Introduction to Google Analytics

If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It

Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics or GA, is a free web analytics service that tracks and reports web traffic. Engineers can use Google Analytics to track their user's website session duration, pages per session, bounce rate and so much more. GA gives users an in-depth look at their user's behaviors and allows them to make smart decisions on how to change their websites. GA can also be integrated into Google marketing and advertising platforms in order for engineers, marketers, and product managers to make smart decisions. In short, if you want your website to be successful and want to know how to better serve your consumers, you need to implement Google Analytics.

What can Google Analytics track?

1. Sessions —How many visitors are coming to your website?
   Being able to see a number of visitors is extremely helpful. The team will know the baseline before doing any campaign and then compare to see if the number of users went up later by looking at GA. You will know if users stop coming to your website and then decide how to increase traffic in the future. Overall, you won’t be guessing if the website is successful or not,
2. Traffic report- Where are your users?
   Traffic reports will give you information such as where your users are located, time of day they visit your website, etc. You can see the website’s peak hours and the location of where the user is visiting your website from. This is very helpful because you can get an idea of where your visitors are and create ads that specifically target these locations for better engagement. Generally, we can answer the question, who do you serve and how can you give them a better experience?
3. Device — What device are they using?
   Should you focus more on enhancing mobile devices? Are they mostly web-based? Google Analytics can give you a report and break down the percentage of users that access your site from their phone vs the web. This data can help designers focus either on mobile, web, or both. We can make better decisions on what features we should roll out to which device.
4. Bounce rate — How many visitors leave your site without visiting a second page?
   Bounce rate is incredibly important. We can track down reasons why the users are leaving the page and build features to get them to stay on our site.
5. Session Duration — How long an average visitor stays on your site?
   We can get a better idea of how long the user stays on our website. We can know if they are engaging with our content and create features to get them to explore other pages more.
6. Behavior report — Which is our popular pages?
   You can see which pages are performing better than others. Which page are the most popular that you can share and promote? This metric can allow the marketing team to push more popular pages to social media in order to get new users. We can also try to push pages we think should get more engagement by looking at this metric.
7. Acquisition — Are you acquiring visitors organically?
   Did your social media campaign drive views? Are users coming to your site directly? Are they coming from Google search? Facebook? Pinterest? We can know if marketing campaigns in Facebook get more engagement or if the YouTube campaign fits better for our content. We can measure if marketing efforts pay off on different platforms.
8. Exit pages — Which pages are leading consumers to exit your website?
   We can see if one page leads to more user exits from others. We can analyze why this might be? Can we learn something from this page? Is there a reason why more users are exiting from this page than others?
9. New vs returning visitors — are you keeping your visitors?
   Are they coming back to your website? Are you acquiring new visitors? If you run a campaign, did you get new visitors? It’s important to know if you are getting new visitors if the campaign worked.

Google Analytics is a must-have for all websites. It’s critical to know more about your users in order to serve them better. You can dive into the data and make better business decisions.