Google analytics is an excellent tool for marketers today to track and measure their digital strategy and efforts. It enables you to monitor and comprehend your customers’ behaviour, user experience, online content, device performance, and other factors. Google Analytics provides you with the data you need to help you develop your business’s success plan, revealing facts about visitors to your site that you probably did not know before.
Below are some of the key features of Google analytics used by all businesses and marketers.
Funnel Visualization
Users follow certain paths from start to finish on websites, and each site has a goal in mind for its visitors. Google Analytics funnels records this journey so you can optimise your website and guarantee visitors achieve your set objectives.
For example, you may want users to go through these steps when they arrive at your homepage:
- Navigate to a specific product page.
- Place an item in their shopping cart.
- Check out their shopping cart.
- Go out and buy something.
- Check the confirmation page.
- Sign up to your newsletter.
You do not require a multi-step shopping cart on your website to use funnel visualisation. You can create funnels to track how each page affects conversion fulfilment. When creating a goal, simply input the pages in the sequence you wish to track them as funnel steps.
For example, if you are pushing a newsletter registration form on your blogs, you may establish a goal funnel to track how often people navigate from your site’s blog section to the conversion page.
Because Google Analytics calculates the Goal Conversion Rate based on the overall number of sessions to the site by default, you can utilise a funnel to get the conversion rate of users who saw a certain page. For example, you can observe what proportion of users visit a Contact page and then fill out the form on there.
This report excels at identifying potential usability problems and areas for conversion rate improvements. Ideally, the final outcome should provide the information you need to boost lead generation and revenue, just like any other report in Analytics.
Conversions
The Conversion reports in Google Analytics provide metrics to measure the value of your online business, whether it be income or other significant events such as signups, leads, or subscribers. Conversions are classified into two types: objectives and ecommerce. Goals are rather simple to establish. There can be up to four goal sets, each with five separate goals. This can be useful for tracking many types of actions on your website (like amount of time spent, exploring a specific page, or visiting a certain number of pages).
To create a goal, simply choose a goal group, label your goal, and then describe the goal type. Based on the type of objective you are establishing; you will have a variety of possibilities. It is a good idea to define goals for the final page of your conversion process. You can also create a funnel, which is a series of pages that leads up to your goal page. You can more readily track when users abandon the conversion process if you set this up.
E-commerce conversions are far more difficult to set up and include the addition of code to your website. Google Analytics help files contain more information regarding ecommerce tracking.
Traffic Sources
One of the most crucial aspects of your Analytics account is the traffic sources summary. The source of your traffic reveals a lot about the effectiveness of your SEO, incoming links, and AdWords and other advertising activities. It also reveals your problem and underperforming areas. Ideally, you want traffic from a range of sources so that your traffic is not overly dependent on a single source over which you have no control.
To explain, if 70% of your traffic originates from organic Google results and Google suddenly modifies their algorithm and your site shows up on page 10 rather than page 1, you will experience a significant decline in visitors. However, if only 30% of your traffic comes from the same source, it is easy to balance (in this case you may want to increase your AdWords spending to compensate for a loss of activity in organic results).
Bounce rate
A bounce is a one-page visit to your website. A bounce is defined in Analytics as a session that generates only one access to the Analytics server, as when a user views a single page of the website and then quits without initiating any more calls to the Analytics server during the same session.
Bounce rate is calculated as single-page journeys divided by all sessions, or as the proportion of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only one page and sent just one request to the Analytics server.
Because there are no consecutive hits after the first one that would allow Analytics to determine the length of the visit, these single-page sessions have a session duration of 0 seconds.
Page Views
The total number of pages visited is referred to as pageviews. Views of a single page that are repeated are counted.
The following definition is provided by Google Analytics’ support site:
A pageview (or pageview hit, page tracking hit) is an instance of loading (or reloading) a page in a browser. Pageviews are a measure that represents the total number of pages visited.
That is a fairly straightforward explanation. Assume you have a webpage about an All-around marketing course: pageviews will display you how many times that page has been seen in a specific period. The measure itself provides no information on how many people saw the website or how many times the page was visited each session. It simply represents the total number of views per page. This means that a single visitor can be responsible for a large number of views, and that a page can be seen numerous times during a single session.
In more advanced methods, Google Analytics can do wonders for your business.
Given the fact that there are other analytics management solutions available, Google Analytics remains a free and very relevant tool for handling your website’s analytics.