How to Setup & Use Google Analytics for Your Website
You’ve likely heard of Google Analytics (GA), but you might be asking yourself what exactly is does and how you can use it to grow business. First & foremost, GA is a FREE dashboard that allows you to analyze your website data to better learn about your customers. Here, we’ll be exploring how you get started with GA and what data to pay attention to.
To utilize GA you’ve got to setup an account and give Google access to your website’s data.
Here are the basic steps to follow.
Step 1: Create a GA Account at https://analytics.google.com/analytics/create
Step 2: Implement a tracking code
Once you’ve created an account and generated your unique tracking code, you’ll need to add this small piece of Javascript code to each page of your site (Pro tip: Add this code to the site wide header or footer!). To add the code, you’ll likely want to consult your web developer. If your website was built through a popular platform, such as Wordpress, you can easily Google ‘Google Analytics for Wordpress Website’ to find simple solutions.
Step 3: Set up views, data filters & goals (Optional)
To more easily access data that’s relevant to you, you can customize your dashboard by utilizing preset views with data filters. Each view is a subset of data that has its own unique configuration and filters. An example of this would be to create a view that excludes data from internal traffic so that you’re not inflating/impacting your own website data. The default view is ‘All Web Site Data’
For more information on setting up views, click here.
To up your GA use game even more, you should consider utilizing goals which help you measure how well your site fulfills your objectives. Typically, a goal represents a conversion or completed action that contributed to the success of your business. In the most basic situation, an online retailers’ goal would be a purchase. As a purchase is completed, a conversion occurs, and the goal is met. For those that don’t sell their products or services online, an example goal would be completing a lead generation form.
For more information on setting up views, click here.
Once you GA account is properly setup, it’s important to understand what information may be valuable to you. The exact metrics that you pay attention to will be uniquely dependent on your business type. So, we’ll review the basics here.
The default dashboard is called Home and displays high level information including
Users: a visitor who has initiated a session on your website
Sessions: a group of a user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. For example a single session can contain multiple page views, events, social interactions, and e-commerce transactions
Session Duration: How long/average length of user sessions
Sessions by Country: Sessions broken down by their geographical location
Bounce Rate: a single-page session on your site
Active Users: The number of users currently active on your site
Acquisitions: How users are discovering your site and from
Sessions by Country: Sessions broken down by country
Users by Time of Day: Your traffic broken down by when (day/time frame) that users are visiting
What Pages are visited: The numbers of page views and page value per URL page
Sessions by Device: The device type by which users are accessing your website
User Retention: Daily retention percentages for weekly cohorts (users acquired during successive seven-day periods).
On the left side navigation bar, there are Reports categorized into different section including Realtime, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior and Conversions. Each Report set helps us to learn something different.
Audience Reports are helpful in understanding the characteristics of your website users. You’ll find information pertaining to their demographics, interests, location, onsite behavior, technology used, etc.
Acquisition Reports tell us how users are discovering your site and from where. We can use the information here to compare which sources send you the highest quality traffic and conversions. If you track goals and conversions, you’re able to see these broken down by traffic source to identify how business is being generated. This is especially helpful in understanding how successful your paid & unpaid advertising/marketing are.
Behavior Reports show how users interact with your website and include information including what content users view to how users navigate between pages. This information can be used to identify what products/services are of most interest, where conversions may be getting stopped up, and much more!
In Closing
Now we know this is a lot of information … but, the only thing to do now it to get started. For more help and resources, we suggest enrolling in the free Google Analytics Academy for Beginners.