Why Google Analytics Is The Only Skill You Need?

Introduction Of Google Analytics

• Google Analytics is one of the most powerful web analytics tools which help in identifying the success of an organization’s digital marketing campaigns. Be it content marketing, SEO, SEM, or E-Commerce related campaigns.
• It is a free tool from Google that helps you in keeping track of the amount of traffic coming to your website(s), blogs, and landing page.
• Google Analytics is used to track your social media traffic from sites like Facebook, Linkedin, WordPress, and MySpace, etc.
• The Results from Google Analytics provide you with an accurate picture of the number of users that come on your website, what they do on your website, how long do they stay there, the traffic comes from which channel, what pages are the most effective, how many keywords are ranking well, how many conversion comes on your website, and much more.

What Is The Use Of Google Analytics?

Here are just a few questions about your website that you can get the answers using Google Analytics.

• How many users visit my website or blogs?
• Where do my visitors live?
• Is my website mobile-friendly or user-friendly in terms of bounce rate?
• Which website pages are the most popular?
• What is the interest of my visitors most from my services?
• How many visitors I have and converted it into leads or customers?
• Which social media sites are providing maximum traffic on my website?
• How can I improve my website speed?
• Which of the blogs on my site users like most?
• Is my business getting a target audience?
• Does my traffic come from the targeted country or city?

To get these answers and many more, Let’s have a look at the features of Google Analytics.

What Are The Features Of Google Analytics?

Google Analytics Intelligence

Data Insights

• Google Analytics has introduced the “Analytics Intelligence” feature to reveal insights.
• It crawls through your data on key changes, new trends, and opportunities that could affect your business.

User And Conversion Modeling

Google Analytics Reporting

Audience Reports

• By understanding the type of people that are visiting your website, you will know if your efforts to market to your target audience are working or not.
• The Audience Report provides information about active users based on their interactions with your websites or blogs in the past 1, 7, 14, or 30 days.
• It also provides the user with information about their Demographics, Interests, Locations, Device, etc.

Demographics Report

The Audience Report provides information about the demographics of your audience, such as Age and Gender.

Geo-Location Report

The Geo-Location Report provides information about users coming from which countries or cities.

If you go to the Mobile section in your Google Analytics account, you can get more details related to the device category of site-visitors according to their device usage.

Acquisition Reports

• Do you want to know how people are finding your website or blogs?
• When you find out about your biggest traffic source and medium, then you will get a better idea of where to spend your time and money to grow your business.
• Acquisition Reports used to compare the performance of all marketing channels and identify which sources provide high-quality traffic that helps to get lead.

Behavior Reports

• Are you interested to know about the content that performs best on your website? The Behavior Reports provide all this information which helps to grow your business.
• The behavior report provides an overview of page views, unique page views, average time spent on each page, bounce rate, and exit rate.
• You can review how the content is performing by page URLs, titles, search terms, or events.

Conversion Reports

• Conversion Report shows how all channels are working together to drive conversions on your websites or blogs.
• Conversion Report shows the completed goals, an E-commerce Transaction, and shows a multi-channel conversion visualizer.

A Multi-Channel funnels visualization provides information about the conversions or Goal completions completed by different channels.

Real-Time Reporting

• Real-time reporting allows you to monitor activities on your site in real-time and understand what’s happening on your website or blog at a given moment.
• The Real-Time Overview report shows the number of users that are currently active on your website or blogs.
  It also provides a list of the top active pages, top sources of referral traffic, top social traffic sources, the top locations that users are visiting from, and much more.

Google Analytics Integrations

Google Analytics integrates with different Google products such as Google Ads, Google Data Studio, Google Search Console, Google Adsense, and others.

Google Analytics Other Features

Google Analytics has many features that we use daily, such as Regular Expressions, Filters, Goals, Segments, Annotations, Campaign Tracking, Channel Grouping, Event Tracking, Secondary Dimension Custom Report, Custom Alerts, Shortcuts, etc.

Regular Expression

• Regular expression supports the best features to help in filters, goals, segments, and more. It is useful for both marketers and developers.
• There are more than ten regular expressions in Google Analytics. Some of them we used daily and others maybe rarely.
• The following regular expressions mostly we use daily;
• Pipe (|), Dot (.), Asterisk (*), Dot-Asterisk (.*), Backslash (\), Caret (^), Dollar sign ($), Question mark (?), Parentheses (), Square brackets ([]), Dashes (-), Plus sign (+), Curly brackets ({ }).

About regular expressions (regex)

Filters

• Google Analytics filters can be created by Account level or View level. The best practice to create all filters at the Account level and assign them to different views on requirements.
• If you create a Filter by View level, then the changes will be applied to that particular view only.
  To create a filter, you have two options, either you create a filter by Account level or you create a filter by View level. You can see from the above image.
• To create or apply the filters, you need edit level permission of the GA account.

As you can see, the location IP address is excluded from the view level so we can get genuine visits.

Goals

• The goals in Google Analytics help to improve your website and help to grow your business.
• Goals are the most important feature in Google Analytics. Goals identify what you want to accomplish. Google Analytics has the option to set up 20 goals per view.
• There are four types of goals — Destination, Duration, Pages/Visits, and Events. Here we talk about Destination type as you can see the above image.
• Destination goals tracked when visitors redirected on the specific page after filling up the form on your website.
• We regularly use this goal type to track how many visitors redirect on thank you pages, order confirmation pages, career pages form, inquiry pages.

