks were made and where they came from.
Bounce Rate Report: This report shows how many users leave your site after visiting your website. It also gives you an idea on which parts of your website cause people to leave (for example, if there is a long wait time between navigating through different pages).
Number of Transactions Report: This report shows how many actions people take when they visit your site. For example, it might show that a visitor navigated from one page to another on their way out but didn’t actually make a purchase or fill out a form.
Goals in Google Analytics:
Goals are a great way to measure the success of your website. They allow you to see how people are interacting with your site, and where they are coming from. Goals are built for specific actions on your site — such as clicking a link or filling out a form. They can also be used to track visits, pageviews or other events that occur on your site. You can set up goals for:
Visits: Any time someone visits your website. This includes visitors who arrive at one of your pages by following a link from another page on your site, as well as visitors who arrive at an entirely different website altogether (such as a search engine result page).
Pageviews: Any time someone views one of the pages on your website (including homepages and search results pages). This includes people who view all or part of one of these pages, but also people who click through from a link on one of them. It does not include people who only go directly to the bottom of one of these pages without visiting any other parts of your site first (for instance if you have an about us page, it doesn’t count towards pageviews).
The Importance of Testing Your Analytics Implementation:
The importance of testing your analytics implementation cannot be overstated. You can test your analytics implementation without having to build an entire site from scratch. Instead, you can test the functionality of your site by testing the way it responds to certain events on your website. Testing your analytics implementation can help you identify any issues that may be preventing you from reaching your goals for growth or success. If you have implemented a new Analytics tracking code and it isn’t working properly, then this is most likely where the problem lies.
Conclusion: If you have a website and you want to understand its performance, getting skilled at using Google Analytics is a great way to do this.
