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I have to be honest, I’m pretty smitten with the tools that Google makes available for free. I’m actually writing this right now using Google Docs, a free alternative to Microsoft Word, and saving it to my Google Drive account (cloud storage). Among Google’s best known tools is Google Analytics, a free web analytics application. With Google Analytics, you can measure traffic to your website and identify how users are interacting with your content. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive review of Google Analytics, but rather a primer for marketers to understand the basics. Subsequent posts with include deeper dives into more advanced functionality.

In the beginning

To begin using Google Analytics, you’ll first need a Google Account. Once you have an account, you have access to a host of tools, of which Google Analytics is included. When setting up your account, you’ll be prompted to enter your website URL, define a category for your site and some other basic information. This is a very simple process that takes minutes to complete. When finished, Google provides you a script, referred to as a tag that you place in your website code. The Google Analytics tag should be placed on every page of your website and ideally appears close to the footer of the page. Most websites today are built in a modular fashion with a repetitive header and footer code so that tags such as this one can be added once and will then propagate across all pages of your website.

Establishing a baseline of data

Google Analytics will begin capturing data from your website immediately but will render the data in the tool the following day. There is a “Real-Time” view as well that allows you to monitor visitor behavior live as they traverse your site, but the extent of that data is limited. In order to really gain an understanding of how your website is being used, it’s best to capture sets of data in measured amounts: days, then weeks, then months and so on. It’s also important that as you begin on your journey of measuring and monitoring data that you develop some standardization. For example, once you have two weeks of data and want to compare traffic, you could compare data from Monday to Monday or week over week, not necessarily Monday to Wednesday. This type of consistency allows for more accurate reports later on.

Variety of data available

The amount and variety of data available in Google Analytics is too broad to go into exhaustively here, but I’ll touch on some key points. These are some of the more important metrics I look at on a regular basis:

• Users – How many people have visited your website? You can view the data as graphs and discern quickly where you may have experienced spikes or dips in traffic for a particular day or even hour within a day. This highly important to come up with a sound and targeted marketing strategy which helps in generating more leads and maintaining the traffic you already have.
• Pages/Session – This metric is how many pages a User visited during their time on your website. Is your content engaging them? A rise in this analytic trend will mean that you are going in the right direction and you can concentrate on bringing in some optimal strategies to take it further. While a downfall in the trend will show you that you need to do something different. In both cases, it is very helpful.
• Session Duration – How long did a user spend on your site? Did they land and leave, or did they stay and engage with the content? This plays a huge role in the conversion rate. Sure you can succeed in generating traffic, but the thing that really matters is conversion. Engaging your traffic with the content they need will help you increase your conversion rate, and you can ascertain that through this analytic.
• Bounce Rate – This is a percentage of people who came to your site and left immediately. A rise in this trend will show you that there is definitely something that needs to be fixed. You can work on your CTC (Call to Action) or marketing strategies to decrease your bounce rate.

Additionally, there is data that is captured that assists you in all facets of your marketing efforts. Working globally? You can view traffic data by Geography down to the level of City. Looking to target specific mobile platforms such as iPhone or Android? You bet! There’s even the ability to view specific hardware and browser version. Couple that knowledge with additional tools such as a mobile browser emulator and now you’re really cooking.

Creating your own metrics

Google Analytics provides you the ability to customize how things are measured and also allows you to auto generate certain reports. There are some very powerful methods of customization here including the ability to use elements such as Regular Expressions in order to truly make custom refinements. Again, we’ll take some deeper dives, but some initial customizations I suggest using include:

• Adding Filters – You’ll want to exclude certain traffic from your reports such as traffic from any of your office locations. You can achieve this by filtering out traffic from your office IP Address.
• Creating Goals – Goals in Google Analytics are customizable metrics. An example of a Goal is discerning whether a visitor made it to a “Thank You” page from a form, meaning that a conversion took place.
• Capturing campaign data with UTM parameters – There are several ways to use UTM parameters on your website to track how the traffic is navigating on to your website and which sources are creating leads to different pages of your website. This can give you a great idea on which digital channels you need to concentrate your marketing strategy on, in order to generate more leads.

The data provided in these methods assists you as a marketer to take action. As your marketing matures and your need for deeper dives develop, you can build upon these practices.

But wait there’s more!

There’s so much more to Google Analytics and this summary just scratches the surface. There are many terrific resources for Google Analytics in every corner of the web. Here are a few names of analytics gurus to keep an eye out for:

Simo Ahava             simoahava.com

Avinash Kaushik     kaushik.net/avinash

Hopefully, this article would have been of great help to all our readers. We highly value your feedback on our work. Please leave your suggestions or additions on the subject in our comments section below, and let yourself be heard.