Google Analytics is a website analytics platform that lets you track and measure visits to your website, actions taken on your website, visitor demographics, and much more. If you’re just getting started with Google Analytics, this tutorial will teach you how to use Google Analytics to track and measure your most important website metrics.

Google Analytics Price: Free with a Google account

Note: This guide assumes you’ve already created a Google Analytics account and added the tracking code to your website. If you’re not yet that far along, start with our tutorial on how to set up Google Analytics.

How to Access Google Analytics Reports

After logging in to Google Analytics, the first view you’ll see is your dashboard. The default Google Analytics dashboard contains several blocks that highlight important overview metrics like site traffic (how many people are visiting your site), traffic sources (where those visitors are coming from), and visitor locations (where most of your site visitors live).

While the default dashboard provides a nice overview of your site’s performance, you’ll most likely want to dig deeper into the data to gather more actionable insights. To view more detailed data, use the REPORTS section of the left navigation menu to navigate to the datasets you’re most interested in.

Google Analytics audience reports

Click the Audience tab to expand it and access all of the audience metrics that Google Analytics tracks.

On the Overview page, you’ll get a quick glimpse of metrics like:

If you want to know more about your audience, you can dig into some of the deeper reports.

Select Geo > Location to see where most of your visitors live.

Select Technology > Browser & OS to see what browsers your visitors use most often.

Open Mobile > Overview to see how many of your users visited your site on a desktop, mobile, or tablet device.

There are also a couple of reports under audience that you’ll have to enable if you want to use them: Demographics and Interests .

However, in order for Google Analytics to collect this data, it has to enable cookies on your site, so you have to update your privacy policy to stay GDPR compliant. GDPR violations can result in fines, so if you’re not sure you’ll be compliant when tracking this information, it’s better to leave it disabled.

Google Analytics acquisition reports

Reports under the Acquisition tab show you how your visitors get to your website. On the Overview tab, you’ll see a pie chart showing the percentage of your visitors that arrive from four different sources:

Below that, you’ll see a breakdown of the number of visitors who arrived from each source.

If you want more specific details, you can dig deeper into your acquisition reports:

Open All Traffic > Source/Medium to see the exact sources that are driving traffic to your site.

If you run Google Ads, you can link your Google Analytics account to your Google Ads account to view Google Ads metrics in Google Analytics. Go to Acquisition > Google Ads > Campaigns and click the Get started button to link your accounts.

You can also link Google Analytics to Google Search Console to see the keywords visitors used to find your site in organic search. Go to Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages and click the Set up Search Console data sharing button to link your accounts.

Google Analytics behavior reports

Reports under the Behavior tab show you how visitors interact with your website and content. You can use behavior reports to see key metrics for each page of your website, find out what users are searching for on your site, and view your website’s page speed metrics.

To see page-level metrics for the different pages of your website, navigate to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages .

Each of your website’s pages will display in order of popularity (which pages had the most visits) along with several metrics:

If your website has a search function, you can use the Behavior > Site Search > Search Terms report to see what keywords and phrases users are searching for on your site.

And the Site Speed reports will show you average load times for your site overall ( Overview ) and for each page of your site ( Page Timings ), as well as suggestions for how to improve the load speeds of different pages of your site ( Speed Suggestions ).

How to Adjust the Display in Google Analytics Reports

Each report in Google Analytics has a default setting for how it displays, but you can adjust those settings to grab the exact data you need.

For example, by default, Google Analytics will show you data for the last week when you open a report. To change the timeframe for the report:

You can also view data for a specific segment of users. For example, say you want to see data only from people who visited your site on a mobile device:

First, click + Add Segment .

Then, check the box for Mobile Traffic , and click the Apply button.

Now you can see data for mobile traffic alongside data for all site traffic and compare the numbers.

There are tons of different ways to segment your data by user behaviors, actions, demographics, and more. You’ll find all of the options in the + Add Segment menu.

Finally, you can adjust how the data is sorted in any table in Google Analytics by clicking the column header. For example, tables in the Behavior > Site Content report are sorted by default from most to least pageviews. But if you wanted to see pages by highest to lowest time on page instead, click the Avg. Time on Page column header. And if you want to sort by lowest time on page to highest time on page, click the Avg. Time on Page column header a second time.

How to Use Google Analytics

  • The standard version of Google Analytics is a free online tool that Google provides to help you understand, analyze, and improve your website traffic.
  • It’s easy to create a Google Analytics account and start tracking your site performance, as long as you can edit your site’s HTML tag.
  • There are a lot of reports available which let you see real-time performance, how pages perform over time, your conversion rate for e-commerce campaigns, and more.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Just the name is intimidating to some people: Google Analytics. It might help to know that analytics is the name for the branch of mathematics dedicated to analyzing data, and is generally used to tease out meaningful patterns that can be used to generate statistics and make predictions about future trends.

That said, you don’t need to know or perform any math to use Google Analytics — all of that is done in the background for you.

What you can do with Google Analytics

Google Analytics — commonly abbreviated as GA — is a free tool that Google provides to help you understand, analyze, and improve your website traffic. It provides graphs and data that you can use to understand information about your site. Here are just a few examples of the kind of information you can learn using GA:

  • How many unique visitors click on the site and specific pages within it.
  • How many overall page views go to specific pages (and the site in general). Pageviews are different from unique visitors, since the same person might click on a page more than once.
  • How long visitors are spending on each page during their visit.
  • What your “bounce” rate is — in other words, what percentage of your visitors are leaving the site after looking at only a single page, rather than following links to other pages.
  • Information about your visitors’ demographics, including where they are from, and what kind of browser or mobile device they’re using to visit.

It’s important to note that only the site’s owners and managers can see GA data, so strangers, visitors, and competitors cannot, for example, access your Google Analytics page (at least not without your permission or login information).

How to create a Google Analytics account

To get started, you need to create a Google Analytics account for each website you own or manage.

1. Go to the Google Analytics homepage and sign into your Google account if needed.

2. If you don’t already have a GA account, click “Sign Up.”

3. Follow the setup instructions by entering the name and URL of your web site, along with other details, and click “Get Tracking ID.”

4. On the next page, you’ll be given a tracking code that you need to add to the tag on each page of your website that you want to be able to monitor in GA. You can add that tag manually in an HTML editor (following the directions provided by Google) or, if you use a web service like Wix or Squarespace, the webpage editor can do this automatically for you.

After creating your account, you can enable other people to see your GA page:

1. On your Google Analytics page , click the Gear icon in the lower left corner to open the Admin page.

2. Click “User Management.” You should see your own login information.

3. Click the blue plus sign in the upper right corner of the screen.

4. Click “Add users,” and enter the email address for each person you want to add to the GA account. They’ll each get an email inviting them to GA with their own unique password. You can always return here to revoke their permission.

A quick tour of Google Analytics

Once you have a working GA account, you can log in at any time and get a snapshot of your site’s performance. Here are some key places to start:

  • The Home tab displays a brief dashboard of your site’s performance, including traffic, how many users are on the site at this very moment, and where your traffic is coming from.
  • The Real-Time tab is rich with valuable information, especially if your site is news-focused or publishes timely information. It’ll show you who is on your site minute-by-minute along with which pages on the site are currently trending, and where that traffic is coming from.
  • The Behavior tab is critical for understanding what pages are performing well (and which ones are doing poorly). The Site Content section of the Behavior tab is a favorite for site editors and content managers, because it shows the traffic for every page on the site for any timeframe you might want to see.
  • The Conversions tab is where you can find how ecommerce campaigns are performing. Here you can establish goals and see whether traffic is translating into actual revenue.

Learn more from Google

Google has a wealth of online instruction and tutorials for Google Analytics. If you want to learn how to use this tool, you should start with Google Analytics Academy , which is a collection of videos and articles that introduce you to every aspect of the site.

Google Analytics offers an easy and free way to track and analyze visitors on your website. You could have thousands or even millions of visitors every month, but those visitors are practically meaningless if you don’t know anything about them. With its robust web analytics and reporting tools, Google Analytics can help you make the most out of visitors and potentially turn them into customers.

In addition to tracking the number of visitors, Google Analytics provides key insights into how your website is performing and what you can do to meet your goals. You can track everything from how much traffic your website is getting to where that traffic is coming from and how visitors are behaving. You can even monitor social media activities, track mobile app traffic, identify trends and integrate other data sources to help you make well-informed business decisions.

Here’s how to use Google Analytics for your website.

Google Analytics Basics

If you want to skip the details and just get started, here’s a rundown of how to set up Google Analytics on your website:

• Sign in to Google Analytics with your Google account

• Click the Admin button on the bottom left sidebar of your dashboard

• Select an account or create an account

• Click on the dropdown menu to create a property

• Click on Website and add your site’s name and URL

• Choose your industry

• Choose your time zone

• Click on Get Tracking ID

• Install Tracking ID on your website

Here are also a few terms you should know:

Account — where each property lives in your dashboard. You can set up multiple properties in one account or have multiple accounts for different properties

Property — the website or mobile app you want to track

Tracking ID — a unique code added to your site that allows Google Analytics to track it

Conversion — visits that turn into customers or potential customers

Channel/Traffic source — shows where your traffic came from, such as referrals or links from other sites, search engines, social media and emails

Session duration — how long visitors spend on your site

Bounce rate — percentage of visitors that view only a single page and then leave

Event — specific visitor behavior, such as when a visitor clicks on an ad, watches or stops a video, downloads a file and more

Landing page — the first page a visitor sees when visiting your website

Organic search — visitors who visit your site from a link on a search results page

Segment — a way to filter data, such as by category and types of visitors

And the types of reports you shouldn’t miss:

Acquisition — shows you where traffic comes from, such as search engines, social media, email marketing campaigns and links from other websites. You’ll find this under the Acquisition tab.

Keywords — tells you what search words visitors used to find your website on a search engine. You’ll find this report in the Behavior tab, under Site Search.

