Wouldn’t you love to know how people found your site? See how long visitors are staying after they came from search, facebook, or remarketing ads? Or know how many visits it took before a user finally converted?
Google analytics is the free tool to do just that. It doesn’t just track your business’s online sales and conversions, it gives insight into how people find and use your site. So it’s the perfect tool for a business or personal site. However, it can be a bit overwhelming for new users or even more experienced users.
Google analytics packs a lot of data. At first glance, it takes some messing around with to discover which data is pertinent to helping you understand your site visitors better. In my blog today, I’m going to answer some questions like; what data do I need to be observing? Where is that data located? How do I apply this data to make changes to my current campaigns.
I’ll answer these questions by showing you
Who’s visiting your website?
What are visitors doing once they get to your website?
When are visitors coming to your site?
I’ve only scraped the surface with the blog post today, but I have noted throughout this article the topics that will be discussed further in future posts.
Set-up
First, we need to make sure you have implemented google analytics tracking on your website. You can sign up for an account at analytics.Google.Com. To set up an account, you’ll want to go under the primary google account that you telephone list already use (gmail, google drive, google calendar, google+ or youtube) otherwise you can set up a new google account.
Once your account is set up, follow these steps to find the tracking code that will need to be placed on your site:
Go to the admin tab in the top toolbar.
Under the middle column labeled ‘property’ choose ‘tracking info.’
Within the ‘tracking info’ drop-down window there will be an option named ‘tracking code.’
Within the tracking code page, you’ll find the tracking pixel under the ‘website tracking’ option.
This universal analytics tracking code will need to be copied and pasted into every web page you would like to track within your new analytics account.
General tips
The top toolbar will include:
Home: this screen contains all websites accounts you have access to.
Reporting: this is where your site data lives.
Customization: this screen is where you can build custom reports. (future post)
Admin: this screen includes the account, property, and view information.
You’re able to change the date within the right-hand corner and can even compare different times.
Who is visiting your website
When you first log into an analytics account, you’ll be taken to your audience overview report. This report gives you a high-level overview IT Cell Number of the amount of visitors that have visited the site, how many sessions they performed, the amount of pages they viewed, average time on site, and bounce rate (percentage of people who left after visiting one page).
Under the audience tab on the left-hand side, you can find a lot more information about the visitors on your site. With this information, you can better optimize your digital marketing.
Within the interests section, you can review different categories that your visitors fall into. These various categories can provide great insight into additional targeting you can utilizes within your digital campaigns. For example, one of our higher percentage categories is technophiles, which makes sense since we are a digital advertising agency. But in the in-market segment, we can see that a good amount of our visitors fall into the category financial services and in our other categories, we can then find out that nearly a quarter of our visitors are also interested in arts and entertainment.
