Often considered the holy grail of website analysis, Google Analytics is a free service that gives you insights into how users find and use your website. While these stats and figures are known to intimidate some, we’re here to help you understand all the reasons why your business needs Google Analytics!
For starters, you can easily track your website’s performance and gauge the ROI of your online marketing strategy, but trying to decipher the meaning behind all of these numbers can get a bit overwhelming to the untrained eye.
With the help of this handy Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics infographic from the team at Milkwhale, you can confidently dive into your account and let your fears of stats unknown be a thing of the past.
Google Analytics puts several lines of tracking code into the code of your website. This tracking code operates in real-time, recording the demographics and the various activities of your users when they visit your website (a snapshot of data, if you will).
Once recorded, this info is sent to the Google Analytics server. Google Analytics then sorts and classifies the data into multiple fields of dimensions and metrics.
Dimension: A descriptive attribute or characteristic of data; they help you label, organize, and analyze your data.
Metric: A quantitative measurement of your data; they can be sums or ratios.
You can go into even more depth with Google Tag Manager, which is a free tool that allows you to manage and deploy marketing tags (which are snippets of code or tracking pixels) on your website without needing to modify the original code.
Google Analytics can tell you a lot of things, with one of the most compelling being where your site needs improvement. Among the plethora of information available, you’ll be able to see:
Additionally, Google Analytics allows you to study your competition, lets you know what type of content to focus on and create (which will help out with your site’s SEO), and lets you see how you’re ranking over time.
You can create customized reports to categorize certain information, or you could also take a wider view of the gathered metrics as a whole. Taking time to dive more deeply into individual segments (such as Audience Interests or Behavior, Social Network Referrals, or Top Conversion Paths).
Google Analytics has another, more subtle benefit: it can locate advantageous areas to market that you may have overlooked before.
For example, let’s say you’ve been creating posts to share on both Pinterest and Facebook, but your primary interest has been Facebook, due to your larger amount of followers on that platform.
However, when you look into your Google Analytics, you find that while you have a lower number of followers on Pinterest, they are of a higher quality—they match your target audience and demographic, are more engaged with sharing your posted content, and spend, on average, a longer time on your site than those referred from Facebook.
This type of insight is integral to your online marketing strategy (and, quite often, your business’s success).
Why is Google Analytics so great? Media Caffeine Marketing Manager Tabitha Flythe says it best:
Google Analytics is an invaluable tool to our overall marketing strategy. With a behind-the-scenes look at our online traffic, we can pinpoint where our traffic comes from, how that traffic engages with our website, and opportunities where we can pivot to reach new clients. Media Caffeine uses this data makes our digital marketing campaigns highly intentional with a strong likelihood to convert.
Google Analytics is an unbeatable asset to any business owner that wants an accurate and detailed report of their website’s metrics. If you’re looking to boost performance, increase your rankings, and be discovered by the right audience, Google Analytics is the service to use.
Whether you’re just getting started or would like to enhance your knowledge of the service, Media Caffeine can assist you in your dive into Google Analytics. Contact us today!
Kayla Maneen is an SEO strategist and a continual purveyor of the written word. When she isn’t building custom landing pages or researching and writing about new digital marketing techniques, she is busy posting to her personal blog, exploring the wilderness, or trying to brew the perfect cup of Irish tea.
