Setting Up and Understanding Google Analytics
What Is Google Analytics
We will discuss here a quick overview of how to properly set up, implement, understand and manage Google Analytics .
Google Analytics is a free analytics solution from Google that was designed to give you a complete view of every aspect of activity on your website. Understanding this extremely, useful detailed and thorough program can really be the difference between a successful online business or a quick fling with the world wide web.
You will gain a considerable edge over your competition when you know how to understand and analyze the numerous types of data provided by the program. This is a vital, often overlooked part of a successful SEO campaign. Without knowing what is currently working for your website you have no idea what areas to improve or expand upon. This powerful tool when used to its full potential provide the website owner with multiple advantages such as the ability to track visits, goals sales and conversions, even user demographics, which you can you can read more about in What Are Customer Demographics.
The first step is to create a free Google Analytics Account.
Check out this useful walk-through of setting up Google Analytics . Once you have retrieved your Tracking Code you need to install it in your website, a little easier when using website builders such as Wix, Weebly, Wordpress or Squarespace but if installing on a hard coded website then it needs to be installed on every page. More about that here. After about 7 days, although in many cases less, you will be able to already view and analyse website data.
Set and Track Goals
If your website includes some sort of lead generation such as newsletter subscription, catalog request, or even something simple like a contact page allowing form submissions, goal tracking can make gauging the success of your online marketing campaigns simple.
Any goal action can be traced back to the original source of the visitor, which allows you to determine what traffic sources are working for your site, what search keywords are performing best,and what are the ineffective methods in your strategy or campaign.
Apply Filters
The tracking code for Google Analytics tracks the user behavior for each visit to your site. There are times when you may wish to track certain pages or parts of the site separately, or even exclude certain traffic from the reports. Google Analytics makes it simple to apply filters to your web site profile by ensuring your data is as accurate as possible. You can even add filters to exclude your own IP address so your own visits to your website doesn't affect the data accuracy. This will ensure that the statistics about the time on site, pages per visit, visitor loyalty are derived from actual site performance
E-Commerce and More
Google Analytics can also be used for tracking external clicks when setting up traffic trades, for Keyword Discovery ( Keyword Research ) and even for creating detailed reports on Sales and product performance from your E-Commerce webstore and can track how your Ad campaigns such as Google Ads, Facebook ads or PPC are generating clicks, purchases , and how much revenue was generated from the keywords you are bidding on.
