E-Marketing

Google Analytics is the standard web tracking tool for website owners. It is a very powerful tool for measuring, reporting and analysing your data.

Once you've built your website, you'll want to generate as many visitors as possible to view your website and order your service.

How do you know how many visitors came to your website?

Where did they come from?

What did they do on your website?

This is where Google Analytics comes in as it helps you to

1. measure
2. report
3. analyse

the behaviour of the user coming to your website.

Measure

When you install Google Analytics, you will receive a tracking code that you need to place on your website. From then on, every time someone goes to your site, this tracking code will send information to Google Analytics.

Data like:

• Which page is the user currently on?
• What browser is he using?
• What are the language settings of his browser?
• What was the previous page that the user was visiting before he came to your website (the referral page)?

and many more.

This data collection (measurement) happens in the background, so the user doesn't notice anything when they visit your website. The data gets recorded and stored in Google Analytics.

Reporting

Many reports are generated from the data measurement. They are divided into:

Audience report, which displays information about the technology that your users are using, where they are from, etc. This example shows that most of the users are from the USA.

1. Audience report, which displays information about the technology that your users are using, where they are from, etc. This example shows that most of the users are from the USA.
   
   
2. Acquisition report, where you can find out where the user came from that visited your website. This example shows that most users came to the site organically i.e. via a search engine; many came directly to the site i.e they knew the domain name; others came via links from other websites (referrals) and others came from Paid advertising.
   
   
3. Behaviour reports that indicate what the user did on your website, which pages they visited and which interactions they took on the website.
   
   
4. Conversion report - did the user take the action that you desired him to take on your website (usually to buy a product or book a service)?
   
   
   

All of these reports are automatically generated by Google Analytics, and you can also build your own custom reports.

Analysis

These reports are only useful to us if we do the analysis, which is about answering our questions using the available data e.g.

• Where did the user come from i.e did he come to the website using Google Search (organic), via our social media pages, through advertising such as Paid Search (Google Adwords) or referrals from another site?
• How does that compare to last week?
• Where did the user land on the website?
• Was there a spike in conversions at the same time as you ran a social media campaign?

There are many tools to dig deeper - filter the data, break it down further, visualise it differently, compare it and segment it. The ultimate goal of your analysis is to get to insight and then to action. So once you have found something out, you should take action e.g.

• Adjust your website to make certain information more easily available
• Adjust your social media channels that are referring traffic to your site
• Adjust your advertising with Google Ads, etc

Google Analytics is not the only analytics programme available, but is the most popular one, has been around for many years and is free.

For a guide on how to set up Google Analytics, see:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZM-ZH3m7zSA

Summary

• Google Analytics is used to measure, report and analyse website data.
• To activate Google Analytics, you need to add a tracking code to your website.
• The goal of your analysis is to get to insight and then to action.