Conversions — tracks how many visitors are converting into newsletter subscribers, shoppers and actual customers. Click on the Conversions tab and choose a type or category of conversion to view a report.

Lifetime value — currently in beta, Lifetime Value reports track visitors throughout their lifetime, from their first visit to conversions, return visits, future purchases and beyond. This can help you figure out what turned these visitors into customers and what made them keep coming back so you can implement changes. Lifetime value is located under the Audience tab.

Landing page — shows you which pages are the most frequent landing pages so you can track down where those visitors are coming from and what’s working on those top pages that’s attracting customers. You’ll find this across different reports under the landing page column.

Active users — monitors how many visitors are actually active on your site within a specific time period, such as the past week, 14 days or month. This will show you what pages the most active users are visiting so you can figure out what’s keeping their attention and apply it to the rest of your website. You can find the active users report in the Audience tab under Active Users.

Now that you have the basics down, here’s more on using Google Analytics as a small business.

MORE:

Sign up for a Google Analytics account

To use Google Analytics, you will need a Google account. Go to Click on Sign in or Create an Account on the upper left corner. If you’re already signed in, click on Access Google Analytics. Fill in the required information – account name, website name, URL, industry, time zone and data-sharing settings.

Click on Get Tracking ID to finish setting up your account.

Once you go into production with your Vue app, you need Google Analytics to understand your traffic

How to Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the go-to tool to understand how much traffic your website gets and even more importantly, from where it originates, who returns to your site and a lot more.

No matter what your goals are with your Vue app, you want to know what your bounce rates are, your organic search traffic coming from Google searches and how users behave on your site.

In this article I briefly describe how to integrate Vue-analytics in your application and then give some tips based on our experience using Analytics during the first months of Epiloge’s launch.

You can potentially disregard Vue-analytics entirely and directly integrate Google Analytics using Google’s instructions on how to do so. But I don’t recommend it.

Vue-analytics is a plugin that has worked flawlessly for us at Epiloge so far. It does not take up much space in your vendor.js file and has been very easy to integrate without any issues.

And that is all you need to get going with Google Analytics in your Vue app. You will, however, need your id number from the Google Analytics panel.

If you haven’t done so yet, create an account for Google Analytics. Google calls your website or app a property in that account. You will need to add such a property. Simply follow the steps Google outlines, they are straight forward.

Thereafter, you gain access to your id that you can use in your main.js file in Vue.use .

You can find your id under the Admin icon in Google Analytics — the Settings Icon towards the bottom on the left. Then click on Property Settings and your id should show.

How to Use Google Analytics

The best way to track which pages users access is throw your vue-router in your Vue app. To do so, you just need to pass ‘router’ to Vue-analytics in main.js after your id number.

If you are new to Google Analytics, you will be encountering a few odd behaviors. One of which is the discrepancy between Google Search Console, which you likely already use to track how many clicks you receive from Google’s organic search results and how many impressions on search results you have.

Google Analytics data will very likely be higher than the clicks you see on the Search Console. Unless you add all your website domains to the Search Console. In Epiloge’s case, the search console should not just track epiloge.com and but also and and

In order to see all organic search traffic for all variants of your domain, you will need to include extra properties in your Google Search Console.

Remember, for Google a ‘property’ is a website which includes all variants of your domain. You can add such properties on the upper left side of your Google Analytics panel.

How to Use Google Analytics

If your Google Search Console doesn’t list all the pages you want indexed from your app, especially dynamically created pages, check out this article on dynamically created sitemaps.

I’d also suggest that you link your Google Search Console to your Google Analytics account. This way, you get information on landing pages and other data that the Google Search Console provides — directly into your Google Analytics account.

In other words, your Google Analytics account takes center stage when you analyze your traffic, your conversion ratio and your strategy to grow users and traffic.

To link your Google Search Console to Google Analytics, click on the Admin panel symbol on the left bottom, then click on All products and find the Google Search Console. Follow the steps there to link the Search Console.

How to Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is by far the most important website traffic information tool in the world. As of 2020, it’s used by 84% of all websites which use analytics tools for traffic.

If you search for Google Analytics, you will find a large number of articles analyzing the legal ramifications of using Google Analytics, in particular in relation to European legislation (the GDPR).

Note that it doesn’t matter where you operate your website from, local privacy laws apply to your website as long as it can be accessed from a certain country.

Regardless of the article you ready, the minimal consensus on Google Analytics is that you need to ask users for consent to use it on your site. However, what is less clear is what type of consent legislation (not just in Europe, but also in other countries) requires.

Most large websites have kept to the cookie policy banner system, while modifying their Privacy Policy. That means, users who first enter a website, see a pop up that specifically talks about cookies and links to the Privacy Policy. The Privacy Policy then lays out that the site uses Google Analytics- sometimes linking to the Google Analytics Privacy Policy.

Certain companies have also started to include the following ‘ how to disable Google Analytics’ paragraph into their privacy policy:

You can prevent the installation of cookies by adjusting the settings in your browser software accordingly; please note though that you may not be able to use all the features of the [include Website name] in full as a result. Google also offers so-called deactivation tools for some web browsers, where you can opt out of your user behavior being recorded and analyzed. You will find more information and download options for these tools here:

This way, users are guided to how to opt out from Google Analytics if they object to its use.

If you like to be even more stringent yourself, you could include an opt-out button in your privacy policy that disables Google Analytics for a particular user. Whether or not this is actually legally required has not been finally legally determined yet as of early 2020.

If you just deployed your app and are busy fixing bugs and modifying it to enhance its user experience, my suggestion is to stop here. You likely want to get used to all the features of Google Analytics over a few weeks or even months before delving deeper into more features. After all, you need traffic first to use a traffic analytics tool.

Eventually, however, you may want to do more sophisticated things with Google Analytics.

In particular, I recommend to read up on Event Measuring with Google Analytics. This is useful if you want to know how many times a button is clicked on (e.g. your signup modal container) or another event is triggered by a user (such as scrolling down on your landing page etc.). It allows you to better understand conversion behavior.

I hope this article gives a good overview of integrating Google Analytics into your Vue app.

If you have encountered other pitfalls or have further useful tricks for working with Google Analytics, it would be great if you add them in the comments.

Home • Blog • How to use Google Analytics

How to use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is no question, a phenomenal item for finding out stats approximately your association’s gathering of people. Out of the box, it can assist you discover out more almost your gathering of people, where they came from and their conduct on your site. But there are a few highlights worth empowering as before long as conceivable, in a perfect world on a new introduce. By approaching the website development agency you can get an entire. F5 Studio WordPress website development services and business packages includes Google Analytics implementation. Of course you can do it yourself.

Here are a few tips

Without assisting, here are the highlights we tend to empower on each establishment. We expect merely have Analytics introduced, are collecting information and have authorization to alter settings.

Removing spiders and bots

Why? It expels most fake activity from your stats meaning they are more genuine. Bots and spider-related activity don’t truly assist you to decide in the event that your campaigns and endeavors are working. Frequently, they will skew your real stats. While it isn’t culminating, Google includes a built-in choice to expel them. This is how you do it- Go to Admin > See Settings and you’ll see a heading of “Bot Filtering.” Tick the choice to “Exclude all hits from known bots and spiders.”

Filtering Traffic

Why? It expels your possess visits to dodge skewing honest to goodness traffic. This may cruel sifting out your possess activity, or your entire office depending on how your association works. Basically, the foremost common way of doing this would be to avoid IP addresses (or ranges) from being tracked. How? Discover your IP addresses by Googling “Ip” and note it down. In Analytics, go to Admin > Channels > Include channel and [prohibit] [activity from the IP addresses] [that are break even with to] at that point pop in your address. You’ll be able check in Real-Time in the event that your channel has worked by going by a page on your location and seeing in the event that it appears up.

How to Use Google Analytics

Include Interests and demographics

It includes stats around your visitors’ sexual orientations and ages to Analytics. Your promoting campaigns might target specific ages. Or maybe you want to memorize more almost gathering of people sex, age and interface and how it influences your site. In that case, socioeconomics is valuable to enable. Whilst not all of your group of onlookers will have a known age or sexual orientation, a subset of it might offer assistance. More information on how Google gets this information. How? Go to Gathering of people > Socioeconomics > Outline and select the “Enable” button.

Track your website searches

Why? See what your group of onlookers looks for on your site. Being able to see what individuals look for on your site implies you’ll find hot points, hard-to-find substance or fabric which you ought to have on your website. How? Firstly go to Admin > See Settings and turn “Site looks Tracking” on. You’ll next got to fill out a “query parameter” — usually the address mark within the web address of a exploring. For case, in the event that you were to go to example.com and seek for widgets at that point the net address can be In this case, you’d put “term” into Analytics as the inquiry parameter. Make an attempt looking at the claim location for yours.

The search console must be integrated

Analytics gives you traffic and conversion data and Google Search Console gives you a look at the causal search factors underlying that data. Linking the two gives you a huge boost in reporting.

To link Search Console and Analytics, head to the admin panel, click property setting and to click adjust Search Console. If you do not see the URL, you need to add your site to Search Console and save sittings.
Note! First you need to add.to Search Console and verify it.

How to Use Google Analytics

Using Google Ads

As it were valuable in the event that you run Advertisements of course. Being able to rapidly check your Advertisements campaigns from Analytics may be a pleasant touch from Google and it can provide you more data almost your audience and conduct than Advertisements alone. How? You’ll get to have set up Advertisements. Once done, go to Admin > Google Advertisements Connecting and select the “New Interface Group” button. Combine it along with your Advertisements account and you’ll at that point see information in Analytics.

How to Check Google analytics with Tag assistant

Tag Assistant helps to troubleshoot installation and that automatically validates the implementation of various Google tags including Google Analytics, Ads Conversion Tracking, Google Tag Manager and more. The extension is free. This extension is easy to set up and use.

