Google Analytics – Digital Marketing Tools

In today’s digital landscape, businesses use different marketing tools to sell their products and services. Unsurprisingly, the internet has given businesses such power to reach their target audiences, maintaining a good relationship with its customers with a strong online presence.

A website sets the first impression for a business and it’s also an important marketing tool that can drive traffic, increase sales and even create new business opportunities in addition to your presence in different social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. However, just having a website, social media presence, and running an ads campaign is not enough to be successful to market yourself in the twenty-first-century digital era where “tracking is essential”.

As a business-minded person, you may think that tracking your website and ad campaign is not important, but in reality, it can really help you grow your company. Tracking what works and what doesn’t work with your marketing efforts will help to keep costs down and increase sales. This data will help you analyze the performance of the website and major improvements for success.

In this blog, we are going to talk about google analytics as a free inbuilt tool provided by Google to keep track of your marketing strategies.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free tool provided by Google to help businesses and individuals understand what visitors are doing on their websites. It allows you to track and analyze critical data about your site, as well as the actions on the landing page of those who come in via search engine results pages (SERP) or from referral channels such as social media, emails, or direct traffic.

Think of a business selling its products and services via a website for example… they are planning to run Google or Facebook ads campaigns to drive traffic to their website. How valuable would the information be for knowing the visitor activity? How many visitors do you have? Where do they land? What further actions do they do? What’s the time spent, bounce rate, etc?

The answer is it is extremely valuable. Google Analytics is a powerful tool for measuring and analyzing the success of your website. With so much data at our fingertips, it has become essential to any business owners who have a website.

How Does Google Analytics Work?

Implementing a small code into your website is all you need to start tracking the behaviour of visitors. This code then provides many other tools that can help you to improve your business website since the platform provides you with a full picture of how your site is performing.

Google analytics can also make tracking what matters most in an organization more transparent than ever before. Whether it’s website traffic data collected on all devices; customer behaviour patterns revealed by their search engine queries, it’s all there for you to use.

Types Of Data

The types of data collected by google analytics are:

• the total number of visitors and source of traffic.
• visitor demographic, geographic, and technological details.
• time spent on the website and further actions.
• most popular page/post on your website.
• at what stage of a visit do users leave your site.

How To Set Up A Google Analytics Account

Getting started with Google Analytics is free and easy – all you need is a google account. If you do not have one, you can easily create an account and get started with google analytics.

Firstly, click on the start measuring button and follow the on-screen instructions. Next fill out the basic information on account setup and on a property setup section, then select options that you want to measure on your website. Lastly, accept the terms of service agreement and your account is ready to onboard!

While setting an account and property, make sure to enter the exact details and things you are planning to track. If you are not sure about the options, you can keep all options ticked and continue the process. Once you have created your Analytics account, you will be able to add up to 50 different sites to track. However, for now, enter the URL you want to link.

Finally, click on the create button and congratulations – your Analytics account is up and running! Look out for the tracking code that will be provided for the site which you chose to track. This tracking code allows google analytics to collect data from visitors and give you an accurate picture of how people use your site.

Now it’s time to add the tracking code to your website. If you do not know how to navigate the tracking code, simply follow these 4 steps:  Go to Admin  >>  Property >> Tracking Info >> Tracking Code

How To Set Up A Tracking Code On Your Website

Go to the settings icon at the bottom left-hand side, select the account, property and click on “Tracking code”, followed by “tracking info”. You will see the website tracking code which you will have to connect on your website.

You might need technical knowledge to implement this code because sometimes a small misplacement of code in the website might completely break the whole thing. If you do not know how to implement code correctly, contact us today for free assistance!

Once you log in to your website’s backend CMS system, you can add the piece of JavaScript code called “Global Site Tag (gtag.js)” into the header section of the website or simply follow the instructions given on where you need to place the code.

Once done, check to send some test traffic to ensure the placement of code is successfully completed.

If you see the test traffic showing up on your analytics dashboard, congratulations, the setup was successful and you can now get started! Google Analytics will start tracking data as soon as there’s enough for it to work properly – but before that happens there are other features you can set up.

Navigating The Google Analytics Dashboard

Now that you’ve learned how to set up a google analytics account, it will start tracking your website visitors and you can access detailed information on the analytics dashboard. You can access these reports through the Google Analytics dashboard.

The homepage of that dashboard is shown below and is also known as the “Overview Dashboard”, this is where each of your visits to analytics begins and it’s you’ll find everything you need to navigate through the platform. Note that it might take up to 24 hours to collect enough information about website visitors to view your first report.

Home Customization

In this section, you can personalize your analytics dashboard. You can add or remove things that bring value to your report. You can also create your own dashboards which will save you time navigating on other different tabs to find data you need.

Real-Time

Here you can see the real-time visitor data on your website. You can easily access other valuable information such as locations, website traffic source, content or web page, events, and conversions on your website as well.

However, to track conversion and events, first, you need to set up goals and conversion values. These are important steps for any business owner who sells products and services using the company website or any other type of e-commerce business. Tracking a website activity and setting a goal will help to measure the success of marketing campaigns or even the usability of the web pages and by using these data you might find the area of improvement in your website.

If you do not know what a goal is or how to set up one on your website, do not worry! We have added a section on this blog below where you will learn to set up goals.

Audience

The Audience dashboard is where you can find out more information about your website users. You will get a broad view of the data Analytics makes available to you, including how many people visited your website. You can also see how many of them are new and returning, the average time spent, device used, language, operating system, and more.

