Are you confused, unsure, or maybe even intimidated by Google Analytics? Don’t be, because tracking your results is one of the best ways to serve digital value, and we’re here to explain the how’s and why’s behind it.
Ready to launch your website’s SEO to new heights with your brand new understanding of Google Analytics and its numerous benefits?
3… 2… 1… Buckle up!
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics, or GA for short, is the premier analytics platform for tracking site or app performance – one of many tools Google provides to help people understand what visitors are doing on their website. And yes, it’s free for anyone with a Google account, even though there are paid versions you can opt for. Through Google Analytics, you can access a wide range of data and reports on website traffic and website visitor behavior.
Even though “web analytics” sounds like a very small area of your digital presence, the implications of Google Analytics are huge. Given that your website is the central hub of your digital presence, your website is the best way to give you a holistic view of the effectiveness of all the efforts and campaigns you are running.
Why Do You Need Google Analytics?
If you have a website, you should be using Google Analytics. There are no exceptions here – it’s a useful and important tool for every website owner. Why? If you can’t measure it – you can’t improve it. Without data, it is impossible to show what effect your SEO strategies are having.
Luckily, the volume of data Google Analytics provides makes it an essential component of any website manager’s or marketer’s online toolbox. If you want a lot of data, and have the time and ability to analyze and act on it — GA is a great fit. Tracking performance and progress with ease is what makes Google analytics invaluable to marketers.
Who Can Benefit from Using Google Analytics?
Since Google Analytics is used to track SEO, PPC, and other marketing efforts, it’s beneficial to anyone with an online presence who wants to track their performance, efforts, marketing campaigns and make it all truly successful. Whether you opt for the free or paid version, with Google Analytics, you’ll be able to gain a fantastic insight into your audience, visitor behavior on your site, traffic patterns, and more.
How Does Google Analytics Work?
Simply put, the GA platform provides you with a full picture of how your site is performing. It collects a vast amount of data and processes it intelligently. It then generates reports to display the collected data to you. Those reports are what you can use to gain critical insight into your website and the people who visit it. What more could one ask for, right?
Google Analytics aggregates the data collected from your website in multiple ways, primarily by four levels:
- User-level (actions by each user)
- Session level (actions by each visit)
- Pageview level (actions on each page visited)
- Event level (button clicks, video views, etc.)
How Can Google Analytics Help Boost Your SEO?
Google Analytics provides access to a massive amount of data related to how users find and interact with your site. This is detrimental to determining how effective your existing SEO strategies are and uncovering areas for further improvement.
What Does GA Do? Benefits of Using Google Analytics
Google Analytics is like a Swiss army knife when it comes to its capabilities — they’re almost endless. There are numerous benefits of using Google Analytics to gain insights critical for your business. Here are some of the most important ones, in case you’re still having any doubts:
Valuable Marketing Insight
The user insights you gain from Google Analytics reports can be a gateway to your marketing success. The collected data can help you answer a range of key questions about your marketing efforts and fine-tune them. How? There are two types of data that you can collect in Google Analytics:
- User Acquisition Data: data about your users before they visit your website;
- User Behavior Data: data about your users when they visit your website.
To better understand how to serve and target your audience, it’s extremely helpful to know as much as possible about them. Google Analytics makes this dream come true, while also helping you choose where to advertise to your customers – it tells you which social platforms to focus on.
Improved Website Performance
Google Analytics reports are also the perfect tool to help you learn about your website and the people who use it. Those kinds of insights give you practical ways forward for improving your site performance. Rather than a vague aim of improving traffic blindly, you can have a more concrete, data-driven objective.
Automatical, Real-Time & Cost-Effective Data Collecting
Google Analytics does all the time-consuming work for you by reducing the time required to put the data into documents or spreadsheets. And, as you already know, time is money! If you have a limited budget, you might wonder if it’s worth shelling out money for this tool. The best part? You don’t have to shell out anything – Google Analytics is free. No matter what your budget is, you can afford it – so, no excuses.
SEO Boosting Analytics
In SEO, as in life, information is power. That’s why Google Analytics insights are also invaluable for informing your SEO – it provides a plethora of data. Access and assess the right reports, and it can help boost the ROI you see from your SEO efforts in no time. Whether your goal is to increase traffic, conversions, or brand awareness, using GA to analyze every part of your content strategy will create a more stable and solid plan with steps necessary to reproduce successful pages.
Full Customization
Google Analytics allows the customization of reports, dashboards, alerts, and with a wide range of third-party support, you can analyze data to fit your needs. The custom reports are a powerful feature as you can create quickly shareable reports to help with making more data-driven decisions on the fly. You can also set custom alerts that directly send a report to email, like when your website reaches a particular milestone.
GA also allows data exportation directly into a spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets) or another third-party tool, which is really handy.
Mobile and Integration Friendly
Yes, Google Analytics has a clear and easy-to-use dashboard. Yet, you are not limited to only using it on your desktop. You can download the app on the Google Play store onto your smartphone or tablet while retaining all the same features. Google Analytics can also easily be integrated with Google AdWords, for example, basically allowing you to align two tools working together to provide actionable insights that help with the success of your campaigns.
Of course, you can use Google Analytics with all your devices to easily implement data to other well-known Google products as well.
Greater Insights = Greater Control: Get Ready to Track & Skyrocket Your Success with Google Analytics
For an information-hungry SEO or digital marketer, Google Analytics is the go-to platform that unlocks tangible data you can then leverage to grow your business. All of this data-driving potential is at your fingertips – you just need to tap into it.
Get GA set up on your website so you can start understanding how people interact with you online, measure the success of your website and skyrocket it.
Best of luck on your Google Analytics journey!