Support

Traffic, Upgrades

Google Analytics

Adding Google Analytics to a WordPress.com site or blog is available as a feature of the WordPress.com Premium, Business, and eCommerce plans. Visit My Sites → Tools → Marketing → Traffic to enable Google Analytics.

Table of Contents

WordPress.com Stats vs Google Analytics

WordPress.com Stats

WordPress.com has built-in stats tracking with reports that offer quick, at-a-glance views of the traffic on your site. New posts, likes and comments are shown alongside visitor activity, so it’s easier to make sense of the numbers.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics includes advanced features to complement WordPress.com stats. Funnel reports help you track the path visitors take through your site, and goal conversion lets you measure how visitors complete specific tasks (such as reaching a product page or contact form). If you already use Google Analytics with other projects, you’ll be able to see all your stats in one place.

Enabling Google Analytics on WordPress.com

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google. Integrating Google Analytics on WordPress.com is part of the WordPress.com Premium plan, that includes everything else you need to build a great website.

In Google Analytics

To get started you’ll need to sign up at the Google Analytics site. Sign in or Sign up to get started.

If you already used Google Analytics with other sites before, you can create a new account in your existing Google account. Click Admin in your Google Analytics account and click Create Account to create a new analytics profile.

How to Use Google Analytics

Be sure to fill in the “Account Name” for your new Google Analytics account. You will see some data sharing options under “Account Data Sharing Settings.”

By default, all four Data Sharing settings are selected. You can read the description for each setting to decide if you would like to opt-out. When you’re ready, click “Next”.

How to Use Google Analytics

You will see three options: “Web”, “Apps”, and “Apps and Web”. Please choose “Web” to get started as you will measure the analytics of your site.

How to Use Google Analytics

On the next page, please fill up with the following information:

  1. Website Name: Enter your website name.
  2. Website URL: Choose https:// from the drop-down menu as all sites on WordPress.com use the https:// protocol, and enter the custom domain of your site in the text box.
  3. Industry Category: Choose a category of your website.
  4. Reporting Time Zone: Choose the timezone you want the reporting of your website to be in.

Click “Create” when done. A pop-up will appear with “Google Analytics Terms of Service Agreement” and “Additional Terms Applicable to Data Shared with Google”. You will need to click the checkbox for both and accept the terms to continue.

If you accept, please click “I Accept” and you will be taken to the “Tracking Code” page.

On this page, look for the “Tracking ID”. It will look something like UA–90363941–1. You’ll need that ID to finish connecting your site to Google Analytics. Copy it, and head to Tools → Marketing → Traffic on your WordPress.com settings.

On your WordPress.com Site

Paste the entire ID you copied from the Google Analytics site into the “Google Analytics Tracking ID” box. After you click “Save Settings” your site will be connected to Google Analytics and start sending data to Google.

Frequently Asked Questions

Most Google Analytics reports do not work in real time. Reports are normally delayed by at least a few hours. Use Real Time reports in Google Analytics to monitor activity on your site as it happens. The following Google help page will show you how to check whether your tracking code has been installed properly or not.

If you are not seeing visits reported after 24-48 hours, and you know you have had visitors based on your WordPress.com Stats, go back to your Google Analytics dashboard and check that your domain is spelled correctly, does not contain www, and matches your primary domain. If it meets all of those criteria, generate a new Tracking ID. Enter the new ID on your SettingsAnalytics screen as outlined above.

WordPress.com stats and Google Analytics use different methods to identify and track activity on your site. You can expect Google Analytics and WordPress.com stats to always show slightly different totals for your visits, views, etc. However, you will be able to notice the same trends and patterns in both systems.

Google Analytics is a very popular website analytics service, and you can find plenty of information about it in books, workshops, blog posts, online forums and more. We suggest you start with Google’s help center for Analytics, and specifically the getting started guide. You can also check out the Google Analytics Solutions Community, where you can interact with other Analytics users.

If you have a website, you should be using Google Analytics. Period.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool offered by Google that provides valuable insights by tracking and reporting website traffic.

This solution is designed to help website owners and marketers measure, track and analyze website traffic, conversions, and content interaction.

It is very important to understand how your website is continuously performing and address issues that need attention.

In order to do this, you need to monitor important metrics such as conversions, visits, and keywords that visitors are using to find your site.

Check out this introductory video from Google that demonstrates the importance of Google Analytics and how it can help you improve your business.

If you don’t already have an account, then here is a step-by-step guide to setting one up.

If you have a primary Google account that you use, then you should set up your Analytics using that account.

Otherwise, you will have to create a new one.

Once you have a Google account, you can go to Google Analytics and sign in.

1. Click here to go to Google Analytics.

How to Use Google Analytics

2. Once you have signed in to your Google account, click Access Google Analytics.

3. Click Sign up

How to Use Google Analytics

4. Fill in your Account Name, Website Name, Website URL, and select an Industry Category and Reporting Time Zone.

How to Use Google Analytics

5. Under Data Sharing Options, check the boxes next to the options that you want.

6. Click Get Tracking ID

How to Use Google Analytics

7. From the Google Analytics Terms of Service Agreement that opens, click I Accept.

8. Add the tracking ID to your site

Adding the code to your website is fairly straightforward.

Here are some instructional videos to help walk you through integrating Google Analytics with some of the most common web platforms.

WordPress

Shopify

Big Commerce

Square Space

Once you have your Google Analytics account up and running, you will start getting a lot of different reports that will help you know which areas of your website need improvement.

To some, these reports may be a bit overwhelming.

Don’t worry… We’ve got you covered.

Check out these videos to learn how to use Google Anylitics, now that you have it setup.

Google Analytics is a platform that collects data and then compiles it into useful reports by using a small piece of Javascript tracking code to collect data about your visitors and their interactions on your site.

You can manage multiple sites from one location.

The Audience reports provide information about your website visitors that include an in-depth look at your community’s traffic and the behavior of users after they arrive.

This video demonstrates how you are able to use dashboards and shortcuts to save and share report data.

Dashboards can easily be customized and allow you to see an overview of your most important reports.

Shortcuts can be a big timesaver and will give quick access to the reports that you use the most.

This video demonstrates how to track and analyze a marketing campaign through “Campaign Tagging”, which allow you to add tags to website links that are used in campaigns that pass information into Analytics about the link that is clicked.

This allows you to determine which marketing campaigns are driving the most traffic.

URL campaign tracking refers to the practice of adding some additional parameters to a link you use on your site.

By adding this information, your link is now referred to as a “campaign” that will be tracked automatically in your Google Analytics account.

Goals in Google Analytics allow you to track specific user interactions on your website.

These user interactions can be anything including form submissions, downloads, clicking a button, and more.

When a website visitor performs the specific action that you’ve defined as a goal, Analytics records that as a conversion.

Now you have the necessary tools to help set up Google Analytics to track and optimize your sites.

While this article certainly isn’t a super advanced guide, it will help you get started and is key for beginners to avoid many mistakes while setting up in each of the above platforms.

You’ve researched your audience. You’ve created mind-blowing content. You’re ready to launch your digital campaign. However, all your efforts will be wasted if you don’t have a robust analytics system in place right from the start. Read on to find out how you can leverage the power of analytics – in particular, Google Analytics – to maximize your earning potential and stay ahead of the game.

In this article

How to Use Google Analytics

How to Use Google Analytics

This article contains excerpts of content from our
↗ DMI PRO course that teaches all the key digital marketing skills needed for the modern workplace.

Web analytics

Let’s start by looking at the concept of web analytics. What exactly does it mean?

Well,web analytics involves the collection, measurement, and analysis of website data. Web analytics tools can provide lots of useful information about the origin of website traffic, how website users navigate and interact throughout a website, what content and web pages they’re most engaged with, and how they exit the site.

This content is from the social media module of our DMI Pro course. View Course

Why use analytics?

There are many reasons why using analytics tools is a no-brainer for digital marketers today. Here are three of the more important reasons:

Helps you take data-led decisions

Marketers can use the data uncovered by analytics tools to optimize the performance of their channels and websites by taking data-led decisions. These are actions we take to improve performance based on our understanding of the data we’ve recorded; that is, the data is leading the decision. This is a very effective way to use rational thought to improve performance. While it’s best practice to follow data-led decisions, we must always remind ourselves to ‘trust but verify’.

Makes reporting easier

Apart from helping with decision making, web analytics is an important information source to help marketers report back to key stakeholders on how campaigns and websites are performing in relation to your digital marketing efforts. Ultimately, marketers are trying to recreate scenarios that lead to commercial outcomes for their organizations or clients. You can do this by measuring and acting on the data trends you observe using web analytics software.

Helps you deduce the ‘story’ behind the data

One of the real values of web data analysis is that it allows you to deduce the ‘story’ behind the data in order to gain valuable insights and enhance business performance. But how exactly does this lead to commercial returns? Well, web analytics can help you understand your customers better. It tells you who they are, where they’re coming from, and what their interests are. It tells you about their demographics and location. It also helps reveal any conversion challenges that might exist on your website. It helps you appreciate what consumers like or don’t like, and how they interact on your website. You can use all this information to improve the experience on your site for the consumer and to optimize the channels that consumers use to visit your website.

Analytics tools

There are numerous analytics tools available on the market today. Some of them are free, some of them require a paid subscription. Paid analytics products and free analytics products will differ in terms of support, features, and functionality.

Some examples of analytics packages that are available include:

  • Google Analytics and Google Analytics 360, which are part of the Google Marketing Platform
  • Adobe Analytics
  • Woopra
  • Kissmetrics
  • Webtrends
  • Piwik

Google Analytics (GA)

The market leader and most commonly used analytics program is the free version of Google Analytics, or GA as it is sometimes known. The paid version of GA, called Google Analytics 360, offers some additional functionality in terms of report validity and sample sizes. But it’s mainly for websites that receive over 10 million page views per month. For the vast majority of websites, the free version of Google Analytics is perfectly fine.