If you would like to find a data on particular date range, you can adjust the date and access the audience report. However, the date range must be after you have added google analytics tracking code to your website. This section is a useful section if you want to learn more about your audience. Here you can find each and every piece of information about your website visitors including their interest and flow. This means you can see how, when and from where visitors came to your site, and further steps are taken such as landing on the home page and clicking on contact us.

Another useful aspect of an audience report is that you can drill more in-depth info about the audience which will help you to understand more about them and plan an effective marketing campaign.

Acquisition

This dashboard provides insight and information about how your website visitors found your sites such as advertisements, social media campaigns, or organic searches. Moreover, in this section, a report displays several dimensions and metrics.

The metrics and dimensions are split into three categories; ‘acquisition,’ ‘behaviour,’ and ‘conversions.’ ‘Acquisition’ section shows you different channels where users came from.

There are other sub-sections under it like all traffic, google ads, search console, social and campaigns.

‘All Traffic’ is where you’ll find more in-depth reports into the data displayed on the overview report.

‘Google ads’ is where you’ll find an insight report on how different campaigns drive traffic to the website.

The ‘Search Console’ reports let you view how users reach your site via organic search. You can find out things like how many users access your site from Google and which search queries they use.

Nevertheless, using google analytics is like a gold mine for businesses and marketers to learn about people visiting an individual or business website.

Behaviour

This is where you can access comprehensive data on what users do on your website. The overview report shows you information on page views, session duration, and bounce rate, among other details of the user.

Furthermore, you can access other websites’ performance metrics such as speed, content, events, and user flow. With all of this information, you can find out which page on the website is performing best, keeping visitors longer and which one is not. It will help you to identify areas of improvement to provide a better user experience.

Conversion

Last but not the least, the main analytics dashboard is the conversion dashboard. Conversions show you how visitors converted or took an action that you are willing them to take. This section is directly linked with goals.

But how do you define goals? Goals are your objective. It could be a successful purchase, visiting the designated page or it could be clicking on an element on-site or subscribing to newsletters.

Google Analytics Dashboards

Using the dashboards described above can help you get a good handle on many aspects of your site. It can help you smarten up your content and sharpen your marketing, alongside making many other improvements such as:

• Customize your report as per your need.
• A real-time dashboard shows the overall information about your website visitor information such as location, content, referrer, and device.
• The audience dashboard shows the insight data of the website audiences.
• The behaviour dashboard shows the insight data of how your website visitor is taking different types of actions.
• The acquisition dashboard shows how did your visitor find your website.
• The conversion dashboard shows the how, when, and where the conversion takes place and the value of the conversion.

Setting up Google Analytics Goals

Businesses invest in websites for many reasons. Undoubtedly, most of them exist to increase revenue, show online web presence and enhance customer relationships by providing an effective way of communication. Whatever your site’s objective is, Google Analytics Goals provide a way for you to assess how well you are meeting those objectives.

It is essential for any business with a website to set up goals and keep a track of them via the google analytics goal feature. Let’s get started on how to set up a goal in analytics.

On the analytic dashboard, first, go to the admin panel in the bottom left corner. Select the account and property and view. Click on Goals. That opens a new page on which you should choose the ‘+ New Goal’ button. You can then decide whether to use an existing goal template or create a custom goal.

Goal templates will satisfy the needs of most site owners. They are designed to let you track all the common goals which sites have.

If you wish to create a custom goal, it is pretty easy to do so.

• Give a name to your goal.
• Choose one of the options on Goal Slot ID.

Every Analytics goal records a conversion when a site user performs a specific action. Which action that is, depends on the type of goal you choose.

• Destination — When a user visits a defined URL, a conversion is recorded.
• Duration — When a user spends a certain amount of time on-site, a conversion is recorded.
• Pages/Screens per Session — When a user views a pre-set number of pages in a session.
• Event — When a user performs a specific action. For instance, clicking a link or playing a video.

Once you have chosen the type of goal you want to create, there are a couple of further steps. Google Analytics provides on-screen instructions.

If you want to track a conversion when someone visits thank you page after purchasing a product from your website, simply get the URL of Thank you page and paste it into goal details. Or if you are willing to track conversion in monitory value, turn on the monitory value and add strings on it.

Once you completed the field, click on save. Now you have successfully set up the goal with conversion value! From now on, whenever someone purchases a product from your website and is redirected to Thank you page, analytics will track it as a conversion. The data will be available on the conversion dashboard.

Some Pro Tips:

• Block business IP address from tracking.
• Using Google tag manager helps to check if the tracking is set up correctly.
• Do not perform multiple tests on goals as it might affect your overall data.

The Main Benefits Of Using Google Analytics For Your Business

• Google Analytics is free and it’s the most popular analytics service on the market
• Google Analytics will help you identify major areas of improvement in your business websites with a data-driven approach.
• Google Analytics provides real-time data about your website visitors, including where they are coming from, what pages they visit, how long they spend on each page, which device or browser type they use. With these data, you can have a good understanding of your audience and optimize your marketing strategies/campaigns.
• You can set up goals to track conversions from your site- like making a purchase, visiting a particular page, or actions on-page elements depending upon the business objectives.
• The dashboard makes it easy to see all this information in one place so you don’t have to log into multiple accounts every day.

Don’t think you have the time to do or monitor these yourself? Move Ahead Media has been in the business for more than 11 years, with industry experience of more than 20 so this is all second nature to us. We can do all the digital marketing for you, while you focus on the core of your business. As one of the few Google Premier Partner agencies around, we have a direct line with Google themselves and have the best and latest training straight from the digital powerhouse. Let us help you move ahead! Get in touch with us for more information.