Google Analytics and its Important Features

Google Analytics (GA) is by far the most useful tool for tracking the progress of any website on the Internet. GA is a fantastic resource that delivers all of the information needed to improve a website.

What is Google Analytics?

All Googlians have access to Google Analytics, which is a free service. It has been demonstrated to be the most dependable source of data about internet consumers’ preferences.

The Google Analytics system is made up of four primary components.

1. Data collection
2. Configuration
3. Data processing
4. Reporting

Google Analytics collects data using a little piece of JavaScript code.

This code must be included on each and every page of the website.

When a user visits a website, the javascript code begins collecting various kinds of data about how the user interacts with the site.

In summary, the javascript collects information from the website itself, such as the URLs of the pages the user is viewing, as well as information from the user’s browser, such as the language the browser is set to, browser name, and device & operating system used to access the site, and the referral source that brought the user to the site in the first place.

Important Features of Google Analytics

1.  Reporting and Visualisation

One of the most useful features of Google Analytics is that it generates reports for all of your marketing campaigns automatically. Google Analytics’ reporting features allow you to learn more about marketing data. With a single click, you may create several sorts of reports and share them across your organisation. The following is a list of the several types of reports that you may create using Google Analytics:

Advertising Statistics: These reports show how a user performed after clicking on a link on your website or app. It enables you to spot patterns in visitors’ behaviour once they click on ads and visit your website. It displays how your Ads recruit users, as well as their activity on your website or app and conversion tendencies.

Audience Reports: Based on numerous indicators, it provides you with information about the characteristics of users. Audience reports are primarily summaries of data obtained from all platforms that describe how customers interacted with your marketing campaigns. Active Users, Lifetime Value, Cohort Analysis, Demographics, and other parameters can be evaluated in these reports.

Behavior Reports: Behavior Reports feature allows you to see how a person interacts with your website when they visit it. What pages do they enjoy, how long do they stay on your site, what optimizations do you need, and so on. These stats reveal how users navigated the site and who utilised the search function.

Real-Time Reports: These reports provide you with all of the real-time data you need to keep track of your website or app’s operations. All Audience reports, Behaviour reports, and other reports are updated in real time. You can also use Google Analytics’ various features to generate Real-Time reports for those metrics.

Conversion Reports: These reports help you to track how adverts, referrals, and other traffic sources are doing. The number of users who complete the transaction, the average order amount, and the conversion rate can all be tracked.

Google Analytics’ visualisation features allow you to visualise all of your reports and metrics in charts. You can evaluate data more rapidly and readily share your progress with other members with the use of visualisation. It offers a framework for combining and correlating two or more variables in a single dashboard. Customizable dashboards are also accessible as a sub-feature in a number of Google Analytics features.

2. E-commerce Tracking

E-commerce tracking must be enabled in Google Analytics for e-commerce businesses. It allows you to trace not only all of your transactions and revenue, but also the traffic source from which the transactions originated. You can, for example, keep track of how many transactions Organic Traffic generated over a given period of time.

This helps you to see which traffic sources work best and can help you focus on which channels need to be improved.

It also lets you track and compare your earnings to the amount of money you spend on each traffic source. For example, you’d want to know how much income Paid Traffic generates so you can make sure you’re getting a good return on your investment.

3. Tag Management

Google Tag Manager is a Tag Management System that makes adding tracking code to your website or app a breeze. To get data from your websites or Ads Campaigns, you must first describe the data you want and then send it to Google Analytics. People used to code the tracking code to send data to third-party programmes before Google Tag Manager. Editing the website code anytime any updates are required is a time-consuming operation. Google Tag Management makes adding code snippets to your website a breeze.

On a website or app, Google Tag Manager places a little piece of code. Through a web-based user interface, you can manage the types of data you want to transmit to Google Analytics. The Tag Management code can interface with Tag Manager servers to transmit user data from a website to Google once it is added to the page.It also automates tag configuration and lets you add and remove tracking code elements from your website with ease.

4. Smart Goals

In order to manage a successful digital business, you must have goals. You invest money and time on marketing campaigns and study them, but you have no idea whether they are helping or hurting your firm. Smart Goals are Google Analytics features that allow you to add particular goals to a list and track their progress.

Purchases on the website, adding a new subscriber to an email list, or reaching a new sales milestone are all examples of goals. It allows you to keep track of the progress of your marketing campaigns. However, strategic goal-setting is required. Adding arbitrary goals to a business might be detrimental because it will not provide a true interpretation of the outcomes, lowering the quality of the analysis.