Because of its functionality and widespread adoption in the market, Google Analytics is seen by many marketers as the single source of truth for website traffic, engagement, and conversion data.

Google Analytics can track the user or consumer journey, providing rich data around channels used, locations, and devices. These journeys can then be tracked through to on-site activity, goals achieved, and exit point, as well as returning visitors, which indicates loyalty.

Benefits of Google Analytics

Google Analytics is an excellent choice for most marketing needs. Some benefits of the standard, free version of Google Analytics include:

  • It’s free
  • It’s easy to implement and easy to install
  • It has a user-friendly interface
  • It offers customizable reports, dashboards, and data collection
  • Both basic and advanced options are available
  • It offers seamless integration with other Google products
  • It offers post-click integration with non-Google traffic sources, including Facebook, Yahoo, and Bing
  • It provides extensive, valuable insights into web behavior

How to Use Google Analytics

This content is from the social media module of our DMI Pro course. View Course

Use Google Analytics for Mobile Apps to measure and optimize user acquisition and engagement with mobile apps. With easy-to-use SDKs and reports designed with app developers in mind, Google Analytics for Mobile Apps enables you to:

  • Understand the number of users in your app, their characteristics, and where they come from.
  • Measure what actions your users are taking.
  • Measure in-app payments and revenue.
  • Customize reports specific to your business.
  • Visualize user navigation paths.
  • Slice and dice your data to understand different user groups’ behavior
  • Leverage Google Analytics data in other Google products.

Learn more about how to measure with Google Analytics by looking at our Mobile App Implementation Guide.

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Learn how to use Google Analytics to measure user interactions and answer questions about app usage.

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Sofie Simonsson • 9 Sep, 2019

Google Analytics is an essential tool for anyone with a website. Most companies have set up Google Analytics on their website, but far from everyone has fully utilized the potential in this powerful platform. For those who get past the technical threshold of correct setup, they also struggle to understand what to measure and what the data can tell you.

That holds particularly true when it comes to B2B lead generation. In this blog post we’ll look at how Google Analytics can be used to make your lead generation efforts more efficient (if you want to learn more about Google Analytics and Lead Generation register to our webinar) .

How to Use Google Analytics

3 steps to use Google Analytics for lead generation

  1. Define leads and goals

As always with lead generation; determining definitions and setting goals is key. Before you do anything else, define what a quality lead is to you. This depends on whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, what you offer and your specific marketing objectives.

Then, think about what action you want your visitors to take on your website. Think about your website in general, as well as any specific page. Common goals for B2B companies, where online purchases might not be possible, are downloading content, reading a blog article, signing up for a newsletter or submitting a contact form.

  1. Set up accurate conversion tracking

When you’ve set your goals and defined your leads, it’s time to get into Google Analytics to set up the actual tracking. In Google Analytics, we set up goals to track conversions. There are four ways to track goals; URLs, Time, Pages/Visits and Events. Understanding the different goal types is crucial to your success with Google Analytics in lead generation.

URL goals is, as you might have guessed, a way to track specific URLs. This goal type is great for thank you pages, confirmation pages and PDFs. You can also setup goal funnels, to keep track on a visitor who moves through several pages. For B2B lead generation, this may be the most important type of goal.

Time goals can be used to keep track of how many of your visitors stay on your site for a specific time. You can track visitors who stay on the site for greater than a specific time of your own choosing. One example to use this, is to estimate the time it takes to read a blog post, and then set up the goal to track how many stays on that blog page for a longer time than your estimation.

Pages/Visits is similar to Time goals, but Pages/Visits lets you track how many pages each visitor sees before they leave. In other words, you’ll need to set” greater than” and then set a number of pages.

Event goals demand a bit more setup, as it’s up to you to define the events you want to track. If you want to track an Event goal, you need to add a bit of JavaScript to your page. Event goals are versatile, and the code snippet can be used to track things like external links, downloads, time spent watching videos and social media buttons.

Google Analytics can track many different metrics. If you’re setting up your Google Analytics account yourself, you’ll need to take the time to understand what each metric means and the difference between them. Here is a quick breakdown of a few important metrics:

  1. Acquisition Overview: Here you’ll find information about traffic sources – organic search, direct hits, referrals and social media.
  2. Social Overview: Take a deep dive into your website’s presence on social media.
  3. Bounce rate: The bounce rate represents how many visitors that leave after viewing only one single page.
  4. Conversions: Conversions in Google Analytics occurs when a goal (as we talked about above) is completed by a visitor.
  5. Exit pages: This metric lets you see the last page a visitor views before leaving your site. This allows for important insight to how a visitor flows through your website.

Don’t forget! Bounce rate can at times be a tricky metric. For a visitor to not be regarded as a bounce, they need to take an action (click on a button, trigger an event etc.). So, even if a visitor visits a blog post, reads it for 10 minutes and then close the browser, it is regarded as a bounce. Keep in mind, a bounce doesn’t necessarily mean that a visitor doesn’t look at your website page.

Learn more about Google Analytics for lead generation!

Do you want to know more about how Google Analytics can be utilized to make your marketing more efficient? On September 25, we’re hosting the live webinar “Google Analytics for B2B Lead Generation and Optimization”. By attending the webinar, you can also get a private session with a set-up and configuration of a Google Analytics account.

Read more and sign up by clicking the button below!

David Court Former editor of Alphr, PC Pro and PC Advisor. Read more February 23, 2015

Whether you’re running a personal home page or a major corporate website, Google Analytics is a powerful tool for monitoring your traffic. It doesn’t matter if your site gets one or a million impressions per month — Google will record what every single visitor gets up to, helping you to understand and improve their experience. See also: Choosing your web hosting package.

How to Use Google Analytics

Jump to:

Indeed, I use Google Analytics on the PC Pro website, to gain a real-time overview of how the site is performing, and examine the performance of individual pages and sections of the site.

If you’re new to online analytics then the Google Analytics interface can seem daunting. But as we reveal below, you only need to learn a few simple techniques to start working out what is or isn’t working on your website. Visit: The easy way to sell ad space on your website.

You’ll then be able to turn cold data into valuable information, which when applied to future website decisions, can boost your online performance significantly.

How to Use Google Analytics

How to use Google Analytics: Why?

There are lots of different web analytics providers out there. Some, like Adobe’s SiteCatalyst, charge a steep fee for the service. Others offer only basic software for free, in the hope you’ll upgrade to a paid-for service at a later date.

Google Analytics is free

Google Analytics, however, is a completely free service — at least, until you reach around 10 million hits per month. Frankly, if you have those figures, the $150,000 annual fee for the premium service shouldn’t be a problem. For the rest of us, getting set up is a very simple process that can be done in a matter of minutes.

The only real downside to Google Analytics is that it’s not the most intuitive service to use. Once you familiarise yourself with the front-end, however, you’ll have access to an ocean of data that, when used properly, can effectively write your next six months’ web strategy for you.

Legacy data

One advantage to Google Analytics is the fact that there’s virtually no limit to how much legacy data you can store, so you can analyse how your site has grown and evolved over time. Here at PC Pro, we have analytics data going back to 24 June 2008 — with a few clicks, we can confirm that the top article on the site that day was “Murdoch fumes as Facebook overtakes MySpace”, with 4,173 views. (Needless to say, our online presence has grown since then.)

While historical statistics can be revealing, analytics can also provide extremely valuable insights through real-time data. Here, Chartbeat is a good alternative to Google Analytics, offering easier access to in-depth data and a friendlier interface.

How to use Google Analytics: What can the data tell me?

Google Analytics reports information in four key areas: it can tell you about your audience (how many people visited your site), acquisition (how they got to your site), behaviour (what they did while they were on your site) and real-time activity (what’s happening on your site right now).

Navigating Google Analytics

Tip: The navigation bar on the left side of the web page is how you can access all the different sections of Google Analytics data mentioned above.

Your audience

Let’s start by looking at audience data. This is where you can find basic information such as how many users visited your site; the proportion of these that were new or returning; how many individual pages were seen by each visitor; and the average time spent your site.

How to Use Google Analytics

What is the bounce rate?

There are also some metrics here that aren’t so self-explanatory. Your site’s “bounce rate” represents the proportion of visitors who land on your site and then leave again without clicking on anything. As a general rule, a bounce rate below 50% is acceptable — there’s a lot of casual browsing on the web — but a figure above 80% suggests that something about your site, or an individual page, is driving people away, and that ought to be addressed.

What is a session?

The total number of sessions measures individual periods of activity on a site. Essentially, a session is recorded when a user leaves your site and doesn’t return within 30 minutes (this time limit can be edited by going to Admin > Property > Tracking Into > Session Settings), or is simply inactive on your site for 30 minutes. The easiest way to understand this is to picture a visitor spending 29 minutes clicking around your site. During this time they follow multiple links, navigate to several different pages, and then leave. Google Analytics counts this as one session. If the user had gone away for 30 minutes or longer at any point, and then returned and continued interacting with your site, this would be registered as two sessions. Session data helps you understand how many pages users view on each individual visit to your site.

An example of when this would be useful is for working out how often to serve full-page promotions to a visitor. Serving a fresh promotion or advert to a user every five pages might annoy them if they skip pages in quick succession, doing so per session is a more rewarding experience for the user. Similarly you can more accurately judge how many pages an average users visits on your site before leaving with sessions.

If you want, you can drill down even further into your audience. Within two more clicks you can find out where in the world visitors are accessing your site from, who their broadband provider is, and what OS or device they’re using, as well as the distribution of age and sex. This sort of information can be terrifically valuable when it comes to tailoring your content or advertising to suit the right demographic.

Google Analytics – это бесплатное решение для измерения приложений, которое дает представление об использовании приложений и вовлеченности пользователей.

