What is Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics service by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, where that traffic has come from, and how individual users interact with your website.
A tracking code is embedded in a website and executed in a web browser when a user browses a page and collects visitor data.
Google Analytics shows webmasters what percentage of their visitors came from each a variety of sources including Organic search, referral traffic and social channels.
In 2012 Google Analtyics was around 55% of the 10,000 most popular websites.
Latest figures show Google Analytics is the industry leader across the world wide web, with 72% of businesses/personal websites choosing to use it as their user tracking software.
Why Use Google Analytics
Using Google Analytics can better help website owners understand the effectiveness of their digital marketing efforts, their visitors, conversions and sales.
Webmasters can track where users activity on their website, how long do they stay on the website, and their bounce rate (the percentage of users exiting a site on the first visit/single pageview).
10 Reasons Why You Should Use Google Analytics
1. Google Analytics is free
2. Collection of user data is Automated
3. Ability create customisation reports
4. Integration with multiple tools and 3rd party platforms
5. Measure the internal site search if present and other interactive features
6. Understand why visitors are leaving off your website
7. Build persona profiles including age, gender, interest, device and location of your audience.
8. Understand which social platforms to target
9. Understand and plan content marketing strategies
10. Check if you are achieving defined goals
Google Analytics Tips
1. Use Audience Data When Creating Custom Visitor Segments
2. Assign a Monetary Value to Goals
3. Examine Your Top Conversion Paths
4. Set Up Intelligence Events
5. Compare Historical Traffic Trends
6. Add Annotations to Your Reports
The Importance of Google Analytics
- Google analytics allows masters to measure the results of individual digital marketing campaigns in real-time while comparing the data to previous periods, and so much more.Google Analytics has a variety of features that allow webmasters to evaluate how well their website and content connect with users.
- These analytics metrics monitor different aspects of the customer journey through a website.
- Proper understanding of these metrics will allow a webmaster to create a list of steps they can take to improve their website to drive traffic, sales and, by extension, profit.
- Webmasters can compare users who visit their website from different devices and evaluate how each one works, giving valuable insights into their user experience.
- Not only does Google Analytics explain the importance of critical metrics, but it also compares the scores of your website with others in your industry and then offers you actionable insights based on your data to improve the quality of your website.
- For example, if a webmaster has an understanding of the conversion rate of their website, they can make changes to your site over time and calculate how those tweaks influence conversion rate and other statistics.
- For example, if you know that 40% of your website visitors are from South America, you might be able to deliver a more personalised experience by providing a Spanish version of your website.