To successfully evaluate the effectiveness of your online business and marketing campaigns, you must set appropriate goals for your website so that Google Analytics’ numerous features can provide essential data and assist you in determining the outcomes. Smart goals can auto-detect the current status of your site or app and update the objectives for you if you can’t decide what goals to add.

5. Audience Reports and understanding your Users

Understanding your audience’s gender, age, and interests allows you to determine the types of creative content you should create, the types of media buys you should make, and the types of audiences you should target for marketing and remarketing efforts.

You can find out who is visiting and viewing your website in this section. This tool, once again, allows you to define your target demographic as well as your marketing plan. All of these factors can influence how you promote your website and what strategies you utilise, whether it’s through social media or paid advertising.

A) DEMOGRAPHICS

Age – This part divides your visitors into the following age groups: 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, and 65+. It then informs you how many users were in each age group, how many were new users, what the bounce rate was, how many transactions were made, and how much money was made.

If you’re an e-commerce business, this is crucial because it will show you (if you’ve set up eCommerce monitoring) which age groups convert the best and buy the most from your site.

Gender — This divides your traffic into male and female visitors and displays the same metrics as the age section. This can help you further identify your target audience.

B) BEHAVIOUR

New vs. Returning — This tracks all site sessions and categorises them as either new users who have never visited the site before or returning visitors who have previously visited the site. You can also see how much revenue and how many transactions each user type has generated in this section.

The frequency and recency of a user’s visits to the site are tracked in this section. In other words, the number of times a person has visited the site.

Engagement – The engagement section examines how long the user was on the website and groups the session duration into categories such as 0–10 seconds, 11–30 seconds, and so on.

C) MOBILE

Devices — This area is useful for determining the usability of your site for mobile visitors because it shows which device the users were using when they visited your site. It divides the report into sections for each device, such as Apple iPhone or Apple iPhone 7. This allows you to see which devices are operating well and which aren’t, allowing you to see if there are any issues with certain devices that are displaying your website.

5)  Funnel Analysis

One of the most important aspects of understanding the development of your marketing campaigns is funnel analysis. It allows you to see the entire user journey from the moment they click on an ad to when they make a purchase. These Google Analytics features assist you in carefully allocating your funds to the stages of the conversion cycle where they are most needed. The following are the several types of Funnel Analysis:

Multi-Channel Funnels: This study allows you to see a user’s path to your website from several traffic sources, as well as whether or not they made a purchase. It shows you how much time people spend on various tasks, such as searching for a product and converting.

Shopping and Checkout Funnels: It assists you in determining at which point a customer abandons the conversion process. This manner, you can explicitly improve the strategy’s or website’s common flaws.

Data Reports And Customization

Google Analytics allows you to customise reports, dashboards, and alerts, and you can analyse data to match your company’s specific needs thanks to a wide selection of third-party assistance.

Reports, dashboards, and alerts may all be customised to provide you a quick look at any data you need in any situation.

Google Analytics includes a large collection of ready-to-use reports and dashboards created by users to assist you in getting started. You may, for example, create a dashboard that displays your website’s performance indicators or SEO analytics fast.

Custom reports are a useful feature since they allow you to easily build shareable reports that can assist you in making better data-driven decisions on the fly. You can also create custom alerts that send an email when the website accomplishes a certain milestone or set of objectives.

If your firm employs other business analytics tools, GA allows you to export data directly into a spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets) or another third-party tool.

Google Analytics Benefits 

Although there are other Web analytics programmes on the market, Google Analytics is the most popular since it is both dependable and user-friendly. A few more advantages of Google Analytics are described below.

It assists you in making more informed marketing decisions using statistics and machine learning models rather than guessing.

Predictive Analysis and Analytical Intelligence can assist you in reducing workload and focusing on business growth.

Because of their ideal Machine Learning models that may meet every business’s demands, Google Analytics can deliver deeper insights and customisable reports than other platforms on the market.

Google Analytics can help you find the perfect audience for your company.

You can quickly obtain an overview of the progress and distribute it across the enterprise using Google Analytics’ Reporting and Visualization Features.

You know how to setup Google Analytics you can checkout this article HOW TO SETUP GOOGLE ANALYTICS – STEP BY STEP

Conclusion

In this post, you learnt about Google Analytics and how it may help you improve the performance of your website. You can also learn about Google Analytics features and benefits, which can help you save time and money. Google Analytics is simpler to use, but understanding its few advanced functions requires some work. It is the most frequently recommended tool for expanding companies. You may use Google Analytics numerous features to optimise your website and generate many returns. To manage the business cycle efficiently in a highly competitive corporate climate, one should invest in good Marketing tools.