What exactly is Google Analytics?

Do you want to learn a concept you probably didn’t know about the visitors who visit your site and the way they interact with it? Google Analytics, or GA, is an analytics tool which gives a detailed look into the performance and user behaviour of your website. You can provide better web experiences if you comprehend your consumers’ behaviour. Google Analytics can help you develop your company’s digital marketing strategy. It’s also useful for keeping track of your accomplishments and results, whether for you as a person your manager, or your customer.

How to Enhance Your Digital Marketing Campaigns Using Google Analytics?

If you are a marketer who desires to gain insight into their audience and develop their marketing efforts, Google Analytics can help. Whether you work primarily with e-commerce sites or small local companies as a marketer, it is critical to understand the behaviour of the website’s users in order to improve the website and offer the best results possible. Google Analytics allows you to measure and analyse website users’ behaviour, user experience, content on your site, and several other factors.

Google Analytics can assist you with identifying what is and is not effective for your website or the websites of your clients. This data supports you in developing a marketing strategy for any business’s website. For example, it could help you in determining which types of content are performing well or the optimum times to post on social media platforms.

Marketers take advantage of Analytics to figure out how their marketing campaigns are doing and how the user experience of a website affects statistics like as engagement and conversion.

The Google Analytics dashboard is divided into four sections:

Audience: The audience includes statistics such as demographics, geography, retention, and device type to assist you in understanding who your intended audience is.

Acquisition: Acquisition demonstrates how people come to your website.

Behaviour: Behaviour defines what visitors do after arriving at your website. How many pages do they go through? How long will they be there?

Conversions: Conversions count the number of people who complete the desired activity on your website, such as finishing buying something, subscribing up for your newsletter, consuming free content, etc.

There are eight metrics that all marketers should incorporate and understand when analysing Google Analytics data:

1. The total number of users and sessions

The number of unique persons visiting a website during a certain time period is provided by the users metric, while sessions are a measure of times individuals actively interact with the site. For example, if there are 100 unique visitors and 200 sessions, it’s appropriate to assume that each user viewed the site twice on average within the time period stated.

In the Audience > Overview menu, you can view user and session data. Then, in the selection just above the major graph, choose Sessions or Users.

Use Google Analytics: users and Google Analytics: sessions for obtaining metrics via the application programming interface ( API ).

These indicators enable a rapid and coarse-grained examination of marketing initiatives. You may determine how your campaigns increase traffic and how many times users interact with the site by plotting the data over time.

2. The Bounce rate

The number of users who visit just a single page on a website without departing is known as the bounce rate. This measure may be found in the menu in the Overview section under Audience, or if you’re using the API, enter Google Analytics: bounce Rate. A high bounce rate may suggest a technical issue, inadequately addressed user needs, a page lacking internal connections or calls to action (CTA), or inadequate user targeting in marketing efforts.

If your bounce rate is high, categorise your site visitors to see if you can isolate the problem. For example, at the bottom of the Overview page, you may click Browser to observe if the site performs more or less well for users using different web browsers.

3. Paid vs. organic sessions

Organic search traffic is defined as visitors originating from a non-paid search engine results page (SERP). Paid Search refers to traffic generated by visitors who clicked on an ad on a SERP. This information can be found under Channels in the All-Traffic section.

If you’re using the API to get the metrics, use Google Analytics: acquisition Traffic Channel.

The Organic Search statistic assesses the success of your SEO efforts, while the Paid Search statistic assesses the performance of your ad campaigns. Both numbers are significant, but organic traffic is critical to the site’s long-term viability. You should use organic search engine result page traffic to establish how well your content performs relative to other organic material on a SERP, notably on Google, in alongside comparing organic versus paid searches for the reason of analysing marketing efforts.

4. Google Ads

By connecting your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account, you can obtain precise metrics about your Google Ads campaigns. This enables you to analyse customer behaviour on your website following an ad click or impression. The Search Queries area is important when you need precise data for each search query that led to a site session, such as conversion rates and click-through rates.

Use Google Analytics: ad Matched Query if you’re accessing the metrics via the API.

5. The Newsletter opens

You may evaluate the success of email campaigns and break down traffic by additional criteria, such as browser and demographics, by integrating email monitoring into your Google Analytics account. This data can be found in the Behaviour section, beneath Events and Overview. Then, scroll down to the events section and select the title of your newsletter and click event. You can then click “Secondary dimension” at the bottom of this page to filter the results by other metrics.

You may evaluate whether the email campaign receives better or worse click-through on smart phones versus computers and tablets by breaking down newsletter open rates by device, for example.

6. Average time spent on the page

You can monitor how long users spend on a page to gain a better understanding of how good the user experience is and whether your marketing strategies target relevant clients. Navigate to the Behaviour section and click Overview, and finally choose “Avg. Time on Page” from the menu that appears above the major graph:

When retrieving the metric via the API, use Google Analytics: average time On Page.

The average time spent on a page is a good predictor of engagement. A high average time on site and/or a low bounce rate implies that your content and website are of interest to your customers. You can look at this metric for particular pages to gain more insight into which content performs more effectively or less effectively.

7. Top search queries

By looking at the terms put in the search field, Google Analytics allows you to review site search outcomes from your website in order to track searches and customer information. This metric can be found in the Behaviour section by clicking on Site Search.

You can monitor your users’ search queries after you start delivering site search data; this is a sign of what material they expect to discover on your website, as well as what keywords lead to high engagement as measured by statistics such as duration after searching or abandonment rates.

8. Goal conversion rate

Goals are particular interactions with a web page that define a specific goal. Typical goals include a purchase or user registration, but a goal may also be defined as a user visiting a certain number of pages or downloading a piece of content.

You can assess how well advertising campaigns lead to goal conversions by measuring conversion rates over time, and you can utilise other user analytics to find out what factors determine their successes or failures. Conversions > Goals > Overview; then click on the menu that appears above the graphs to see the goal conversion rate.

If you’re using the API, enter Google Analytics: goalXYZCompletions, where XYZ is the name of your goal.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve learned how to utilise Google Analytics, it’s time to use the data you’ve gathered to create an excellent marketing strategy. Since there is so much data available in Analytics, it can be difficult to identify the most significant and relevant KPIs.

There are some less-useful metrics in Google Analytics, just as there are some useful indicators in Analytics. Metrics that are helpful to one of your clients may not be useful for another. However, if you know how to sift through data streams, you can make more effective advertising selections.