What Is Google Analytics

How do customers end up on your website? Where are they located? How long do they stay? These are just some of the questions that you’ll struggle to answer without proper analytics tracking set-up on your website.

Google Analytics is a tool set up by Google to allow webmasters a better understanding of their website’s online traffic. Once set up on your website, Google Analytics can be used to measure the volume and activity of your website visitors as well as providing other crucial insights that can supercharge your marketing efforts.

In order to work, a piece of code is installed on each page of your business’s website. This code is triggered when a user lands on your website and runs in their browser, linking up with Google to track the user’s activity as they move around your site.

As we will discuss, there are an untold number of benefits to using Google Analytics tracking. It can identify who your audience is, how long they stay, where they come from, what they do on your website and so much more. When used properly this information can then go on to help you improve your website and further refine your online marketing efforts to get the best ROI (Return on Investment).

1 – Identify Your Audience

As well as showing you the volume of traffic to your website, Google Analytics can also show you exactly who your audience is. It can provide information like age, gender and location of the people visiting your website, as well as their presumed interests (based on their browsing behaviour) and the language that they speak. With this kind of information at hand you could create some powerful and highly targeted marketing campaigns.

2 – Learn Where Your Visitors Come From

Google Analytics can show you how the visitors to your website got there in the first place. Did they arrive organically through search results on Google or Bing? If so, what search terms did they use to get there? Maybe they arrived through paid advertising on Facebook or Google Adwords – which advert brought them there? All of this information can help you to calculate which streams of marketing are working for you and where you need to double-up your efforts.

3 – Study the Behaviour of Your Visitors

Google Analytics can provide an overview of the way that your visitors interact with your website by showing you things like bounce rates (the percentage of people who leave after viewing one page) and how long visitors spend on specific pages on your website. This can tell you a lot about your website and may help you to plan for improvements. Is the copy on your page engaging enough? Is it difficult to navigate? Does the page load so slowly that people click away before it loads?

4 – Set Your Goals

Another powerful use of Google Analytics is the use of goals. Google Analytics allows you to tie together specific user actions into a goal. Your goal might be achieved when someone completes a newsletter sign-up form, when they submit an enquiry form or perhaps when they complete a purchase online. This will then give you a bird’s eye view of how much money, or how many enquiries your website and different marketing streams are generating.

Here at DBS we believe that Google Analytics tracking is one of the cornerstones of a successful online marketing strategy. We have years of experience helping businesses to set up, monitor and report on Google Analytics results.

To find out more please call us on 0800 988 8366 or email enquiries@dbsinternetmarketing.co.uk.