Google Analytics Tutorial
What is Google Analytics?
Digital Marketing is one of the most competitive business environments. Every day there are small, medium and large businesses who are advertising through Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram and/or Bing Ads. In order for a company to have success in selling their products and/or services through any platform, they need to take advantage of all the tools they have available.
Google Analytics is a free tracking tool from Google which helps business owners understand their audience and website from different perspectives. It grants access to some of the more relevant aspects to consider from their audience, such as their age, location, gender, and just as importantly, it sheds light on how the audience interacts with your website, if and how goals are being achieved through your website; it pretty much, in a nutshell, tracks every interaction that takes place within your website. An interaction can be any action taken on your website. How people interact on your website will help you get to better know your audience and will also give you insights on how your website is performing.
Above all, it is simple to install, all you have to do is add a JavaScript tracking code in the <head> of every web page you want to track. This data will be imported into the Google Analytics platform and you will be able to start having a more comprehensive profile from your users and their interactions with your site. Since most websites contain a header, it’s usually as simple as adding the JavaScript code snippet provided by Google to the header.html file and you will begin tracking activity throughout your entire site.
How Can Google Analytics Help Your Business?
Marketing is constantly changing, what used to work in the past may not necessarily work now and this tendency is not going to change; therefore, business owners like yourself need to adapt to these changes. We have encountered many websites that have landing pages which take a significant amount of time to load (a few seconds is already too much) or the number of page views may be low due to aspects such as the content not being as relevant as it had originally been thought, causing a high bounce rate on that landing page. Some of these issues are hard to fix even if you are able to identify it; nevertheless, they are impossible to fix when the issues are not even recognized.
Knowing about how your audience interacts with your website will allow you to make the changes that you need in order to increase your profits. There are metrics like the average time on page, bounce rate, search queries, and average page load time that give you information to make the necessary changes to reach your overall business objectives.
Let’s try using a real-life example: Say your industry is welding services and you’ve never had Google Analytics installed on your website. As of now, you haven’t realized that your boat welding landing page takes 8-10 seconds to load due to some technical errors on the back-end of your website which need to be optimized (read more about SEO) and therefore, it’s causing a high bounce rate. It’s easy to misinterpret the information and feel that people are likely to be more interested in your vehicle welding service for the wrong reasons since the call volume has been directed for that particular service. The data collected from Google Analytics will help you fix those errors and take advantage of unexploited opportunities. By doing so, you might see an increase in the number of calls to your business asking for boat welding. This service might have been the one giving you the most profit and by fixing those mistakes you increase the likelihood to receive calls asking for this service, consequently, increasing the revenue for your business.
Pay-Per-Click & Google Analytics
As stated previously, marketing is changing constantly. Previous Marketing Strategies such as face to face, print ads, flyers, and brochures have been replaced significantly by Digital Marketing. Consumer Barometer from Google states that 86% of Americans use the Internet for personal purposes, and they use it daily.[efn_note]https://www.consumerbarometer.com/en/graph-builder/?question=N1&filter=country:united_states[/efn_note]
This is why most business owners have taken the decision to invest in Pay-Per-Click efforts. When they do that and utilize platforms such as Google Ads or Bing Ads, they need not only to focus on the metrics given by Google Ads but also look in detail at the data collected in Google Analytics to optimize their campaigns.
In some cases, we have encountered websites which are not mobile-friendly. Nowadays this is a must since the percentage of users utilizing mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones is significantly higher and the trend continues to be an upward trend.
Know Your Audience & Create Audiences
Google Analytics allows you to create different Audiences[efn_note]https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2611404?hl=en[/efn_note] based on specific goals that you’ve defined. These goals may vary from one industry to another. You can create a general list of all visitors if you are a lead generation business. The audience accrued can help you, in the future, to re-market to these users, (once the requirements are met)[efn_note]https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/2472738?hl=en[/efn_note] and therefore, increase the likelihood to receive more leads. This information can also give you some insights in regards to how new users behave in comparison to returning visitors and this data is provided by Google Analytics.
Now, let’s say that you have an E-Commerce website, and you would like to specifically target people who have reached the shopping cart landing page (the final stage of the buying process within your site) but then they bounced out. As they have taken the time to navigate through your website and selected the items they want, you want to capitalize on these users. With Google Analytics you are able to create an audience specifically for Cart Abandoners who in the future you can re-market with a different message in the ad you publish to target this audience, maybe a promotion or discount, and increase the likelihood of them completing the sale and increasing your profits.
Audiences may be as granular as you want them to be. You can create audiences based on landing pages, devices, operating systems, age or gender. They may take some time to be gathered, but when they are created and implemented in Pay-Per-Click efforts they can make a huge impact on your business.
It may take you some time to gather these audiences, depending on your traffic and buying funnel, but it’s a fact that the more granular the audiences you have, the higher the possibility to become more prominent to your users.
Let’s Get You Started With Google Analytics
We know that all business owners are looking to increase their profits – it’s a simple fact. Moreover, the fact of being a business owner is time-consuming since you have to manage various aspects of the business, and let’s face it, sometimes you don’t have the time to check all the details stated above. If that is the case, give us a call, any of our Account Managers will gladly walk you through any questions or inquiries you may have regarding Google Analytics or other aspects related to Digital Marketing.