Welcome back to the final chapter of my digital marketing blog. Last week we looked at the use of CRM for customer service. This week we are looking at the complicated world of Google Analytics. Analytics is a powerful tool that provides insights into the inner workings of your website. Understanding Google Analytics can help you strengthen your website to improve your customers’ experience online.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free tool created by Google that tracks customers movements throughout your website. It gives you the opportunity to look at details such as the behaviour & number of visitors along with details on who these visitors are. 

How Does Google Analytics Work?

Google analytics is a reporting tool, you, the user places a code onto your website in which google analytics begins to track actions on your website. It collects data on each visitor including their location, browser, device, pages visited and movements whilst on your site. The data is presented in a range of figures and graphs.

Key Features of Google Analytics:

1. Audience: It provides details on your visitors such as number of users & pageviews
2. Acquisition Reports: It can tell you what channels the user followed to arrive on your website, such as referral links, social media & search engine
3. Behaviour Reports: It advises on what your customers did along the way, what pages they went onto, the duration of time spent on the page and what actions they carried out.
4. Conversion Tracking: Through tracking, you can see the success of your efforts. You can understand if a customer has made a purchase, completed a form or never signed up for your weekly newsletter.

Getting Started with Google Analytics:

1. Sign Up and Install Tracking Code: Create a Google Analytics account and add the tracking code to your website. You can find detailed instructions on how to do this in Google’s help documentation.
2. Explore the Interface: Once your tracking code is installed and data is being collected, explore the Google Analytics interface. Familiarize yourself with the various reports and sections available.
3. Set Goals: Define specific goals for your website, such as increasing sales or newsletter subscriptions. Use the goal tracking feature in Google Analytics to monitor progress towards these goals.
4. Regularly Analyze Reports: Make it a habit to regularly check your Google Analytics reports to gain insights into your website’s performance. Look for trends, patterns, and areas for improvement.

Tips for Making the Most of Google Analytics:

1. Customise Reports: You can maage your reports so the information you pull out of the site best fits the needs of your business.
2. Use Annotations: Adding markers to your reports helps you pinpoint certain changes on your website, so you can understand why the date fluctuates.
3. Experiment with Segments: You can better understand your customers by drilling into each segment, elements you can consider are new visitors, repeat customers or location of the potential customers.
4. Stay Updated: Google regularly makes updates to analytics, so stay upto date with new features as they come out.

Understanding Google Analytics carries a lot of value if you want to fully understand your customers and their behaviour with your business online. You can use this tool to get the very best out of your website and to nudge your customers’ behaviours. 

Thank you so much for sticking around for this entire series on digital marketing. I am delighted you chose to stick with my marketing ramblings until the end! Please do get in touch if you have any questions and subscribe to my email newsletter in order to stay up to date with future blogs.