05/31/2022

What is Google Analytics and How Does It Work?

Insights

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Google Analytics was launched in 2005 and quickly became the most widely used web analytics tool.

The tool is more than a decade old and has been praised for its cutting-edge site analytics and ability to help website owners discover things about their websites they never knew.

This page will discuss Google Analytics, its functions, and how you can get the best ROI for your business.

Talk to a marketing expert about a Google Analytics Campaign.

Google Analytics Definition: What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web-based analytics platform that you can use for tracking and analyzing the performance of your website. Google Analytics gives you access to a variety of data and reports about website traffic and visitor behavior. You can access the platform from any Google account. There are both free and paid versions.

What does Google Analytics do?

Google Analytics collects a variety of data about site visitors and your website. These data include:

  • How visitors arrive at your site
  • How visitors interact with your website content
  • Your website’s audience characteristics
  • How many website visitors convert?
  • And much more

Google Analytics reports can be used to achieve the following: 

  • Evaluation of the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns
  • How to optimize pages and determine how they are performing
  • Decide who your content and marketing should be directed to
  • Monitoring conversions and purchases

What is Google Analytics? 

You will need to add JavaScript code to your pages to track your website with Google Analytics.

This code snippet is used to track data from a page that a user visits. It sends it to Google Analytics when the JavaScript file is opened.

After Google Analytics has collected sufficient data from your site the data will be populated within GA.

Google Analytics: Who is it for?

Google Analytics is used by companies with an online presence to track their marketing campaigns. It tracks search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click, and other marketing efforts.

Google Analytics will allow you to gather important information about your audience, visitors, traffic patterns, and other factors. You can also quickly access and analyze data with the Google Analytics data sampling feature.

You can get amazing insight into your customers’ interactions with your website, regardless of whether you choose the paid or free version. To get started, set up Google Analytics.

Google Analytics: Why is it so beneficial?

Let’s talk about more than just Google Analytics and discuss why it matters.

It is important to have a basic understanding of Google Analytics to fully understand the benefits it offers.

We mentioned earlier that the platform allows website owners to track the success of their SEO, PPC, and other internet marketing campaigns. What are SEO and PPC?

SEO is a mix of marketing strategies that can be used to improve your website. These improvements will help you rank higher on search engine results pages. This means that they will bring more traffic to your site.

SEO campaigns are focused on targeting keywords your audience searches for frequently, creating informative content to target those keywords, and making a user-friendly website.

PPC can be used to advertise on a paid platform. You can also track it with Google Analytics.

It works in a bidding platform, where business owners bid on keywords to get top-paid advertising spots on search engine’s sponsored links. PPC’s best feature is that advertisers don’t pay until people click on their ads.

Despite all this, it is clear that without a tracking platform, it can be hard to see the results of these strategies.

This is precisely why Google Analytics is so useful.

Google Analytics offers 5 amazing benefits

Google Analytics is the Swiss Army knife of its capabilities. They’re nearly infinite.

Businesses can reap the many benefits of this wide array of capabilities. These are the five most important.

1. Access to real-time information

The “real-time tab” is one of the most important tabs in Google Analytics. This tab lets you see real-time information about your website.

It also includes a digital reading of how many people are visiting your website at any one time, and what percentage of them are viewing it on a desktop and mobile.

You can also see how many pageviews occur per minute and sec, top referring sites (websites that refer to your website), top active web pages, and top places where your site is viewed.

This real-time data can also be broken down by traffic sources, locations, content, and other information.

You can see the percentage of people visiting your site from different locations around the globe by clicking the locations tab.

You can see the source of your traffic in the traffic sources tab. This is very useful for understanding your target audience’s web surfing habits. You can see what percentage of your website visitors are coming from search engines. This is also called organic Traffic. It will show you how much traffic comes from paid ads and referral traffic.

You can also see the real-time tab, which breaks down your data into content. This gives you real-time information about what content is being viewed and conversions, as well as what goals are being achieved.

Website owners can set their own goals. They could be anything, from a job submission or a new lead to a newsletter signup.

What is the significance of this information?