Ключевые возможности

Неограниченная отчетностьАналитика предоставляет неограниченные отчеты о 500 различных событиях.
Сегментация аудиторииПользовательские аудитории могут быть определены в консоли Firebase на основе данных устройства, пользовательских событий или пользовательских свойств. Эти аудитории могут использоваться с другими функциями Firebase при назначении новых функций или уведомлений.

Как это работает?

Google Analytics помогает понять, как люди используют ваше веб-приложение, приложение iOS или Android. SDK автоматически фиксирует ряд событий и пользовательских свойств, а также позволяет вам определять свои собственные пользовательские события для измерения того, что уникально важно для вашего бизнеса. После того, как данные собраны, они становятся доступны на панели инструментов через консоль Firebase. Эта информационная панель предоставляет подробные сведения о ваших данных – от сводных данных, таких как активные пользователи и демографические данные, до более подробных данных, таких как идентификация ваших самых покупаемых предметов.

Аналитика также интегрируется с рядом других функций Firebase. Например, он автоматически регистрирует события, которые соответствуют уведомлениям, отправленным через композитор уведомлений, и предоставляет отчеты о влиянии каждой кампании.

Аналитика помогает вам понять, как ведут себя ваши пользователи, и вы можете принимать обоснованные решения о том, как продвигать ваше приложение. Оцените эффективность своих кампаний по обычным и платным каналам, чтобы понять, какие методы наиболее эффективны для привлечения пользователей с высокой стоимостью. Если вам необходимо выполнить собственный анализ или объединить данные с другими источниками, вы можете связать свои данные Analytics с BigQuery, что позволяет проводить более сложный анализ, например, запрашивать большие наборы данных и объединять несколько источников данных.

Интеграция с другими сервисами

BigQueryСвяжите свое приложение Firebase с BigQuery, где вы можете выполнить собственный анализ всего набора данных Analytics и импортировать другие источники данных.
CrashlyticsАналитика регистрирует события для каждого сбоя, чтобы вы могли получить представление о частоте сбоев для разных версий или регионов, что позволяет вам понять, на кого влияют пользователи. Вы также можете создавать аудитории для пользователей, которые столкнулись с несколькими сбоями, и отвечать на них уведомлениями, направленными на эту аудиторию.
FCMAnalytics автоматически регистрирует события, которые соответствуют уведомлениям, отправленным через композитор уведомлений, и поддерживает отчеты о влиянии каждой кампании.
Firebase Remote ConfigИспользуйте определения аудитории Analytics, чтобы изменить поведение и внешний вид вашего приложения для разных аудиторий без распространения нескольких версий вашего приложения.
Google Tag ManagerИнтеграция Google Tag Manager вместе с Google Analytics позволяет вам удаленно управлять своей реализацией Google Analytics из веб-интерфейса после распространения приложения.

Путь реализации

Подключите ваше приложение к FirebaseНачать работу с Google Analytics легко. Просто добавьте Firebase SDK в новое или существующее приложение, и сбор данных начнется автоматически. Вы можете просматривать аналитические данные в консоли Firebase в течение нескольких часов.
Журнал пользовательских данныхВы можете использовать Analytics для регистрации пользовательских событий, которые имеют смысл для вашего приложения, таких как покупки в электронной коммерции или достижения.
Создать аудиториюВы можете определить аудиторию, которая важна для вас, в консоли Firebase.
Целевая аудиторияИспользуйте свою пользовательскую аудиторию для таргетинга сообщений, рекламных акций или новых функций приложений, используя другие функции Firebase, такие как FCM и Remote Config.

Следующие шаги

  • Добавьте Google Analytics в свое веб-приложение , приложение для iOS или Android .
  • Загрузите пример кода .

Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. For details, see the Google Developers Site Policies. Java is a registered trademark of Oracle and/or its affiliates.

Ever wonder how many people have visited your Etsy shop? Or what keywords they used to find an item in your store? Thanks to Etsy Web Analytics, you can find out. With Etsy Web Analytics, a free service powered by Google Analytics, you can track such metrics as page views, site visits, popular content, and page referrals — helpful for, say, determining whether that ad you placed on that blog is actually directing readers to your Etsy shop like it’s supposed to. Before you can use Etsy Web Analytics, you must have a Google account and a Google Analytics account. (Both are free.)

When you have a Google account, you can create your Google Analytics account:

Type in your web browser’s address bar.

The Google Analytics page opens.

Click the Access Analytics button on the right side of the page.

If you’re not signed in to your Google account, enter your e-mail address and password in the appropriate fields and click the Sign In button.

Click the Sign Up button in the page that appears.

A New Account Signup page opens.

In the website’s URL field, type .

In the Account Name field, type your Etsy shop’s URL — as in, shopname .etsy.com , where shopname is your shop’s name.

Enter your country and time zone in the appropriate fields; then click the Continue button.

Type your last name and first name in the appropriate fields, select your country or territory, and click the Continue button.

Read the Google Analytics user agreement; then click the Yes, I Agree to the Above Terms and Conditions check box to select it.

Click the Create New Account button.

The Tracking Instructions page opens.

In the code that appears in the text box, locate the string of letters and numbers that appears in this format: UA-XXXXXXXX-X; this string of letters and numbers is called a Web Property ID. Write down this Web Property ID.

How to Use Google Analytics

Click the Save and Finish button.

After you create a Google Analytics account, you need to set up Etsy to work with Google Analytics. Log in to your Etsy account and follow these steps:

Click the Your Account link that appears along the top of any Etsy page.

The Your Account page opens.

Click the Options link under Shop Settings on the left side of the page.

Click the Web Analytics tab.

How to Use Google Analytics

In the Web Property ID field, type the Web Property ID that you wrote down in the preceding section.

After you connect Etsy to Google Analytics, you can view your Etsy activity on the Google Analytics site. To do so, simply log in to your Google Analytics account. (Type in your web browser’s address bar, click the Access Analytics button, enter your e-mail address and password, and click the Sign In button.) The Overview page for your Etsy shop appears.

How to Use Google Analytics

On this page, you can pinpoint, among other key nuggets, how many people have visited your shop and how long they spent there. You can also access information such as where they came from (that is, which web page they were on before they accessed your shop) and more.

Don’t be surprised if you don’t see any useful info right away. Google needs a bit of time to start tracking your site.

Learn how to use Google Analytics Reports to view user behavior & uncover which marketing efforts are driving traffic to your website.

How to Use Google Analytics

Today, businesses can have a wealth of data about their customers and website visitors at their fingertips – data that can help make informed marketing decisions. In my 20 years of marketing experience, I have seen many businesses continue to make costly decisions based on intuition and dated information. Although these may not be poor choices, these are choices that aren’t based on insightful data.

In order to properly evaluate and adjust your digital marketing strategy, you need to know how your promotional efforts are performing. For businesses just starting out with website analytics, tracking your website traffic is an excellent place to begin filling out a larger picture of audience behavior and content performance.

Where Are Your Website Visitors Coming From?

Google Analytics can track your website traffic coming from the following default channels: organic search, direct, paid search, other, referral, display, social and email.

Types of Website Traffic

What do these channels mean? Traffic is reported as:

Organic Search – when a visitor searches for your website or a relevant keyword and clicks on your website in the search engine results page (SERP).

Direct – when a visitor enters your website URL in directly.

Paid Search – when a visitor comes to your website by clicking on a link in one of your search ads.

Other – when a visitor’s source cannot be categorized. This may occur if the UTM parameters for source or medium haven’t been properly set up (this will be explained later).

Referral – when a visitor comes to your website by clicking on a link on another website (except search engines and most social networks).

Display – when a visitor comes to your website by clicking on a link in one of your display ads, then it will be reported as display traffic.

Social – when a visitor clicks on a link pointing to your website from a social network (one that is tracked by Google Analytics), then it will be reported as social traffic.

Email – when a visitor clicks on a link within an email, then it will be reported as email traffic.

Setting Up Google Analytics Tracking

To be able to track these different traffic sources and delve into deeper, more detailed tracking, you need to first have a Google Analytics account set up and the code placed on your website.

Here is Google’s article about setting up Google Analytics tracking. I also have a quick & simple Google Analytics course that will show you step-by-step instructions for setting up your account and tracking.

Which Marketing Efforts Are Driving Traffic to Your Website?

By using Google Analytics, you can determine how your marketing efforts and campaigns are performing. Being able to evaluate the ROI and overall value of current campaigns allows your business to adjust its marketing strategy based on measurable performance metrics. Acquisition reports also help you determine the effectiveness of different sources, such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and mediums, such as email, social and digital advertising.

Along with your new source and medium insights, you can identify which pieces of content are popular traffic drivers AND on which sources and mediums they perform best. For example, let’s say that you’ve discovered that one of your blog posts is driving high volumes of traffic and consistently receives a great deal of page views. If you have set up UTM parameters for tracking (explained later), you may also discover that 40% of this traffic is coming from organic, 25% from Twitter and 25% from a monthly email newsletter. With this information, you can begin investing more into these specific sources for the specific type of content or topic. Before you make too many assumptions based on this one data point, you will want to continue to test and evaluate all performance factors, then adjust your marketing strategies and tactics.

Finding Traffic Sources in Google Analytics

Under the Acquisition reports, you will find your main traffic information in Overview. Below, you will see the default channels where your website traffic is being reported.

How to Use Google Analytics

All Traffic > Channels

How to Use Google Analytics

All Traffic > Source/Medium

The Source/Medium report is very important to understanding where you should invest your marketing efforts and budget. To learn how to use the Source/Medium report, you can watch this video tutorial I’ve created:

If you want to search for a specific content type, topic, page or section of your website, you can create a secondary dimension and then use the advance filter option to search for a keyword. For example, you can view the Source/Medium for individual pages on your blog by creating a secondary dimension for “Page” and an advanced filter for pages containing “/blog/” in the URL. Another way to do this is to create a secondary dimension for Source/ Medium under the Behavior>Site Content>All Pages report and add a filter for “/blog/.”