Segments

• A segment is a subset of Analytics data. Predefined segments are already available in Google Analytics, but you can define your custom segments.
• Google Analytics segments provide deeper insights from the data that you have collected.
• There are two types of segments — simple segments, including demographic data, and advanced segments such as conditions, and sequences, as you can see in the above image.

About segments

Annotations

• Do you keep any note or document when a new campaign starts, or when you make any changes on your google analytics account?
• Google Analytics provides a feature to keep the most important activities that might impact your data. Viz Http to https redirection information such as the date will keep in Annotation can identify the changes on the Google Analytics graph.

Event Tracking

• Google Analytics provides the most useful features, such as Event tracking.
• It allows monitoring of any action that doesn’t trigger a new page load, such as video clicking, phone calls, Internal social media clicking, an outbound link, etc.
• There are two different ways to set up events in Google Analytics — The first one is to add the code manually, and the second one is to set up tracking by Google Tag Manager.

Secondary Dimensions

• To show the specific data by the fixed dimensions and metrics, Google Analytics provides a feature of the second dimension for multiple dimension options.
• As you can see from the above image, metrics have been displayed by multiple dimensions, such as channels and mediums.

Custom Report

• Google Analytics provides flexibility to build your custom report and dashboard by your dimensions, and metrics whatever you need.
• The custom report you can easily export in excel, PDF, Google Sheet, and CSV. files.

Shortcuts

Why Is Google Analytics Necessary For Your Organization?

Google Analytics provides crucial and valuable insights that can help to create a business success strategy.

• Google Analytics helps you understand the business aspects.
• For instance, if you have an online selling product business, you have to study and understand your customers’ requirements so you can deliver better.
• Luckily, Google Analytics provides you the feature to track and understand your customers’ behavior. It helps you answer questions like — what they are looking for, what their interests are, whether your business fulfills their needs, whether your business is mobile-friendly.
• Knowing all answers is necessary for any organization to provide the best services to its customers and grow the business or organization.
• Here’s some example that will tell you about the importance and usage of Google Analytics.

To Understand Referral Traffic

• Identifying the origin of your visitors is the key to creating a great marketing strategy.
• You need to know what your customers are looking for if you have set up an online store.
• Also, you need to know what kind of marketing strategies you need to invest in.
• Google Analytics will help you to give some answers about questions like, where your visitors’ source is from, is your online store getting more mobile traffic, your Mobile app can help to get more customers, etc.

To Understand Which Location Brings Most Customers

• From the GA’s Audience section, you will get detailed information about your user’s location.
• This information is very crucial to understand where your customers are from which helps you to formulate marketing strategies and provide more related services to grow the new customer rate.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034773?hl=en

Customer-Based Segmentations

• If your business is an online store then your customers are different. Their requirements are also different. They react to your website differently.
• If you want to check all the behavior simultaneously and categorize them, then you can use advanced segments to get the required result.
• In other words, you can use the individual filters together in a segment. After getting specific data, you can apply the segment to your reports and dashboards.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3124493?hl=en

To Achieving Goals Information

• Google Analytics provides a Goal feature which helps to track the processing capacity of your business or organization.
• You can create several goals to help you to track the customer’s journey based on their actions.
  For instance, if your business is an online store and your website has an inquiry form, then you can set up a goal on the submit button.
• A first-time visitor who just landed on your website has filled information on the form, provided their email address and contact details which we can consider as a lead. This goal adds more success to your business.

To Track Google Visibility

• Google Analytics helps to get more visibility on Google and attract more traffic by search term.
• For this, you need to add the right keywords on your website’s contents. In Google Analytics, we can track the high ranked keywords attracting more traffic. You can see the search queries in the acquisition section of Google Analytics.
• Let’s take an example — if you are selling bridal wear accessories and clothes on your website.
  The search term ‘gowns’ or ‘accessories’ may not give you a visible ranking on google because the keywords are common and included in broad matches.
• You can instead choose keywords like ‘bridal wear’ or ‘bridal accessories’ by location to get more visibility and redirect actual visitors who are looking for specific products.

To Get Your Competitors’ Information

Google Analytics provides insights into competitor analysis. You can compare your traffic with your competitors. If you can see that your competitors’ traffic or visits are more than yours then you can check their websites about the engagement information provided and based on that improve your website to grow your business.

To Understand About Bounce Rate Traffic

• If the number of visits on your website is high, but your conversion rate is low, it means that the visitors aren’t able to find the desired product. And this is causing them to hop onto another website. The phenomenon where visitors don’t look through more pages of your website and leave accounts for the bounce rate.
• Google Analytics allows you a detailed report of the pages that are getting more bounce rate.
• Based on that, you can work on Keywords or contents to remove irrelevant traffic and redirect actual traffic on your website.
• Based on GA information, you can work on your landing page to look attractive and get the required products to your customers so they can easily convert and increase your conversion.

To Understand What Your Target Market Is

• For any business, marketers need to understand their visitors’ interest by the location that is a very crucial thing to know.
• Google Analytics provides information about current trends and demands on marketing. So based on that, marketers can offer the same products or services accordingly which they want.
• Meanwhile, Web Analytics tracks the volume of visitors and the performance of business related to visitors’ interests and demographics data.
• The demographic report includes age, gender, interest, and geo-location of the visitors who visit your website.
• The marketer can track the session durations of the visits and find the page with the maximum time.
• This information helps the business to identify their target market.

Let’s check our new blog about the setup of google analytics account very soon.

Originally published at https://www.zealousweb.com.