Understanding Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free website analytics service offered by Google; it provides data and insight into how users find and use your website. You can also track ROI for your online marketing strategy. This website can help you view your visitors’ behaviors through your account dashboard.

Another feature is that you are able to add Google analytical tools such as Ads Account and Search Console. You can additionally add tracking codes; which allow you to closely monitor the success of any advertising, social, or PR campaign. To get this started, you need to install “tracking code” on each page of your website.

Tools and features

There are many features you can utilize within Google Analytics such as:

• Data visualization tools including: a dashboard, scorecards and charts to display changes in data.
• Segmentation for analysis, such as conversions.
• Customized reports.
• Email-based sharing.
• Integration with additional Google resources, such as AdWords and Website Optimizer.

Google Analytics helps you make decisions based on data. You can justify spending more on your advertising; decide where you should be advertising; and what type of content you should be exploring to add to your site. Google Analytics categorizes data into three main buckets:

• Acquisition
• Behavior
• Conversions

Acquisition

Acquisition is the website traffic. The acquisition reports show you how traffic is getting to your site. The overview tab provides you a view of acquisition, behavior, and conversion data for your top traffic sources by channel (referral, direct, organic search, and social). This information displays the number of sessions acquired, the bounce rate, and their conversions. The acquisition report is the best tool to use in order to evaluate what is working well in driving traffic to your site, and how best to maximize the traffic.

Behavior

The Behavior reports show the performance of your website, and what your visitors are doing as they move around your site. You are able to assess the performance of your website content and determine if changes need to be made in order to change the behavior of the site’s visitors. Under the overview within the behavior tab, you will see a graph showing the amount of traffic during a specific period of time.

Additionally, you will see page views, unique page views, average time on page, bounce rate metrics, and percent exit metrics. These metrics show how a user interacted with your website page.

Conversions

A conversion takes place when a visitor to your site takes an action that converts them to a customer. Examples of this could be: filling out a form, purchasing, or becoming more involved with your site. You will need to use the Google Analytics URL Builder to tag your URLs with custom campaign tracking parameters, and then set up a goal within Google analytics. Google Analytics can now create easy-to-read reports that reveal your campaign’s performance.