All Traffic > Referrals

How to Use Google Analytics

Social > Overview

How to Use Google Analytics

Campaigns > All Campaigns

Under All Campaigns, you will find all of the campaign names that you have tracked with a UTM campaign parameter. If you’re using Google AdWords, that parameter is added automatically for you on those campaigns, unless you have campaign tagging turned off (it is on by default).

You can click on individual campaigns to see Source/Medium and how your campaigns are performing on different channels and media. From the All Campaigns page, you can also create a secondary dimension to view Source/Medium or even individual pages.

How to Use Google Analytics

How to Set Up Campaign Tracking/UTM Parameters

Tracking your campaign traffic is as simple as adding some additional text to the URL you are linking to. You will need to add UTM parameters to track your campaign traffic. See our previously published article on UTM Parameters which covers how to do this.

Conclusion

Overall, it is important to properly track and analyze your website traffic, as it can provide you with the data you need to make effective marketing decisions. To learn more on how to use Google Analytics in full detail, you can watch my Google Analytics Reports Deep-Dive: Acquisition Reports course on Udemy. You may even be able to capitalize on traffic drivers you didn’t know you had! What has your traffic told you? I’d love to hear about it! Feel free to comment below or reach out to me on Twitter: @janetdmiller.

  • By WinningWP Editorial
  • December 2, 2018
  • Leave your thoughts

When it comes to websites, the audience is everything: no audience = really not a lot of point in even having a website at all! So how best to find out how popular your website is (or isn’t)? How many people are viewing it? How many people return to it? Where do your visitors come from? These are all essential questions for growth and direction. If your website runs WordPress, one of the best (and easiest) ways of finding all this out is to use Google Analytics. But how?

Let’s take a look…

How to Use Google Analytics with WordPress:

– (note: video credits to Topher DeRosia – creator of HeroPress)

Video Transcript:

Hi! This is Topher with WinningWP. In this video we’re going to take a look at how to install Google Analytics on a WordPress website, step-by-step. But why should you watch this video? Aren’t there dozens of videos on how to install Google Analytics on a WordPress website? It’s true there are, but in this video I’m going to show you exactly the right plug-in to use so that you never need to worry about your analytics code again, even if Google changes all of their algorithms and changes the rules on where your code is supposed to go. This plug-in will take care of all of it. So let’s take a look at how to make this happen, step by step. The first step is to create your Google Analytics account. I’m here at the Google Analytics home page. Now this is really just a marketing piece. To really use analytics you want to sign in. And we’re going to sign in here at the top to Analytics. Now an interesting thing about Google properties is that you can use the same account across all of them, so if you already have a gmail account or a YouTube account or a Google Drive account or any of those ,you can use that same username and password here with analytics. So the next thing we’re going to do is click sign up. They want to know if we’re tracking a website or a mobile app we’re going to choose website and it’s already selected there and then we have to create an account name and this can be pretty much anything. And what’s interesting is that you can have more than one tracking ID per account. Aince this is our first one we’re not too concerned about that. So I’m going to create one called Coworkerpro and then it wants to know the name of our website. Now the site I’m putting this on is a staging site for Coworkerpro so I’m going to call it Coworkerpro Staging and then wants to know the website URL so it’s just the domain name like that. Then they want to know a bunch of information about our site and this is actually optional so you don’t have to put it in if you don’t want. I’m going to put in computers and electronics. The time zone can be useful. I’m in Eastern. And then Google wants to know if they may share your data with other services and this is entirely up to you. I’m going to choose no because this is really more of a testing account. And now I’m going to click get tracking ID. And before I can I need to accept this service agreement. There we are. Now this is our tracking ID. Now in the old days you would have to remember this tracking ID and maybe even all of this code but with WordPress we don’t need to do that and I can show you why. Because our next step is to install a plug-in. We’re here at our WordPress dashboard now go to Plugins → Add New. So we’re going to search for “Monster Insights” and here we get Google Analytics for WordPress by Monster Insights. That’s the one we want. “But what’s so great about Monster Insights?” you ask. Well it connects to Google in a unique way. First of all it doesn’t ask you for your analytics code like most plugins do and it doesn’t just take that code and stick it in the header or the footer. The Monster Insights plugin actually connects to Google and integrates your analytics account into your website. That way it’s actually in communication with the Google Analytics website It learns things from Google and it tells Google things about your site and when Google makes changes the Monster Insights plugin knows, and it knows how to change its own code, and where to put it, and how to move it, and when. All of these things are an advantage over a less fully featured plugin that simply takes your analytics code and pastes it in. So let’s click install now and then activate. Now from here we want to configure the Google Analytics settings and we can do that either from this nav here on the left, this link here on the plugins page, or right at the top there’s a banner that says “Please configure your Google Analytics settings.” So let’s click that. And right here at the top it says Google Authentication. It wants to authenticate with my Google account so I’m going to click this button, I’m going to choose the Google user that I used to log in to Analytics, and then I’m going to choose “allow”. Now we need to pick a profile. Since my Google user only has one profile we can simply say all “website data”. If we wanted to use a different Google account we could, and if we wanted to just bail out and not do this you could click here, but we’re going to click “complete authentication”. And there we are! Remember our UA code here that was also right here? The plugin went to Google for us got all the right code and put it in just the right place. Not only that, if there are changes in the future with how Google manages this the plug-in will update itself and put the new code in the right place so you don’t have to think about it in the future anymore. If you want one last test about whether or not this is working, we can copy this number, go to the home page, I’m going to scroll down to the content area, and right click and “View Page Source”. And now we’re going to search for that number. And there it is. And this is all all that google tracking code that you did not have to put in because the plugin was great. So let’s review. First you need to create a Google account or use an existing one. Then we went to the analytics page and filled out their signup form but we didn’t do anything with the information that they gave us. We didn’t need to do anything with the UA tracking code or even all that JavaScript that we saw. Instead we installed Google Analytics for WordPress by Monster Insights. Once it was installed we simply had to authenticate. And we looked over the settings to make sure it’s working right. This process used to be much more complicated but now, because of this excellent plugin and WordPress it’s now quite simple. If you’d like to learn more about WordPress check out WinningWP com.

Google Analytics is a must-have tool to gain insights into how users are interacting with your website. Check out the beginner’s guide to using Google Analytics for detailed information about gathering and reviewing your website stats. But before you learn how to use it, it needs to be installed.

Follow the steps below to install Google Analytics on your website.

Step 1 – Create a Google Account or Use an Existing One

If you have an existing Google or Gmail account already established, you do not need to create a new one and you can skip to the next step. If you do not have a Google or Gmail account, follow the instructions below.

  1. Click on the following link to create your Google account.
  2. Fill out all of the information in the form and then click “Next Step.”
  3. Google will then ask you if you would like to create a public Google+ profile. That is optional and you don’t have to set that up if you don’t want to. Click “Create your profile” if you would like to or click “No thanks” to skip it.How to Use Google Analytics

Step 2 – Using your New Google Account to Setup Google Analytics

Now that you have a Google account established, we can move on to setting up Google Analytics.

  1. While you are still logged in to your account, go to this website address:
  2. Click on “Access Google Analytics” in the top right corner and you will be redirected to a new page.How to Use Google Analytics
  3. Click on “Sign up” on the far right hand side.
  4. For the purposes of this tutorial, we are going to be setting up Google Analytics for a website and not a mobile app. Therefore make sure that “Website” is clicked at the top.How to Use Google Analytics
  5. Fill out all of the information on this page.
    1. Account Name
    2. Website Name
    3. Website URL
    4. Industry Category
    5. Reporting Time Zone
  6. Finally, click on the blue “Get Tracking ID” button at the bottom
  7. A Google Analytics Terms of Service Agreement will appear and you will need to accept this agreement before you can proceed further.How to Use Google Analytics
  8. You will then be presented with a unique tracking code that will need to be applied to your website.

Step 3 – Installing the Tracking Code

  1. In order for Google Analytics to be able to report back on a variety of website metrics, you will need to install the tracking code on every page of your website. To install the code, you basically need to have it appear on all pages of your website code.
  2. If you do not have experience adding code to your website, you should contact the web design company that manages your website.
  3. Copy and paste the tracking code to either the header or footer file of your website.
  4. If you are adding the tracking code to the header file, make sure the code is contained before the closing tag.
  5. If you are adding the tracking code to the footer file, make sure the code is contained before the closing tag.

Step 4 – Make Sure the Tracking Code is on All Pages

There is a very handy tool called GA Checker that will scan your entire website (up to 10,000 pages) to see if the Google Analytics tracking code exists on all pages. All you need to do is enter in your website name and then click the button that says “Check Your Site.” If you installed the tracking code successfully you will see a check mark next to Google Analytics on all pages.

Step 5 – Learn How to Use Google Analytics

Now that you have installed the tracking code on all the pages on your website, it’s going to take 24 hours for Google to start collecting data from your website. Please keep in mind that Google Analytics will always be one day behind and you won’t be able to view data from the present day.

Be sure to review the Beginners Guide to Using Google Analytics for specific information about understanding the data in Google Analytics.

2 Responses to How to Setup and Install Google Analytics on Your Website

  1. oliviasmith
    11:25 am on June 6th, 2020

I set up my account however it wouldn’t let me put my website in? how can I edit my profile to in my website URL

  • The standard version of Google Analytics is a free online tool that Google provides to help you understand, analyse, and improve your website traffic.
  • It’s easy to create a Google Analytics account and start tracking your site performance, as long as you can edit your site’s HTML tag.
  • There are a lot of reports available which let you see real-time performance, how pages perform over time, your conversion rate for e-commerce campaigns, and more.
  • Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Just the name is intimidating to some people: Google Analytics. It might help to know that analytics is the name for the branch of mathematics dedicated to analysing data, and is generally used to tease out meaningful patterns that can be used to generate statistics and make predictions about future trends.

