Navigating Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best free tools available for collecting and analyzing data from your website. It’s one that one have to be using to collect data about website visitors, their behavior, customer acquisition, and conversion tracking. Google Analytics is simple to set up and easy to navigate. In this article, we’ll look at some of the popular features of Google Analytics, how to set it up on your website, and how you can start using it to make better data-driven decisions in your business.

Google Analytics (GA) can appear overwhelming at first glance. The sheer amount of information available can make navigating it seem like a daunting task for beginners. Despite this, GA’s layout is very organized so even beginners to learn how to navigate it very quickly. Once GA is connected to your website, you’ll begin seeing data appear in your GA dashboard in realtime.

Getting Started iN Google Analytics

Once Google Analytics is connected to your website, you can begin familiarizing yourself with its dashboard. There are a few main areas and a few important key performance metrics to get to know when you’re just getting started. On the left, you’ll see five categories of reports that you can generate in GA (Realtime, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, & Conversions). These reporting categories will show you all the data that’s being collected from your site.

Realtime

The Realtime category will show you data live as it’s happening. You can see visitors as they’re on your site, how many visitors there are, and what pages they’re on. You won’t spend too much time here unless your website is reliant is very current information, such as a news source.

Audience

The Audience page tells you about the users on your website. Here you can learn about the number of visitors to your site, their demographics, location, device used to view your site, and much more. You’ll be able to view and track many different characteristics about your users, as well as create your own characteristics to track. This page will be very important when you’re identifying your target audience for different marketing campaigns.

Acquisition

The Acquisition page tells you how users are getting to your website. It lets you know the sources of your website traffic, and is very important to your customer acquisition strategy. This data can provide details into how effective your SEO strategy, landing pages, and other Call-to-Actions are in your marketing campaigns. There are seven different acquisition channels that GA tracks for you here: Direct, Organic Search, Paid, Email, Social, Referral, and Other.

Behavior

The Behavior section tells you what your audience is doing on your website. Data here tells you which pages users visit, how long they spend on each page, how many pages they visit, and what they do before they leave your site. This section tells you how users are interacting with your site and which pages might need optimizing. A good strategy is to have effective Call-to-Actions on the pages user visit most often, and recreate content on less visited pages to drive more traffic there.

Conversions

The Conversions section is a fully-customizable section where you can track your own goals and conversions on your website. This is a more advanced section where you can create custom reports and track data to see how many users are becoming qualified leads and moving through the marketing funnel on your website.

Recap

Google Analytics is a great free tool that everyone who has a website should be using. The data that is collected can help you better understand your audience, how they get to your website, and how they interact with the content on your website. Using the data in GA, you can better optimize your website and create a better experience for website users, which can lead to more conversions, more leads, and more sales all coming from understanding your data. Follow the steps in your website creator to get Google Analytics connected to your website right away!