Google Analytics: A Practical Guide for this Well Known Tool

Data has so much power, especially in business, because it helps with decision-making. The secret to success with a website is the same: understanding what happens on it. There are several effective tools that can help companies and marketers to find all the information they need in a single place, but the best-known tool is Google Analytics. Analytics’ primary goal is helping businesses understand their sites and keep track of their performance based on the content, products and more. It’s also a functional tool because it works with Google’s advertising and publisher products, so you can use your insights to deliver quality results.

Why Google Analytics?  

All digital marketers, SEO specialists, webmasters, and even non-experts that manage a website think Analytics is essential and love having it within their toolbox, because it allows them to discover massive amounts of data about a website’s performance and users’ behavior.  There are several benefits of using Google Analytics, including: Free: The most fantastic feature about Analytics is that it is completely free. For such a powerful tool, it is hard to believe that Google has given us Analytics for free to get insights about our websites. Know your Audience: Analytics is not only a user-friendly platform, but it has a wealth of data to discover everything about your audience or traffic. It allows digital marketers to see where traffic is coming from, like the country, or the source (social media, organic or paid), what they are interested in, or how they behave. Tracking Conversions: Analytics allows to track conversions for any type of website. Whether it is an ecommerce site or a traditional website, it can track phone calls, email clicks, form submissions, newsletter subscriptions.  Reporting: This easy-to-use platform also has the ability to create complete reports that cover all these aspects, like audience details and website conversions, to name a few. 

Important Metrics 

When it comes to metrics, Analytics has many; however, it is vital to choose to focus on the ones that are relevant to your business and that are aligned to your goals. Here are some of the metrics you can measure:

• Users (visits)
• New users (New visits)
• Sessions
• Pageviews
• Bounce rate
• Average session duration

Defining which metrics are important to you and which ones to include within your report really depends on the goals and plans of your business. For example, if you’re trying to increase the traffic of your website then you would want to focus on users and new users.  On the other hand, if you’re interested in figuring out if people are engaging enough with your site, then bounce rate and average session duration are the right metrics to look at. An important fact about metrics is that not all businesses are the same. What works for one, may not apply to another. For example, time on site (average session duration), is extremely valuable for some businesses: if visitors stay longer on their landing pages, they’re more likely to take an action and buy. Nevertheless, time on site is a metric that depends entirely on the type of business, industry and even the way that the website is structured. For some companies, there is not much they can offer to their visitors and because of the nature of the industry users are used to calling or filling a form faster than others.  There are so many things to learn about Google Analytics; fortunately Google offers a Free Pro Course to learn how to use Analytics and how to understand  a report.

Getting Smart with: SFX Small Business Solutions

S-FX.com Small Business Solutions is a boutique web design and technology consulting agency geared towards start-up businesses, small businesses and non-profit businesses.  We specialize in implementing low cost technology solutions to maximize efficiency and reduce business operating costs. Our team of experts is ready to support you and teach you how to become an expert using the right tools.