What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is an immensely powerful free tool that, when used correctly, can give some great insights into the behaviour of your customers when they visit your website. Once setup it collects data every time someone visits and stores this information for you to analyse with a variety of tools it provides.
It’s not just your average hit counter though – It gives you accurate data which you can leverage to increase the probability that your next website visitor will become your next customer.
The ABC’s of Google Analytics
You can generate a multitude of reports in Google, far too many to cover in this brief post, but they fall into four broad categories.
Audience
This set of reporting tools helps you identify who is visiting your site. It can tell you all sorts of information including how old they are, their gender, where they are from, whether they’ve visited your site before and even what type of device or browser they’ve used.
Acquisition
This report is brilliant for figuring out how your visitors arrived at your site and can be particularly useful if you’re running complimentary advertising or social media campaigns. For example, you can track if your visitor arrived at your site directly from a Google search, a social media post you’ve made or perhaps from a Google AdWords PPC campaign you’re running.
Behaviour
The behaviour reporting tools give insights into what you’re your visitors are doing on your website. You can track what pages they visit, how long they stay on a page for and what page they leave on. Having an understanding of their journey can help you know what information is relevant to them and allow you to build more engaging pages that help move them through your sales funnel.
Essentially, what you’ll see is the typical path of that journey, as well as where people are dropping off in the process. This can help you find hurdles to conversion, such as a complicated checkout process, or a broken cart page.
Conversions
Arguably the most important of the reports Google Analytics has to offer, the conversions report can help you see your company’s actual return on investment and understand how people convert on your site.
Knowing the path that visitors take on their conversion journey is a powerful insight, but by seeing the number of conversions that have been made, and being able to assign a value to that, you are able to provide solid intelligence on the effectiveness of your website and ongoing marketing campaigns.
Google Analytics & Other Search Engine Optimisation Services from Burns Creative
Having Google Analytics implemented into your website can provide you with incredibly valuable insights that you may otherwise not have access to. Burns Creative can help you get up and running even if you have little to no experience. We can even give you a monthly or quarterly report summarising your website visitors activity. To find out how, and to see what other Search Engine Optimisation services we have available contact georgie@burns-creative.com
Other great articles on Google Analytics
Knowledge Is Power: Using Analytics to Improve Conversions
The Business Benefits Analytics
