9 Sep, 2015

Understanding Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a service provided by Google to track and monitor the traffic which comes to your website; from visitor sources to referrals and monitoring conversion rates, these analytics are used to generate invaluable data for your business. But whilst it is simple to produce these insights, it is how we use them which will really make a difference to your business. 
Whether you want to increase visitors, encourage more sales or simply want to see how visitors navigate around your site; the data generated from your analytics can be used to inform business decisions, improve engagement and target marketing campaigns. Take a look at all of the key features of Google Analytics and see how each can be used to help your business. 

Acquisition: Insights into your visitor journeys including how they found your site and what pages they visited once they were on. Acquisition insights can be invaluable to your business as once you know where your traffic is coming from, you can target marketing or sales campaigns to those sources and generate more results for your business. Acquisition reporting also allows you to manage your AdWords, Paid, and Organic campaigns. 

Audience: Audience reporting can be used to determine exactly who your audience are – how old are they? What do they enjoy? What platform did they view your site on? What operating system to they use? The data gathered in audience reporting are essential to your marketing campaigns as it can be used to identify your key target audience. Who you are trying to engage with and who you actually engage with can be two different things – these insights will let you see how targeted your campaigns actually are. 



Conversion: The ability to set goals and conversions means you can easily monitor points of success for your business. Whether that is a data collection point, the process of a sale, adding an item to a basket or simply clicking on an email link; by establishing key business goals for your website, you can really determine how successful the site is and identify points for improvement.  

Social: Whilst you can use external interfaces to monitor the success of your social media campaigns, Google Analytics can be used to determine which of your posts generate the most traffic to your site. By putting these most successful posts into time boxes, you will be able to schedule your posts at a time where engagement it at its highest and increase footfall to your site. 

E-commerce – Analytics are vital if your business runs an e-commerce platform. E-commerce reporting will allow you to see everything from which of your products are the most popular, which ads generated the most clicks. Reporting can also be used to monitor the user’s journey from viewing a product to purchase. By mapping this transaction timeline, you will be able to highlight points within the timeline where buyers drop off. Is it that they are asked to login prior to making a purchase? Is that stopping people from going through with the sale? Once you know this information, you will be able to make continuous improvement to your sales process and hopefully generate more sales. 

Behaviour – Behaviour reporting allows you to monitor how engaging the content is on your site by viewing how many page views it has had and how long users stayed on the page. Engaging content is not only important in getting people to stay on your site, it is also an important ranking factor. You can also manage event tracking, landing pages and exit pages in behaviour reporting.   

Understanding the data generated from your Google Analytics and using that information to improve your website can be the difference between the success and failure of a site. At pixelbuilders we understand that not all business have the time or expertise to invest in managing their Google Analytics account. 

If you need help with your businesses’ analytics then give a member of our team a call today to see how we can help you heighten the success of your business.