That said, you don’t need to know or perform any maths to use Google Analytics – all of that is done in the background for you.

What you can do with Google Analytics

Google Analytics – commonly abbreviated as GA – is a free tool that Google provides to help you understand, analyse, and improve your website traffic. It provides graphs and data that you can use to understand information about your site. Here are just a few examples of the kind of information you can learn using GA:

  • How many unique visitors click on the site and specific pages within it.
  • How many overall page views go to specific pages (and the site in general). Pageviews are different from unique visitors, since the same person might click on a page more than once.
  • How long visitors are spending on each page during their visit.
  • What your “bounce” rate is – in other words, what percentage of your visitors are leaving the site after looking at only a single page, rather than following links to other pages.
  • Information about your visitors’ demographics, including where they are from, and what kind of browser or mobile device they’re using to visit.

It’s important to note that only the site’s owners and managers can see GA data, so strangers, visitors, and competitors cannot, for example, access your Google Analytics page (at least not without your permission or login information).

How to create a Google Analytics account

To get started, you need to create a Google Analytics account for each website you own or manage.

1. Go to the Google Analytics homepage and sign into your Google account if needed.

2. If you don’t already have a GA account, click “Sign Up.”

3. Follow the setup instructions by entering the name and URL of your web site, along with other details, and click “Get Tracking ID.”

4. On the next page, you’ll be given a tracking code that you need to add to the tag on each page of your website that you want to be able to monitor in GA. You can add that tag manually in an HTML editor (following the directions provided by Google) or, if you use a web service like Wix or Squarespace, the webpage editor can do this automatically for you.

After creating your account, you can enable other people to see your GA page:

1. On your Google Analytics page, click the Gear icon in the lower left corner to open the Admin page.

2. Click “User Management.” You should see your own login information.

3. Click the blue plus sign in the upper right corner of the screen.

4. Click “Add users,” and enter the email address for each person you want to add to the GA account. They will each get an email inviting them to GA with their own unique password. You can always return here to revoke their permission.

A quick tour of Google Analytics

Once you have a working GA account, you can log in at any time and get a snapshot of your site’s performance. Here are some key places to start:

  • The Home tab displays a brief dashboard of your site’s performance, including traffic, how many users are on the site at this very moment, and where your traffic is coming from.
  • The Real-Time tab is rich with valuable information, especially if your site is news-focused or publishes timely information. It will show you who is on your site minute-by-minute along with which pages on the site are currently trending, and where that traffic is coming from.
  • The Behaviour tab is critical for understanding what pages are performing well (and which ones are doing poorly). The Site Content section of the Behaviour tab is a favourite for site editors and content managers, because it shows the traffic for every page on the site for any timeframe you might want to see.
  • The Conversions tab is where you can find how ecommerce campaigns are performing. Here you can establish goals and see whether traffic is translating into actual revenue.

Learn more from Google

Google has a wealth of online instruction and tutorials for Google Analytics. If you want to learn how to use this tool, you should start with Google Analytics Academy, which is a collection of videos and articles that introduce you to every aspect of the site.

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How to Use Google Analytics

Hardik Patel

Hardik Patel is a Digital Marketing Consultant and professional Blogger. He has 7+ years experience in SEO, SMO, SEM, Online reputation management, Affiliated Marketing and Content Marketing.

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Many people have ventured on online marketing on social platforms as a way of living. These platforms include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and snapchat.

How Do They Earn?

People earn on social media through the following ways:

They ensure they create traffic on their website- It means they always come up with an impressive structure that can capture people’s attention. Others take the trending updates, and they create suggestive headings which push the urge of the viewers. For example, users of Facebook have witnessed people posting videos of a homeless woman on street singing, which captured many people’s attention.

Understanding the audience-It identifies your viewer’s main interest makes it easier to have many followers. It means if the content is related to the young generation, then the chances of having more viewers is high as compared to the material concerning the aged age.

Substance- It includes the availability of new ideas on the platform that are relevant to the world today. Always having a change of plans makes the blog more attractive, thus attracting more viewers and retaining the previous. Giving the audience new videos and blogs limits their capability to predict your move; therefore, they get addicted to your forums.

Now, the question is, how can you measure your viewers and the effectiveness of your blog? The simple answer is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics:

To obtain the number of viewers on a blog and determine the effectiveness of the content, one must use Google Analytics.

Google analytics can be defined as a web platform provided by Google to give certain information which can help an online marketer calculate the number of the viewers and understand the competition and what the world wants. Google analytics helps in the following ways:

Estimation of the number of new viewers or coverts. This is calculated using the number the item is shared, how many people have linked up, and how many new members have subscribed.

Understanding the geographical area most of the viewers are. By this, one can create content that favors the audience within the region.

Ensures extensive coverage on an individual page and effectiveness to the audience. This means that an article writer or a blog writer can identify the number of pages that caused traffic and therefore, characterize and classify audiences based on their interest.

Google Analytics Tracking Code

One cannot complete the task of analyzing without the Google Analytics tracking code. The primary purpose of the Google analytics code is to collect information concerning viewers who visited your website and their attributes.

Their replies are the most crucial segment on digital marketing, how they respond can give an average performance of content and suggest the expectation of the audience. It later sends the information to the google analytics specialist who classifies the data into four levels.

The primary or user level this involves the participation of the user on the blogger’s website.

Individual-level means how many times the person visits the one blog.

Page view includes the classifying the individual by use of the page he/she visited.

Participation or event level it gives an analysis of how many videos, or item viewed.

Google Analytics Report

Google Analytics Report is required to track the effectiveness of social media based on marketing. They help an individual in the following ways:

Identify which platform is causing a high rate of traffic. Mostly it happens when he/she posts the same content on all the platforms, and one platform gives a higher percentage of views. Then it’s easier for the blogger to understand the best site for blogging.

Classify the most performing content and how it has influenced the viewers. It can be seen in the feedback where the viewers express their satisfaction with the content.

It helps the blogger to cause traffic on the targeted audience of a specific geographical area.

Google Analytics Account

When creating a google analytics account, one must follow specific procedures that help to create a great report that is compatible with all the platforms. These steps include:

Have S.M.A.R.T. goals: this means one must be:

Specific: Before feeding the audience with the post has an objective that has to be attained by the end of it. That is if the blog includes how to manage the forests, and then have an aim of reinforcing a positive perspective on reforestation.

Measurable or gauge: It offers data on your achievements and fails. It is easier to keep records on what to do to or increase attention to viewers, thus increasing the number of new converts.

Attainable: It is the goal you what to achieve realistically? It’s always advisable to set standards based on the context with its rate of interest.

Reasonable and relevant: It’s always considered wise to first reason on the content without been unbiased with this; it is elementary to be relevant to the viewers and not offending anyone.

Time: It’s always good for the blogger to have a timeline. Within a specific time, limit; he/she will be able to achieve his/her target.

Have a good tag management system: This helps a beginner to add tags on the google analytics data dashboard without the use of the google codes. It’s easier and faster as many people, especially the third party, can follow.

Create an analytic tag with the management system: with this one can select the type of data he/she wants to collect.

Have other goals: like the destination of a blog, event, duration, and others.

First thing first, Google Analytics is a web analytics tool used by 90% of the companies in the world. It’s free and easy to use analytics tool. In the world of Digital media, you need an analytics tool to track all your websites or app users’ behavior flow.

To use Google Analytics, you need to access analytics.google.com. If you are a first time user, you will have to log in with a Gmail id.

Once you sign up, you will be taken to an Account Setup page;

Once you click on next after account name, you will be asked to choose the property that you want to measure the users for.

  • Web- Choose this option if you wish to measure only your website or a blog.
  • Apps- Choose this option if you wish to measure only your mobile app. It can be both your IOS or Android app.
  • Both apps & web- Choose this option if you want to measure both your app and web property.

Once you have chosen your desired property, click on next. You will now be asked to fill up your property details. If you have chosen web, then you need to add the website URL. If you have chosen app, it will ask you to write the app name as mentioned in google play store or app store. Follow the steps as mentioned in the platform.

Click on create, select your country and accept the terms and conditions by Google.

After you have accepted the terms and conditions, your tracking id will be generated.

What is a google analytics tracking id?

The tracking ID is a string like UA-000000-1. This is the ID which needs to be included in your website backend to fetch the Analytics of that particular property. Simply said, without the tracking ID you cant track your website users.

Once you have created your google analytics account. Login to your wordpress website admin.

Install a plugin called, tracking code manager. Tracking code manager plugin allows you to add multiple tracking codes. It allows you to add the codes in the header, body, any selected page or across the websites. Once you have installed the plugin, you will find it under “Settings>tracking code manager” in your wordpress dashboard.

Click on “Add new tracking code” and add the google analytics code that you have created. This code should be placed in the head section and on all the pages.

Once this is done, go to your analytics page and send a test traffic so that you can confirm that the code is placed correctly on your website. Go to Admin>Property Settings> Tracking Info

Once this is done, you are all set to track your users.

Google Analytics data is divided into 4 sections;

  • Audience: Gives you information about your website or app users. Demographics, location, devices.
  • Acquisition: This report tells you which channels have contributed to your website or app users. SEO, Paid, Social, Email, Referral, etc.
  • Behaviour: This information helps you understand what content is popular on your website or app. Which webpage is mostly visited by your users. How much time they are spending on a page? Etc..
  • Conversions: This report will help you track your business conversions. E.g: product purchase, email signup, newsletter downloads, etc.

A more detailed blog about each of the categories will follow. Stay tuned!!

This article discusses several ways you can use Google Analytics with a Joomla site.

Using Google Analytics with Joomla

Google Analytics provides detailed statistics about visitor traffic to your site. To use Google Analytics with Joomla (or with any other type of site), you must first sign up for a Google Analytics account at and obtain a unique Tracking ID.

