Do you know how many people come to your website, how often, and what pages they are exiting from? If you don’t, these are some of the areas that Google Analytics can help illuminate for you. It collects data about your website visitors and their interactions with your website. More importantly, it can help you answer key questions, from which channels are driving the most qualified traffic, to what pages need to do a better job engaging your audience.
So how does Google Analytics collect data? It uses a small piece of JavaScript tracking code to collect the data about your website visitors. Once you sign up for Google Analytics, it generates the JavaScript code that you need to add to your website.
Once the JavaScript is placed on your website, whenever a visitor comes to your site, Google Analytics issues and places a unique ID associated with the browser cookie on the visitor and starts to track their engagement on your website via “hits” which is sent to Google Analytics. Whenever that user comes back on the same browser and has not cleared their cookies, Google Analytics can identify that user as a repeat visitor and continue to track their engagements.
In the hits data has information regarding the page they are viewing, the device and operating system they are using. The 3 most common types of hits are:
- Page view hits: this is triggered when a user goes to a page that has the Google Analytics JavaScript code.
- Event hit: this is when a user interacts with an element on the page, think video starts, downloading a whitepaper, submitting a form. Note that these event hits require additional tracking to be placed on the key events you want to track.
- Transaction Hits / eCommerce hits: this hit passes information about the online purchase itself on your website, such as the product name, SKU or price.
Without going into much more details on how the back-end works, let’s pivot to the reporting in Google Analytics’. Google Analytics reports are made up of 2 components:
- Dimensions (attributes of your data, such as traffic source, country). The dimensions can be at the hit level, session level, and the user-level.
- Metrics are quantitative measurements of your dimensions also known as the number of the dimensions, such as the number of sessions from the US.
There are many reports or views available that are standard and some that you can customize yourself based on your business needs. The benefit of Google Analytics is that it has a much shorter learning curve and the results come back much quicker than other solutions.
Example things you can learn out of the box are:
- New vs. returning visitors (count and behaviors)
- Highest to lowest visited or engaged site pages
- What channels users came from (direct, search, display, social, email, etc.)
- What channels are driving the most engaged audience
- What geographic locations your visitors are coming from
- What devices your visitors are using to visit your site
There are many other benefits to having Google Analytics on your site if you don’t have an alternative solution. You can understand what content resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. You can take clues from their searches on your website to inform new content that should be developed or webpage optimization opportunities. You can determine what mobile devices you need to adjust your website or content against to increase outcomes. You can also create audience segments for remarketing purposes.
Ultimately Google Analytics provides data and information that is valuable to help you identify the key areas to improve on your website, marketing strategies, and SEO, which in combination lead to better business outcomes.
To learn more how Google Analytics can help your business or how to optimize your current Google Analytics setup please contact us.
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