What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics - known as GA - is an analytics tool available for all company sizes to provide a complete view of your website's and/or app's performance. The platform has a cohesive relationship with Google's marketing platforms (such as Google Ads and Search Console) to integrate media buying performance with actual site conversion and engagement efficiency. Within the platform, you'll find reporting surrounding the following subject areas:
- Real Time / gives you insight into what’s happening on your site at this very moment
- Audience / gives you a high-level overview of the site account property
- Acquisition / breaks down your traffic by source: organic, direct, referral, email, social, paid search, display, affiliate, and (Other)
- Behavior / provides many pieces of information to help you understand the behavior of users as they interact with your site or application
- Conversions / makes it possible to measure all of the goals, essentially the conversions that you’ve defined
What are the best ways to leverage Google Analytics?
1. Understand who is visiting your site
By utilizing the Audience report section of the platform, you can focus on the important activity metrics of your user base including volume of sessions, users, pageviews, bounces and how many pages users visit in a session, as well as how long they stay. Split out by technology (mobile vs. desktop), demographics, geographic (country, state, city), and interests. These attributes can be extremely valuable to how you set up your advertising campaigns and target future customers.
2. Creating custom reports
Within the web platform, a user can create custom dashboards or reports for a number of purposes including brand performance, social media monitoring, ecommerce activity and more. By setting up ranges, types of dimensions, measures and views - you can will have a complete suite of visualizations catered toward your business cases.
3. Building alert notifications
By capitalizing on positive signals and stopping bad activities, can be critical to a business running effectively. With Google Analytics' custom alert capabilities, you'll be able to setup specific notifications surrounding traffic spikes or drops, increased bounce rates, drops in transaction revenue, or drops in conversions. A proactive approach leverage systematic notifications is a great step to effectively operating your site or app.
Next Steps
Knowing how to measure your site performance can help a company understand what customers drive the most sales, spend the most time engaging with their brand, and who your customers are. Google Analytics platform provides an all-in-one environment to track, measure and understand the critical parts of a user's experience with your site. The most valuable part of Google Analytics is the underlying data it collects. The ability to clearly visualize, combine with other similar data - like Shopify, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads - is how a brand can truly maximize this data.
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