What is Google Analytics?
Search giant Google’s free Google Analytics service tracks and reports website traffic and events and is available within the Google Marketing Platform. What’s more, it’s been around for a while, having first been launched in November 2005 following Google’s acquisition of web analytics system Urchin.
In a nutshell, it collects data from websites and apps to create reports granting insights into your business and its digital performance.
Benefits of Google Analytics
With Google Analytics, you gain a deep knowledge of the way your customers engage with your organisation, making you better placed to offer enhanced experiences and results. You can also clarify who your target audience is and track different conversions such as contact form submissions, while improving Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and content marketing.
The unlocking of customer-focused measurement across your sites and apps gives a clear idea of what’s working and what isn’t. You’ll also be able to see the parts different channels play, thanks to advanced reporting and analysis. Learn which content is most popular, set up conversion goals and more.
With Google’s machine learning, you can learn, for example, which of your sites’ users are more likely to buy or ‘churn’ (i.e. stop using a product). At the same time, Analytics is designed to function in tandem with other Google solutions and partner products to provide insights which actively improve your marketing performance. These include Google Ads and Google Search Console, among others.
It’s easy to work collaboratively and process and share data speedily, plus there’s built-in tech support and a robust infrastructure to ensure the security and accuracy of your data.
Key Features of Google Analytics:
- Built-in automation
- At-a-glance reporting
- Customised analysis
- Data collection and management
- Seamless integration with other Google solutions
Overall, you won’t find a better free resource for analysing and optimising your website’s performance.
Maximising Google Analytics
Use Filters
You can use these to exclude or include data, which helps in many different ways. For example, you can exclude irrelevant traffic, e.g. internal visitors like your staff, who would be on your website anyway. Or you can only track those who have actually landed on your website or different pages within your site. Or keep out referral spam, or Google Analytics sampling.
Set up Goals (Conversions)
These could be for any action you want someone who visits your site to take, whether that’s viewing a video, downloading a file, completing a form, or clicking on a phone number.
Create Views
Set up these to track your metrics as accurately as possible. The three every site should have include:
- Raw/unfiltered – This means you won’t completely lose your data if anything goes wrong
- Master – This is your main View for reporting and tracking, and will typically incorporate some filters.
- Test – Before adding filters to your Master view, set them up in test mode and run for a few days. Once it’s all working well, apply to the Master view.
Linking your Google Ads Account
Don’t consider Google Analytics data in isolation. After all, your website only represents a single part of your marketing strategy. So link Google Analytics to other products from the search giant, particularly Google Ads and Search Console.
Create Custom Audience Segments
Different audience segments will behave differently. The more details you capture, the easier it is to create campaigns tailored to each one. Use Analytics to create custom segments according to user info, behaviour, date of first session and more.
Set up Funnels
A funnel is a customer’s journey from awareness of a brand through to conversion to making a purchase. Use Analytics to see where in the funnel you’re potentially losing customers, and note the proportion of website users who drop away at every stage of the process.
Google Analytics Consultants Guidance
At Simply Search, we’re skilled and experienced Google Analytics consultants, and use the platform so our clients can make the best decisions for their businesses. We fully appreciate the platform’s importance in terms of measuring performance, understanding user behaviour, identifying audience segments and more, to help optimise website performance.
Let us help you with a full Analytics audit complete with reports and advice, so that you achieve tangible results – we give you the information you need to beat the competition and make informed choices. Contact us or gain a free website review today to begin your journey.