What Google Analytics Does for Marketers & Business Owners: An Introduction

Google analytics is a service that is provided by Google and it reports and tracks website traffic. It is a freemium service. It operates within the Google marketing platform. The service has been operational since the year 2005. There are many good things that Google analytics help marketers achieve. These include:

Getting to know customers

Google analytics gives marketers an opportunity to get to know their customers in a much deeper way. You can use tools that will help you analyze all the data that your business needs all in one place. When you understand the app and site users well, you will be able to evaluate how the marketing content you are giving performs. You can also evaluate the performance of the products.

Building a complete picture

With Google Analytics, you can understand how the people using the app and site are consuming the content provided. With such information, you can tell what is working for you and what is not. You can also see exactly how the audience is interacting with your app and site and what role is played by each channel. This is done by viewing dashboards and reports that are quite robust. It is even possible to connect the systems that can measure points of sale, CRM and all other kinds of touch points. This offers a complete view to the marketers.

Getting insights from Google

Google has got very unique capabilities that help you to discover new things from the data that you already have. Such insights include things like who is likely to convert and who has a high potential for revenue.

When you have these insights, you can now turn them into results. The analytics are built in a way that they work with the products of the publisher and also Google’s advertising so that you get to reach the right audience. You can then connect analytics with Ad manager, Adsense, Google Ads, and display and video 360. With the analytics data that you already have, you can now create new lists that you can use to re-market. Accessing them becomes much easier with the tools available.

Use the data to your advantage

With Google analytics, you are in a position to make a quick analysis of the data. The user interface is very easy to use and you get reports that can be shared. You can process data and then share it in huge amounts within a very short while. You can also use configuration APIs to allow things to be flexible and totally programmatic. There is also technical support that is inbuilt and it delivers data that is accurate and secure across all the apps and sites that are connected to you while you still control all of them.

There are lots of ways in which analytics can help you convert your data into acumens. Getting a deeper understanding of these ways helps you get so much more from it. When you understand your audience, you can work on different things to make their experience more fulfilling and meaningful. When you uncover the details of your data, you can tap into the greatest modeling capabilities. With analytics, you get a chance to visualize, organize, and access your data in a way that meets all the needs of your business.

Integrations

Analytics are created in a way that it is able to work quite seamlessly with partner products and Google solutions. This means that you end up saving so much time and this in itself increases efficiency to a great extent.

Penetration

Google analytics stands as the greatest service on web analytics available on the internet today. It provides SKD that allows one to gather the usage of data from android and its apps. Since it is integrated with other resources, one is able to review different online campaigns by simply tracking the conversions and landing page quality. The goals can include file downloads, viewing a page, generating leads and even sales. The approach used by Google analytics shows a dashboard kind of data which is of a higher level even for casual users.
With analytics, you can easily identify any pages that perform poorly using techniques like funnel visualization. You can also identify exactly where your visitors are coming from and who is referring them. You get to see their position geographically speaking and how much time they spend on your website. There are other advanced features that include custom visitor segmentation. E-commerce reporting can actually help you to track all sales activities as well as performance. Such reports show metrics that relate to commerce, including revenue and on site transactions.

Real time analytics have been around for a couple of years and they enable you to see who is viewing your site at a particular time. It also comes with the website optimizer which is referred to as Google analytics content experiments. With the analysis available on Google analytics, you are in a position to understand how some component groups behave. When you have a marketing strategy that is successful, then you will benefit greatly as a marketer.

Technology

Google analytics has page tags referred to as tracking codes. This is a code that the owner of the website needs to add to their pages. These codes run in the browser as the client browses and if they have Java script enabled and then the data belonging to the visitor is collected and sent to the collection server provided by Google. It is the tracking code that loads a JavaScript file from the servers and then sets some variables connected to the users’ account number.

Google analytics on mobile

There is the mobile package from Google analytics that can be used on the mobile websites. The package has different server tracking codes which make use of ASP.NET, Java server pages, PHP, and Perl for language. There are also many programs included to filter ads as well as extensions. This means that some users cannot be tracked and therefore data collection is obscured. This is one of the limitations that you could face. There are many privacy networks that can be used to mask the location of a user, thereby giving geographical data that is incorrect.

You monitor your website’s analytics, but the real problem is now what do you do with the data?

Follow this three-step plan to make the most of your site’s analytics.

Define the Audience Need(s)

People buy a specific product or service because if fills a specific need. When you are able to identify that need, you can then create an experience to address that need. Analytics are able to provide clues as to what those needs are. They can provide clues about your customers as to their interests, how they accessed the site, do they tend to consume more short-form or long-form content, do they watch the videos on your site, and how long do they spend on your site doing what.

Establish Baseline Conversions

It’s important to know your conversion rates. Analytics will not only help you establish your baseline conversions, but you will also be able to know the conversion rates from different sources of traffic. You will be able to determine that an ad on one site may perform at a much higher rate than other sites, or that one site in particular provides a very low conversion rate. Knowing the conversion rate of your site in general and of each of its traffic sources will allow you to focus and tweak your advertising efforts to maximize the results while minimizing the effort and expense.

Assign and Calculate Revenue

Every action and interaction on your website can be assigned a value. Of course, a sale will have a higher value than a click-through, but each interaction has a value. Analytics are helpful in determining and assigning a value to these actions. When you know what is working on your site and what is not, you are then able to prioritize decisions and increase your site’s profitability.

Knowing your analytics makes the decision making process easier and faster for you. Google Analytics can provide you with all the information you need to make these decisions and Google Analytics Dashboard for WP is a WordPress plugin that brings all the Google Analytics information directly into your WordPress dashboard.

Analytics can be a full-time job and can take a dedicated professional to comb through all the data and make sense of it all. But if you know where to look and what to look for, you can manage this information on your own and make educated decisions on your marketing efforts.

We are the Digital Marketing Training Group. With over 75 years of combined digital marketing experience, we have been providing a recipe for success to people who want to run their own businesses in a multi-billion dollar industry that is growing year after year.