Everything you Need to Know about Google Analytics

Everything you Need to Know about Google Analytics

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a powerful plugin that allows you to track and analyse your website traffic. It is one of the world’s most popular and effective statistical/analytical tools for SEO and marketing.

Free of charge to download and use, Google Analytics is a must-have tool for anyone interested in growing their website with digital marketing.

What does Google Analytics allow you to see?

Google Analytics gives you access to a great deal of information. For example, using the tool, you’ll discover how many visitors are coming to your website, and where they’re coming from.

Because it’s free to anyone with a Google account, Google Analytics is particularly popular amongst small and medium sized businesses – especially those within the e-commerce sector.

By collecting website visitor insights, it can help businesses determine top sources of user traffic, gauge the success of their marketing, track goal completions, discover patterns and trends in user engagement, and obtain visitor demographics.

For example, are they coming from Google, YouTube, Facebook or Instagram (or a combination of these platforms)? What is the percentage of visitors coming from each of these platforms? How long are they spending on your website, and which pages are they clicking on? What is your website’s bounce rate, and where is the bounce taking place?

Google Analytics is so advanced that it even gives you access to information about your visitors such as:

· Gender

· Age

· City/country  

· Devices being used by your audience

· Audience interests

· Etc.

As you can see, Google Analytics provides access to plenty of important data.

Google Analytics can track up to 200 different metrics to evaluate website performance, including:

· Unique visitors to the website

· Bounce rate

· Average session duration

· Average number of pages viewed per session

· Times visitors completed specific goals as defined by the company

Google Analytics can tell a company when customers added products to carts, or when a contact information form is filled out.

Tracking specific information like this is incredibly useful to businesses, and far more advantageous that the amount of traffic received overall. 

Having a website but not having Google Analytics is a huge mistake. You will struggle to understand how your website is doing, and will have very little information in terms of the future direction of your site.

How does Google Analytics Work?

Google Analytics works in a number of ways, depending on the purpose of your site.

For instance, let’s say that the main goal of your website is to sell a product or promote a service, then ultimately get paid for that product or service.

Let’s also assume that you’re running ads to your website through Google, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. Once Google Analytics is up and running, you’ll receive a special code that you will need to insert into your site in order to assist with tracking.

Once the code is inserted into your site, it will then track where your site visitors are coming from, so that you can determine which ads or platforms are generating the most or the least amount of traffic. You’ll also be able to see whether your video ads are performing better than your picture ads (or vice versa).

Once the visitors are on your site, the code enables you to see how many people are bouncing off your website before making a purchase. Not only that, but it also shows you which page they are bouncing off from. Perhaps it’s a particular product landing page? Your homepage? The shopping cart?

By being able to determine where people are bouncing, you’ll be able to make improvements to specific areas of your site, so that you can encourage you site visitors to keep travelling down that funnel and ultimately making a purchase.

One major benefit of Google Analytics is that it’s not complicated to install, run or understand. The platform helps users to make sense of the data by providing:

· Data visualisations and monitoring tools

· Data filtering, manipulation and funnel analysis

· Predictive analytics and anomaly detection

· Custom reports for advertising, acquisition and audience conversion

As you can see, Google Analytics is a powerful and user-friendly resource providing you with plenty of useful statistics about your audience/visitors.

Do you use Google Analytics? What features are the most valuable to you?

EWM is a Geneva-based digital marketing agency offering end-to-end solutions for your business. Achieve your every business goal with a comprehensive digital marketing services – including SEO keywords, online optimisation and Google Analytics.

Don’t get lost in the noise. Contact our specialists today for support in achieving your precise business goals.