Why Should We Care to Use Google Analytics (GA)?
Recently, I have received a number of questions asking about SEO and Google Analytics, however, it seems that Google Analytics creates a big barrier to entry-level, i.e, you must learn how all new concepts work together so you can understand your own data.
While I provided some initial thoughts on each post that arrived, I tried to make more simple to understand the main terminology behind and its functionality.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics (GA) is a free web tracking tool offered by Google that provides real-time reports and insights about the traffic and general behavior of users on a website.
As a business owner, it’s vital to understand the importance to drive significant traffic on your website, and conducts your content for online success. But it can seem daunting if you don’t know where to start.
Google Analytics uses a vocabulary and certain terms to help us to analyze our website traffic data. To become more familiar with these terms, we introduce the terminology most used.
Terminology
Terms like users, sessions, page views and segments have all been used by web analytics tools in the past, but Google Analytics was the first to combine them into a platform.
Along with this post, I will explain a few of the terms from the perspective of a first visitor, and other ones from the perspective of the software.
How does Google Analytics Work?
All you need to do is a sign up for a Google Analytics account click here and copy and paste the provided tracking URL into Head section of your Website and start to monitor the data in the dashboard.
We discuss a few key behavior and acquisition metrics, but Google Analytics can measure hundreds of metrics on your website, please consult here for more details.
The code records various activities of your users when they visit your website such as age, gender, demographics, interests, behavior etc.
It then sends back all that information to the GA (Google Analytics) server once the user exits your website.
Next, Google Analytics aggregates the data collected from your website in multiple ways, primarily by the following:
- Users – are individual people that visit your site. GA determines this via a browser cookie- a tracking ID based on the browser from the user’s computer.
- The Session level- when a user makes a visit to your domain as a whole.
- Pageview level- within the session, a user can visit multiple pages, such as Home, blog, contact, products page. The first visit page is called Landing Page.
- Events level- when a user makes trigger such as a click or watch a video.
- Bounce Rate – The Bounce Rate metric shows you the percentage of website visitors who bounced back from your website. That means that they left your site immediately after landing on one of its pages, without navigating any further.
- Goal Conversion Rate – Google Analytics measures the conversion rate of each and every one of your goals and then shows you the sum of their conversion rates.
Setup Goals
Goals in Google Analytics let you know how often users take or complete specific actions on your website that convert to the desired task. For example, if you want to measure the activity for an inquiry, view a product, or make an appointment.
Let’s say, for instance, you have a contact form on your website that you use to capture leads for your business, then create a custom page on your website that thanks users for submitting their contact information. Then set up that page as a destination goal called “Contact Form”.
Beyond that, Google Analytics provides other metrics like measure the site performance to ensure that website pages load quickly. It has many specialized metrics for e-commerce stores as well. Also, connect to AdWords to measure the behavior of users that visit your site from pay-per-click (PPC) ads and so on.
Moving forward, we’ll show the walk-through for each level described on the google analytics dashboard on the next post.
Lastly, I hope you can open a Google Analytics account and take the advantage to make your website as effective as possible, and discover which data helps the marketing plan and user experience performance.
That brings us to the end of our first guide to Google Analytics Navigation.