What is Google Analytics?
Find out the importance of Google Analytics today!
Google Analytics, also known as GA, is a free tool that enables you to track and analyse your website and your website’s traffic. If you’re a website owner, you most likely want to expand your business. Google Analytics is a great tool that helps you do just that.
Brief Summary
Google Analytics is a tool that helps you track and analyse traffic and user behaviour on your website. It provides valuable insights into how visitors interact with your website.
People looking into buying products/services do so in stages, also referred to as a purchase funnel.
- Acquisition
This is the stage where you acquire awareness and user interests. Basically, this is when users start recognising your brand and getting interested in your products.
- Behaviour
This is the stage where the user engages with your business. Whether it’s reading an article you’ve written or knowing which page a user decides to exit your website.
- Conversion
This is the stage where the user buys a product/service you’re offering and becomes a customer.
With Google Analytics, you can track this funnel and gain insights, such as what led the user to become a customer? Or even the opposite, what lead the user to exit your website? With GA, you can analyse which of your marketing campaigns are performing well and which are not to improve your marketing activities. You can understand your user’s behaviour to, hopefully, acquire new users.
The importance of Google Analytics
Google Analytics will help you understand your customer better. For example, it enables you to understand what your customers like and don’t like and how they behave on your website. In addition, it’ll notify you if there are any challenges on your website, especially conversion challenges.
So, what is the best use of Google Analytics? Google Analytics allows you to see and analyse all your website’s data. If you don’t keep track of data relating to your website and business, you’ll have a hard time growing your business. Therefore, below we describe the importance of Google Analytics.
Users
Google Analytics allows you to know how many visitors are visiting your website. Keeping track of how many visitors you have on average is very important. You want to ensure that your visitors are steadily increasing every week or month. Google Analytics lets you see and track this data so that you can make sure that you’re doing everything right. If you’re not happy with the number of visitors you have on average, you can decide to optimise your website or implement marketing activities.
Additionally, GA allows you to see where your which source your visitors are coming from. Knowing where your visitors are coming from is also an essential piece of information. For example, if you know that your visitors are coming from Google, you know that your SEO efforts are paying off or that your Google Ads campaigns are working. However, if it’s the opposite, if your visitors are not coming from Google but finding your website, for example, through Facebook, then you know that you need to work on your website’s SEO or Google Ads. Keep in mind that this applies if you already work with SEO and Google Ads.
But that’s not all. Google Analytics also allows you to see the age span of your visitors, their gender, their city, and their country. So you have all this important information that will help you make your website and business successful.
Google Analytics also lets you see how long your visitors are staying on your website. For example, suppose you’ve written a long article. In that case, you can use Google Analytics to see if your visitors have read the entire article or if they lost interest somewhere in between and exited your website. You can optimise the pages on your website with a high bounce rate, i.e., where people have left the page quickly after they visited it. While we’re on the topic of pages, you can also see which pages people are visiting the most. If you have pages with low traffic, you can refresh the content and optimise the page to gain more traffic.
Imagine being a website owner but not using Google Analytics. You would miss out on important data that can help you increase your online traffic. This is the importance of Google Analytics.
How does Google Analytics work?
If you’re a website owner and you sell products or services on your website, GA is the tool for you. If you sell products/services on your website, you’re also most likely working with paid ads; running your ads with Google, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube etc. These are four great platforms where you can run ads to ensure that people find your website.
Before we go any further if you have not installed GA yet, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. In this article, we’re describing how you can set up Google Analytics and get started. After installing the GA tool, the tracking code you receive from GA will track all the visitors coming from the four platforms we mentioned above.
With the help of Google Analytics, you can see which platform is generating the most traffic and which is generating the least. You can also monitor whether your ads on YouTube (video ads) work better than your ads on Instagram/Facebook (image ads). With the help of this data, you can tweak around until you have a process and system in place that works best for you.
Knowing which page a visitor decided to bounce from your website is a great insight. For example, if a visitor exits your website while on the checkout page, you can dig deep into why visitors abandon their shopping cart. Shopping cart abandonment is a huge problem; knowing how to avoid it is great. In fact, knowing exactly all the pages on your website that’s underperforming is a great start to turn the trend around.
