How to Use Google Analytics
Once you’ve signed up for an account and implemented the Analytics tracking code to your site you’ll need to know how to use the Google Analytics interface to find the information you want.
There are four key sections to Google Analytics which you can see on the left hand pane:
Audience
This is the default screen you’ll see every time you upload your account. This gives you information on the amount of visitors on your site within the custom date range you provide in the top right hand corner. Here you can also see interesting statistics about how long your visitors are spending on your site and the bounce rate.
You can drill down further and see the key demographics of your visitors; the location that they’re visiting from for example. Along with this you can see what devices they are using to view your website, the web browser they’re viewing on, and even the operating system they’re using. This is really useful information for you to decide how to develop you website’s design, as you want to have a website that’s optimised to the devices people are using.
Traffic Sources
When it comes to digital marketing, the traffic sources section is one of the most important. Here you see where the traffic is being directed from to your website, so you can measure how your SEO, Adwords and social campaigns are working.
In terms of analysing your SEO performance, you can check out reports in this section that give you information on every keyword that’s used to direct traffic to your website from search engines: simply navigate through the ‘Sources’ menu and drill down to ‘Search’ and ‘Organic’.
If you’re using Google Adwords you can also visit this section in Traffic Sources and can analyse the traffic coming from here. Its reports cover details such as campaigns, keywords and more, giving insight into the number of visits, time spent on your website, the bounce rate and revenue.
Content
This section focuses on page views rather than visits, so you can analyse your website by the pages being visited, which pages people are entering the site and exiting the site for example.
You can also find reports on the speed of your website, which is a very important factor in the user’s experience of your site – slow pages will drive users away!
Conversions
This is of particular use to those who want to track conversions on their website, whether it’s a product sale, an email address sign up form, or a download of pdf file that you’re giving away to users.
The easiest way to track these is by setting up ‘goals’ which you can do in the Admin section. A more powerful, and certainly more useful, method for tracking sales in particular is by using the E-commerce part of this section. To implement it is a fair bit trickier as you’ll need to insert some more code onto your website. Once you’ve got this set up you can see the actual transactions that have gone through your website and track the revenue generated.
*******
To find out more about Google Analytics, and how it can help your business, feel free to contact us at Touchpoint Digital, an internet marketing agency.
_______________________________________