These numbers give you basic information about site traffic and help you understand user behavior. These are some examples:

  • What time of the day do your users visit your site?
  • Fluctuation in users over time
  • Which traffic should you focus on? Is it paid, referral, or organic?
  • How many users sign up for a newsletter, download guides, convert, or accomplish any other goals you have?   

2. Get insight into your audience

It’s very helpful to have as much information about your audience as possible to better target and serve them.

Google Analytics gives you information such as how many users have visited your site, how many sessions they have completed, how many pages they viewed per session, and the average duration of each session.

You can also see charts in the audience tab that show how traffic fluctuates over time.

Google Analytics provides audience demographics that will help you better understand your site visitors. This information includes the language spoken by a majority of visitors, where they are located, their browsers, and even the operating systems of their mobile devices.

These demographics, while general and superficial, are beneficial. However, Google Analytics allows you to better understand your audience by providing data on lifetime value, cohort analysis, as well as other useful information.

You can also use the audience tab to see your audience’s interests and behavior on your site. This includes engagement, what type of mobile device they are using, and many other details.

What is the significance of this information?

Audience analytics is far more important than what you see!

  • It allows you to decide what language, tone, and jargon you want to use for your website.
  • This helps you to understand when your users are most active on the site.
  • This helps you to understand how important mobile-friendliness for your website is.
  • This helps you to understand your audience’s interests and determine what content should be included.
  • There are many other things.

3. Enhanced Ad Management

As we have mentioned, PPC Ads can be a great way of driving traffic to your website. However, without an Analytics platform, it’s difficult to track the results.

Google Analytics allows you to track and manage all aspects of your Google Ads account from one location. You can see information such as the number of clicks per ad, cost per campaign, cost per click, and other details.

What is the significance of this information?

You can save money by keeping track of the results of your PPC campaigns.

  • Know the value of your campaign’s money and how it is being spent.
  • Learn what keywords are most beneficial
  • Learn how users click and which ads work best.
  • Learn how users interact with landing page pages

4. a Better understanding of user interactions and behavior

You can find all information about site content in the Behavior tab of your Analytics platform.

An overview of all pages on your website can be viewed. This will show you which pages are most popular and how much traffic each page receives over time.

To see the numbers on a page, you can also enter a URL from your site.

The behaviors tab contains information such as sessions and new users, bounce rates, average session duration, conversion rate, and bounce rate.

This tab allows you to see your site speed and exit page analytics (the page that a user visited before leaving the site).

What is the significance of this information?

It is possible to save time and energy by understanding how visitors interact with your website content.

  • This helps to determine what content is most popular and most useful.
  • This tool helps to determine which elements keep users on a page.
  • This allows you to compare pages during different times periods to see how content has changed on your pages

5. Improved tracking of conversions and goals

As we have mentioned, you can set goals that are based on what you consider a conversion to your website.

If you’re an ecommerce site, you may consider a purchase. If you’re a bakery, you may consider a goal completion of a quote form submission.

Any type of goal you wish to achieve can be achieved, no matter what. Other goals include webinar signups and the completion of contact forms.

Analytics’ conversions tab allows you to see your goals and the value of each one.

What is the significance of this information?

It is possible that understanding your goal completions can be one of the most important aspects of any marketing campaign. 

  • Find out which goals are being accomplished and which are not, and draw conclusions as to why.
  • The overall goal value is shown in dollars
  • Check out the pages where goals were achieved

Are you looking for help setting up Google Analytics?

You now know the basics of Google Analytics and why it is important. It’s time for you to set up Google Analytics on your website.

Kobe Digital can help you get the best out of your web analytics.

We offer Google Analytics consulting. We can show you how to use Google Analytics and set it up.

We are a full-service Internet marketing company and can create and implement custom-designed digital marketing plans for your business. We are experts in SEO and PPC. We will use web analytics to monitor, report, and improve any online marketing channel you choose.

About the author

Kobe Digital is a unified team of performance marketing, design, and video production experts. Our mastery of these disciplines is what makes us effective. Our ability to integrate them seamlessly is what makes us unique.