In today’s digital landscape, understanding and leveraging data is fundamental for businesses to thrive, and among the vast number of tools available is Google Analytics. This insightful tool offers a treasure trove of information that can be utilised to propel your business’s online presence to new heights. In the first part of this blog series, we will be delving into what Google Analytics is and what it does to give you an idea of just how powerful this tool is in terms of business growth.
WHAT IS GOOGLE ANALYTICS?
Google Analytics is a free, web-analytical tool that integrates with Google’s marketing tools such as Google Ads and Search Console. It tracks a range of indispensable data such as website traffic, user behaviour and site performance to provide an in-depth look at a website or app’s overall performance.
How it tracks these metrics is mostly automated which is advantageous for busy website owners who may not have the time on their hands to spend collecting data.
Whilst the standard version of the tool is free, there is also a paid version of the tool that provides more features if a business feels that the standard features are not sufficient for their business prospects.
WHAT DOES GOOGLE ANALYTICS DO?
At the heart of Google Analytics is its data collection capabilities. The tool collects data as users interact with a site, capturing data such as session duration, page views and referral sources. The information collected can be separated into four types of user information:
Various reports are available in Google Analytics that can give you information about your website’s performance, these include:
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REAL-TIME REPORTS
Aptly named, this report provides data about what is occurring on your site in real time. For example, how many visitors are currently on your site, which pages they are visiting, descriptions of those users and if they have come from another social platform.
Whilst this report can be beneficial for tracking things such as custom events or monitoring traffic to a new blog post, real-time reports are not valuable when considering the long-term success of a site.
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USER REPORTS
This report is extremely valuable as it provides you with data surrounding your prospects and allows you to confirm how well your marketing efforts are working from different viewpoints.
It can confirm if visitors are coming from a platform that you are marketing on or can help you to make discoveries about new locations to invest your efforts.
Under the ‘user’ report tab are two sub-sections; ‘demographics’ and ‘tech’.
DEMOGRAPHICS
This tab allows you to fully understand your users by providing information about their age, country, city, language, gender and interests. This data can help you to tailor your marketing efforts more effectively.
TECH
This report shows information about users’ devices and splits them into desktop, mobile devices and tablet categories. This tab also shows the user’s method of accessing the website such as if they were viewing the site from an iOS app or an Android app. This information under this tab can help you to plan and improve your content to better fit user preferences.
This particular report provides insight into more specific consumer behaviour rather than generic as you can track particular metrics.
Understanding your target audience is essential when trying to build your online presence. Access to data such as the interests, age and location of your audience can lead you to make informed decisions about your marketing activities that will lead to your content being more engaging and audience appropriate.
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LIFECYCLE REPORT
This report is comprised of four sub-sections: acquisition, engagement, monetization and retention. This report is customer-centric and showcases the customer journey by mirroring the sales funnel.
ACQUISITION
Acquisition reports break traffic down by source into the following groups: organic, referral, social, email, paid search, display, affiliate and other. This report is useful if you are wanting a more granular look at the ways people are coming to your site. Many businesses will create a landing page to help track this data to also determine where website traffic is originating from.
Moreover, you may notice that 65% of your website traffic is coming from Instagram, whilst only 10% is coming from LinkedIn. This is valuable information that can help you to make informed decisions about where to focus your marketing efforts to ensure that they are creating the best chances of conversions.
Gathering data about the types of devices that have been used to access your website can also be handy to inform you whether your site is mobile-responsive and user-friendly.
ENGAGEMENT
Since the introduction of GA4, there is now a way to directly measure engagement on a website. Using GA4, website owners can calculate how users engage with their content based on conversion events and using ‘engaged sessions’ data.
Conversion metrics can also be helpful to investigate, for example, when looking at conversion rates by device. The goal may be to sign up for a monthly newsletter, but you’ve noticed that the conversion rates on mobile devices are much lower than conversion rates on desktops. This may be suggesting that there is a problem with the mobile version of the site that is making it difficult to complete the conversion. You are then able to look into this problem and resolve it to boost your conversion rates.
Additionally, under engagement reports, you are able to explore pages and screen reports. This provides information about specific pages on the site. For example, the top-trafficked pages on the site and average engagement levels.
If you are noticing that certain pages are receiving more traffic than others, it is usually an indication that those are the types of pages that users prefer to look at which should then encourage you to provide more of that type of content across your site.
Similarly, the pages with the lowest amount of traffic may not be worth the investment of time, money and resources so this helpful data can help to prevent you from focusing your efforts on the wrong things.
MONETIZATION
This tab shows revenue-based events such as purchases. This provides information about revenue sources and allows owners to identify user trends and determine the efficiency of their campaigns. This feature is customisable, so it can be tailored to what you wish to monitor as a business.
RETENTION
This report shows the percentage of established users who return each day in the first 42 days after first visiting your website. This will display how well users engage with your content and how frequently they want to revisit your site.
Additionally, if your goal is to have repeat visitors, this report can provide you with KPIs (key performance indicators) about the percentage of returning visitors to your site.
Having access to more information about how your customers are working through the customer lifecycle will help you to make better informed decisions about what is working well and what is not. Moreover, your customers are the driving force of many businesses so being able to understand their behaviour is advantageous in order to keep the business relationship developing well.
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EXPLORER REPORT
In the previous version of Google Analytics, this feature was only available to those who were paying for it. With the new update, explore reports are now available to everyone.
These reports allow website owners to build their own personalised reports and uncover more detailed insights about their site and its users.
There are 7 types of exploration analysis techniques currently available with Google Analytics:
As seen throughout this blog, Google Analytics is an invaluable tool that allows businesses to make informed decisions based on a massive variety of data-driven insights. Knowing how to optimise the use of this tool and leverage its functionalities can unlock a range of opportunities for a business’s online presence.