A Beginners Guide To Google Analytics

We know that Google Analytics can seem like an overwhelming platform. There is so much data available and it can be hard to know where to start. In case you are wondering, Google Analytics is a powerful marketing tool that is completely free to use and gives you access to a comprehensive set of data about your website and PPC advertising performance. The information you gather from Google Analytics will allow you to make data-driven decisions and enact real changes and optimisations to your website and campaigns. You can track over 200 metrics that span across the whole marketing funnel from acquisition to conversions. When it comes to viewing your metrics, Google records two types of data:

• Dimensions: demographic information such as age and location of the user
• Metrics: qualitative data such as number of users and page visits

In this blog post, we are going to take a look at the data we think is the most important for you to understand. The Google analytics dashboard is broken down into four main categories:

1. Google Analytics Audience

Understanding who is visiting your website plays a large role in creating and optimising marketing campaigns. The most important things to track when it comes to your audience are age, gender, location and device. It is important to note that the DoubleClick cookie needs to be present on a user’s browser for Google Analytics to collect demographic information. Therefore the number of male and female users will not always equate to the total number of users.

• Location: It is important to understand where your audience is from, maybe you have high users from a certain county, city or even country.
• Age and Gender: Understanding the demographic of your website users means you can successfully adjust your campaigns and marketing to meet their needs.
• Device: Understanding whether your website traffic comes from desktop, mobile or tablet is crucial in optimising your site for users. You may notice a lot of mobile users visit your site for example, and can therefore you can optimise it further for mobile views.

2. Google Analytics Acquisition

The acquisition section of analytics allows you to see which sources your website traffic is coming from whether that be paid social, organic or direct.  The metrics within this section of Google Analytics that we think are the most important are:

• Sessions: A session is a group of interactions a user performs on your site within a timeframe. During this time they may fill out forms, make a purchase or click on multiple pages.
• Users: This is a key metric! The number of visitors to your website is vital in reviewing marketing performance, whether that be new or returning users.

3. Google Analytics Behaviour

Finding out how your users navigate your website is extremely informative for you and will give you a deeper understanding of user intent, what is working well and what requires improvement. These are the metrics you should keep an eye on:

• Average Time on Page: This will tell you the average length of time a user spends on the different pages on your website. It will allow you to track the highest performing pages.
• Page Views: This metric will allow you to see which are the top-performing pages on your site. 
• Bounce Rate: This metric shows you if users leave a webpage without taking an action. If you have a high bounce rate it indicates that your content isn’t relevant, the webpage provides a poor user experience or there is a lack of clear CTAs.

4. Google Analytics Conversions

Conversions are the ultimate goal and final part of your marketing funnel. Whether they involve an enquiry or sale, tracking them is extremely important. So which conversion metrics should you monitor?

• Goal completions: You can set up goals on Google Analytics to monitor the conversions that you want to track. This metric tells you how many conversions you have had on your website – the most important thing!
• Conversion rate: This figure breaks down the percentage of users who complete a conversion on your website. 

We hope this post has given you some insight into how to use Google Analytics and the takeaway information you can gain from it! If you need any help with your digital marketing, website and using Google Analytics, then get in touch with us today.