After you have set up a Google Analytics account and have the Tracking ID for your site, you can configure it for Joomla. There are two ways to do this:

  • Use a Joomla extension.
  • Edit the Joomla template.
Method #1: Use an extension

There are numerous extensions that enable you to configure Google Analytics for a Joomla site, and they all function in essentially the same way—all you have to do is specify your Tracking ID, and the extension takes care of the rest.

Here are some popular Google Analytics extensions for Joomla:

Method #2: Edit the template

Extensions are convenient, but they also carry processing overhead with them that can affect site performance. If you prefer not to use an extension, you can edit the Joomla template directly to enable Google Analytics for your site.

To enable Google Analytics by editing the template, follow these steps:

  1. Log in to your Google Analytics account, click Admin , click Tracking Info , and then click Tracking Code . Copy the entire text in the tracking code box, including the starting tag.
  2. Log in to Joomla as the administrator.
  3. On the top menu bar, click Extensions , click Templates , and then click Templates .
  4. Click the name of the template you want to modify.
  5. Select the file in the template that you want to modify, and then paste the Tracking ID code snippet from Google Analytics that you obtained in step 1.

Step-1 : Navigate to the ‘Assisted Conversions’ report:

How to Use Google Analytics

Step-2 : Make sure the date range of the report is set to the last three months.

Step-3 : Unselect all Goal Conversions from the ‘Conversions’ drop-down menu and then click on the ‘Apply’ button:

How to Use Google Analytics

Step-4 : Scroll down to the data table and then sort the table by ‘ Assisted Conversion Value ’:

How to Use Google Analytics

You now see a list of marketing channels that assisted (but not closed) your website sales.

These marketing channels are called ‘ Assisting marketing channels ’ and the conversions they assisted are called ‘ Assisted Conversions

From the data table above, we can conclude the following:

>> Direct channel played the biggest role (35%) in assisting website sales, followed by ‘Referral’, ‘Organic Search’, ‘Social Network’, ‘Paid Search’, ‘Display’, ‘Other Advertising’ and ‘(other)’.

Step-5 : Sort the data table by ‘ Last Click or direct Conversion Value ’:

How to Use Google Analytics

You now see a list of marketing channels that directly closed your website sales. These marketing channels were the last touchpoint (exposure) before the purchase took place.

From the data table above, we can conclude the following:

>> Direct channel played the biggest role (66%) in directly closing website sales, followed by ‘Referral’, ‘Organic Search’, ‘Paid Search’, ‘Social Network’, ‘Display’, ‘Other Advertising’ and ‘(other)’.

How to Use Google Analytics

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Himanshu Sharma

Digital Marketing Consultant and Founder of Optimizesmart.com

How to Use Google Analytics

Himanshu helps business owners and marketing professionals in generating more sales and ROI by fixing their website tracking issues, helping them understand their true customers’ purchase journey and helping them determine the most effective marketing channels for investment.

He has over 12 years of experience in digital analytics and digital marketing.

He was nominated for the Digital Analytics Association’s Awards for Excellence. The Digital Analytics Association is a world-renowned not-for-profit association that helps organisations overcome the challenges of data acquisition and application.

He is the author of four best-selling books on analytics and conversion optimization:

In order to start getting data from Google Analytics with the answers from your team members (or without them) you need to:

  1. create Google Analytics Request;
  2. select a template or customize it the way you want;
  3. add it to one of your reports.

How to create Google Analytics Request?

1. Open your Standuply’s personal account.

2. Click “Create Request” here (if this is the first Request you create)

or here (if you’ve already created some Requests)

3. Select “Google Analytics Request”

4. Log in to your Google Account that is connected with Google Analytics

5. Select Google Analytics Profile you’d like to get data from.

6. Select the website you’d like to get data from.

Note: If you get back to the dashboard without accomplishing the Request customization, its status will be shown as “Draft”

How to set up Google Analytics Request?

There are two ways to set up GA request:

  • select one of the 5 templates;
  • use Custom Metric Settings.

Selecting a template

Right after you’ve chosen the website, you will get to the page offering you a set of GA reports templates.

There are 5 available templates:

You can select one of them by clicking the “Use it” button. By default “Summary” template is selected.

You can also get a preview of the report in Slack by hovering over one of the templates and clicking “Preview in Slack”

You will get a preview from Standuply in Slack right after you click the button.

After you’ve selected a template click “Done”

and you will see your Request in the team overview page of your personal account

Custom metrics settings

In order to use custom metric settings click “Custom metric”

You can customize the following parameters:

We support all Google Analytics dimensions and metrics.

You can also get a preview by hovering over and clicking “Preview in Slack”

The preview in Slack looks like this

For both template or custom metrics settings you can set up the period of time for this statistics – from “Today” to “This year” or “Last year”.

How to add the Google Analytics Request to a report?

There are two ways to add the Google Analytics Request to a report.

1. You can add the request right after you’ve created or edited it by clicking “Next” after you’re done with setting it up.

You will see the list of your reports. Choose the one you’d like to add the Request to and click the gray switcher in order to connect the Request to this particular report.

When the Request is connected to the report, the switcher becomes green and you can see the word “Connected!” near it. This means that you will get the data from Google Analytics according to the schedule of this report.

2. You can add the request from the “Respondents & Requests” section of the report’s settings.

Click “Request” on the report’s block

or click this gear on the right side and select “Edit”

If you have chosen the second option, click “Respondents & Requests” on the top bar of the report’s settings

Scroll down to the bottom of this section and click the “Add request” button

Select the request you’d like to connect to the report

After you connected one or several requests to the report, they appear in the report’s settings

In order to delete a request click the green gear of the request’s block and then click “Delete”

Google Analytics is often cited as a useful tool for tracking and managing website data. However, if you don’t know how to put the information this platform provides to use, it may seem like a waste of time and effort.

In reality, analytics are one of the best ways to improve your website. Once you learn the significance of the data Google Analytics gathers, you can apply it to bring new users in and give your current users a better experience on your website.

This post will show you what Google Analytics is capable of doing. Then we’ll share a few tips for using website data to boost your site’s visibility, quality, and content. Let’s get started!

An introduction to Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool used by website owners and managers to gather information about their websites. It shows information regarding a site’s audience, acquisitions, user behavior, and conversions in a variety of tables and charts.

Typically, in order to add Google Analytics to your website, you have to generate a tracking ID and add it to your site’s code. However, there are also plugins for WordPress users to simplify the process, such as Google Analytics Dashboard by MonsterInsights:

How to Use Google Analytics

However, if you have multiple websites, it can get tiresome switching between accounts to see your analytics. Fortunately, we at ManageWP have a handy Google Analytics feature that can help you easily track your site data in a single dashboard.

Our Google Analytics feature is free to use. You can add as many accounts as you need and monitor them all from your ManageWP dashboard. Plus, you can easily include Google Analytics data in client reports to demonstrate how your work is paying off.

3 ways to use Google Analytics to improve your site

Your Google Analytics dashboard – be it in the platform itself, within WordPress via a plugin, or in your ManageWP account – can show you website data, but can’t tell you how to use it. Below you’ll find three key tips for taking action based on your findings.

1. Track your referral sources to increase traffic

Knowing where your website traffic is coming from may seem like a novelty, but it can actually be extremely useful when it comes to your marketing strategy. When you know how your users are arriving at your site, you can clearly see which promotion methods are working, and which aren’t.

You can see your referral sources by navigating to Acquisitions > All Traffic > Channels. Here you’ll get a nice overview of how most of your visitors are hearing about your site:

How to Use Google Analytics

You can learn a lot by looking at this information. For example, if the number of people finding your site via organic search is very low, you know your site’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) needs work.

Likewise, if your social media accounts are bringing in a lot of traffic, you know that your current strategy relative to others is working. This information may also encourage you to expand your social media marketing strategy accordingly.

2. Monitor user behavior to decrease bounce rates

Your website’s ‘bounce rate’ refers to the number of visitors who click on a link to one of your site’s pages, then leave the page without interacting with it. While a high bounce rate in some niches isn’t necessarily a problem, it generally indicates a problem that requires your attention.

In Google Analytics, you can see your bounce rate by navigating to Behavior > Overview and looking beneath the line graph. You can also find useful Users Flow charts that show how your users are navigating around your site:

How to Use Google Analytics

Generally speaking, a bounce occurs because a user thought a link would take them to a certain page, but it actually took them somewhere else. This could indicate poor website navigation or confusing anchor text.

By looking at which of your pages have the highest bounce rate and examining the flow charts to see how users are getting to those pages, you may be able to unearth some navigational issues on your site. You can then correct your design to improve user experience and lower your bounce rate.

3. Note popular posts to improve your content strategy

In most cases, there will be certain posts that perform better than others. By looking at these posts, you can learn about what type of content your users value and other helpful hints to help improve your content strategy.

You can see which of your posts and pages are most popular by navigating to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages. Remember: you’ll potentially have to add your Google Analytics tracking ID to every page you want to monitor (although many times including it in the tag is sufficient.) If your tracking ID isn’t included, a page may not show up here:

How to Use Google Analytics

Make note of all your most popular posts and pages, then go to your website and take a look. Consider the topics they cover, and whether you created those posts differently compared to other content on your site. For example, do your high-performing posts have more images, better SEO, or certain tags that perform well?

You can then emulate these features in future posts and see if they also perform well. There’s no need to re-invent the wheel when it comes to content strategy. Looking at your most popular posts can show you what your users like so you can create more of it.

Conclusion

At first, using Google Analytics can feel overwhelming. It’s easy to get caught up in looking at all the graphs and charts and forget to actually put the information they contain to use and improve your website.

In this post, we shared three ways you can take data from your Google Analytics dashboard and use it to make your website more successful:

  1. Track your referral sources to increase traffic.
  2. Monitor user behavior to decrease bounce rates.
  3. Note popular posts to improve your content strategy.

Do you have questions about how to use Google Analytics to better your website? Leave them in the comments section below!