Google Analytics (usually now called GA4) is a fantastic free tool that businesses can use to understand how their website is performing and how it can be improved. GA4 tracks how your visitors interact with your website and gives you valuable insights about both your audience and your website’s effectiveness.
1. It shows you where your website visitors come from
Google Analytics will show you if your website visitors found you through Google search, social media, advertising, from links on other websites or via other channels. This can help you understand what’s working for you and where you could improve your marketing efforts.
2. It tells you what people do on your website
You can easily see what pages people view, how long they stay on your site, and what they do – make a purchase, watch a video, send a contact form. This helps you understand what content resonates with your audience, as well as see where your visitors lose interest or drop out of your sales funnel.
3. It helps you make informed decisions
While understanding the data is important, it’s making decisions and taking action based on that data that’s where the real power lies.
Examples of actions you can take based on your analytics data may include:
- Focusing more (or less) on a particular product or service on your website (e.g. linking to it from the homepage, incorporating links to it from blog posts etc.).
- Increasing your marketing on social media or paid advertising to boost a product or service.
- Understanding how effective your newsletters and social media channels are in driving traffic to your website.
- Improving your website speed, call to actions and messaging on pages that are turning visitors away.
- Noticing seasonal trends over time: the longer you collect data, you will notice that particular months or seasons dip or peak, and can take this into account with your marketing efforts.
- If you have it switched on in your account, you can understand more about the demographics of your audience – gender, location, age. This can help you tweak your messaging (and even website design) appropriately.
How Google Analytics works
To use Google Analytics, you need to install a small tracking code on your website. You can get this code by creating an account at https://analytics.google.com
Note: GoldenWeb websites are all set up with GA4 as part of our project process.
By default, demographic data is not turned on – you will need to do this manually by logging into Analytics and going to Admin -> Data Collection -> Data Signals Collection.
You’ll also need to make sure that basic event tracking is on by going to Admin -> Data Streams, clicking on your data stream, then making sure the 7 default events are turned “on”.
If you want to create custom events such as recording how many times people click on your phone number, you will need to set this up yourself (or for GoldenWeb clients, please contact us).
Hopefully you’re now inspired to take a good look at your Google Analytics and see what’s working for you and what’s not.
Resources
Google Analytics: https://analytics.google.com
Google Looker Studio – helps you create visually appealing reports: https://looker.google.com
Measureschool – for those who want to get in and get their hands dirty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaBycjPJztk
