Google Analytics is one of the best and most valuable resources for tracking and analyzing website traffic.

This article is for you if you don’t understand what Google Analytics is, haven’t installed or used it on your website, or have installed it but never check your results. Though it may be difficult for some to believe, there are still websites that do not use Google Analytics (or any analytics, for that matter) to monitor traffic. In this article, we’ll look at Google Analytics from the standpoint of a complete novice. Why is it necessary, how do you get it, how do you use it, and its cons?

What is Google Analytics?

GA, is an analytics tool that provides you with a comprehensive view of your website and app results. It connects with Google’s marketing and advertisement services and products (including Google Ads, Search Console, and Data Studio), making it a standard option for anyone who uses various Google resources. It offers valuable insights that enable you to develop the company’s success plan.

In simple terms, Google Analytics is a free tracking tool provided by Google that shows you how visitors interact with your website.

Importance of Google Analytics

GA enables you to monitor and comprehend your customers’ actions, user experience, web content, application features, and other factors. Google Analytics provides you with the data you need to enable you to formulate your business’s growth plan, revealing details about visitors to your site that you probably didn’t know before. Here are some of the benefits why you should use Google Analytics:

1. Free

If you have a tight budget, anything else on this list will sound fantastic without encouraging you that it is worthwhile to spend money on this tool. However, you are not required to pay anything. Google Analytics is completely free.

Google will not charge you for using this product. Furthermore, it provides you with vital details, numbers, and statistics to assist you in optimizing the success of your website. You may use these methods to spend a significant portion of your expenditure on other essential tools.

2. Easy to use

If you’re not a technology whiz, hearing about outstanding software programs can make you wonder how fun it would be for other people who can find out how to use them. However,GA is simple enough for even inexperienced website owners with basic computer skills to comprehend.

3. Automatic data collection

GA can make it easier to import Google Analytics data into Google Docs, Sites, or Spreadsheets. You must not do anything to obtain the data. Google Analytics does everything for you.

All you have to do is create a GA account and paste a small piece of code into your website. This will allow GA to begin automatically gathering data from your website and producing reports as a result.

You can also view your reports right away without any hesitation. This GA functionality not only saves you time but also gives you direct bearing on the outcome(report).

4. Customer engagement

GA is an effective technique for measuring your online performance. It enables you to monitor how users communicate with your website and web content. These fundamental indicators assess and track various facets of the user experience, demonstrating how users view the website and advertisements.

5. Conversion tracking

When anyone visits your website, it is usually a positive thing. It is, however, much more important to know how many folks are converting. You may use GA to set up targets to monitor whenever a user performs a specific action on your website.

 

You must understand how your web traffic converts so that you can take the appropriate steps to either strengthen your practices or make a change that will yield the desired results.

How to install Google Analytics

To begin, you must have a GA account. If you have a primary Google account that you are using for other services such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google+, or YouTube, you can use that Google account to set up Google Analytics. Alternatively, you would need to make a new one. You can always give other people exposure to your Google Analytics later on, but you don’t want them to have absolute control over it.

1. Set up your account
2. Add a view to your property
3. Install tracking code
4. Set up site search
5. Add optional accounts and properties
6. Visit your GA portal and verify the code is working.

 

Google Analytics Reports

In terms of reports, here is a brief rundown of what you would expect to find in each of the generic Google Analytics reporting pages.

• Acquisition Report

Acquisition reports are beneficial when it is first beginning with Google Analytics. It will show you how visitors arrive at your website. According to its source, the Acquisition report categorizes your traffic: organic, direct, recommendation, email, social, paid search, display, associate, and others.

• Behavior Report

When it comes to determining what your website users are doing, you can check the Behavior report in Google Analytics.

• Conversion Report

Ultimately, we reach Google Analytics’ final report, Conversion. It indicates how your website’s conversion rate is doing, as the name implies.

A visitor’s conversion rate is essentially any task that they accomplish. It may be as simple as uploading a video, purchasing a product, or referring to your newsletter in order to expand your email list.

The Bad side of Google Analytics        

Google Analytics shines at revealing the start and finish of a visitor’s trip, but the center is hazy. Indeed, it will tell you how often people came to your website, where they went, and even many promotions were the most popular.

• GA is essentially designed to monitor page views and activities across individual sessions, with additional technology bolted on and try to expand it to quantify someone over repeated visits. If you want to quantify something more specific, such as which blog retains long-term subscribers or the influx of leads converted into clients, you’ll need to look for an alternative.
• To grasp the complexities of Google Analytics, you must first “learn the language.” Unfortunately, finding the right tools online can be difficult, and directions can be frustrating, time-consuming, or daunting for anyone without an essential analytics experience.
• The platform’s overall atmosphere can be overwhelming. There are several dashboards, configurations, user views, and metrics to choose from.
• The free edition of Google Analytics is suitable for almost all users, but if your web traffic is heavy and you want to upgrade to the paid version, there is a massive premium of $150,000 to consider.

Final Verdict

Google Analytics is a perfect fit if you want a considerable amount of data and, most importantly, the time and resources to evaluate and execute on it. It does, however, require time to set up, understand, enforce, manage, and use. In more useful ones, Google Analytics can do magic for your company. It gives you valuable insights that you can use to boost your website’s results and improve conversions. Despite the reality that there are numerous other analytics management systems available, Google Analytics remains a free and highly applicable platform for handling your website’s statistics.

 

images Source: neilpatel