Two Ways to Use Google Analytics Effectively

Do you want to learn more about how people engage with your website? Or know how your marketing efforts impact engagement? No matter what question you want to answer about your website, Google Analytics is an awesome tool to have under your belt.

While the information in this article can be employed for any website, it is especially helpful for start-ups that are new to collecting data and utilizing metrics.

With that being said, we’ll cover a few things to help you get the most out of this tool.

• What is Google Analytics
• Why (and how) to set up Goals
• Why (and how) to use Segments

What is Google Analytics?

Analytics allows you to collect data on basic website metrics, as well as more set up detailed, customized reporting. It works by inserting a code snippet into your website URL, which then uses cookies to collect information on users and their interactions with your site. Here’s a simplified list of the types of data Google Analytics can track for you:

• Audience- demographics, geographic location, new vs. returning users, devices used (mobile/web)
• Acquisition- the source or medium your site traffic originates from
• Behavior- which page users land/exit on, bounce rate, page visit time, whether users completed certain actions

If you're in the early stages of your business or setting up a new marketing team, keep in mind that this tool is free. You can start getting a handle on your start-up analytics with no upfront cost, and free training through the Analytics Acadamy and scores of dedicated youtube channels.

Once you’ve decided to implement this tool on your site, you now have a possibly overwhelming amount of information to sort through. Never worry, with intentional planning you can get the most out of Google Analytics. Here is where my tips for effective use come into play.

Setting Up Goals

A general rule of thumb for utilizing any type of metrics is that they are only useful if they measure your progress towards your business goals. While the metrics you track through Google Analytics may not directly connect to your overall business goals, they should measure your progress to smaller, specific goals that support your main goal.

That being said, you should take the time to set up goals within Google Analytics. Setting up goals will allow you to visualize and track the data that is relevant to you, and help you measure how well your site is meeting your objectives. This is a big step in making sense of all the information available to you.

Here’s how to get started:

First, navigate to the admin page, where you can view your accounts, properties, and views. Under the ‘View’ column, select ‘Goals’.

Select the button ‘+Create New Goal’ in the top left corner. From here, you will have a few options. You can choose to create a goal from one of Google’s templates, which are based on the industry you indicated, and are categorized under acquisition, revenue, inquiry, or engagement. You can also choose to create a custom goal. This will direct you to select a goal type, either destination, duration, event, or pages/screens per session.

It isn’t necessary to create a bunch of goals, just think carefully about what makes sense for your overall objectives. For example, if your biggest interest is getting users to subscribe to something, you could create an event goal that counts every subscription as a conversion. You can also set up goal funnels, which will show the steps it takes for a user to complete a goal.

For the best reporting on your goals, take the time to assign a value to each goal. For the subscriber example, try to calculate the monetary value one subscriber has for your business.

Using Segments

Segments are an excellent feature of Google Analytics that allows you to isolate and view specific traffic on your site in your reports. This is an excellent tool for finding and visualizing specific insights. For example, you could isolate traffic from a specific marketing campaign to see how those visitors interacted with your website. You could also compare what percentage of your overall conversions came from two different demographics.

There a few ways to set up Segments. As we did with Goals, you can navigate to the admin page, and under the view column select ‘Segments’. This will allow you to view your saved segments and create new ones as well.

You can also navigate to any report and select ‘+Add Segment’ at the top of the report next to the ‘All Users’ segment. This gives you a quick and accessible way to modify almost any report, and your selected segments will carry over to other reports you view (you can only view 4 segments at a time.)

For example, take a look at the default Goal overview report, which displays all Users. It gives us a general idea of how we are performing, but it doesn’t tell us anything specific.

We can easily implement Segments to break down the numbers into specific groups to learn more about what types of traffic contribute the most to our Goal completions. For example, we could create segments to show new and returning visitors.

Now we can see that new users contribute more to our goal completions in this time frame.

You can browse the preset options for segments, or create custom segments using conditional statements to better suit your business. You can also easily import custom segments from other users in the solutions gallery. No matter what you choose, segments are an easy way to get the most out of your reports.