If you have a website but not using Google Analytics, you are doing a big mistake. When you will start using it, you will be sitting on a goldmine of excellent data. Keep reading and learn how to exploit this opportunity.
Google Analytics (GA) is a free Google tool for generating detailed statistics about visitors to your websites. It is the most used website tool for marketers on the Internet.
With this first article I am starting a Google Analytics tutorial. I hope I will help you achieving great results. You should sign up to our free newsletter so you’ll get the next articles in the series straight into your inbox. I will now start from GA basics.
Through this tutorial you will get some basics you need to understand to begin with GA. We’ll focus on:
- How GA is excellent in helping you with your website and/or business goals.
- How to measure your success with goals.
- How to integrate your analytics with AdWords, which is Google’s advertising program.
- How to measure marketing campaigns.
- Analyzing traffic sources in order to improve your results.
Bring Your Business to the Next Level
First of all, you need to think to the objective and the goal you’d like to achieve through your website. For instance:
| Your Personal Business Objective | Goal |
|---|---|
| E-commerce industry | Selling products |
| Lead generation industry | Gather contact info for sales prospects |
| Content publisher | Present advertising to readers |
| Customer support | Help clients solving issues |
| Branding | Drive consciousness & engagement |
Know that, historically speaking, a good measure of conversion on the Internet is about 2-3%. This measure is for actual conversions of course, therefore sales. But that does not mean the rest of the traffic coming through your website has no value.
On the contrary, the non-$-converting traffic is extremely important too, that will lead to so-called micro conversions that need to be tracked. These conversions may be:
- Share some content via social networks.
- Subscribe to the newsletter.
- Watch a video about your brand.
- Play games on the site.
- Add a product to cart.
- Live chat.
- Taking a survey.
Tracking Your Conversions is Essential
Measuring your success is essential. In GA you can set up goals to track your website’s conversions. To do so click “Admin” as shown below and then click goals. There are up to 20 goals that you can set upon GA.
One of the most common goals you can set up is the URL destination goal. Basically, this is useful to measure when visitors get to a particular page. Excellent for newsletter sign ups, transactions, leads and so on. How you use it:
- Give your goal a “Goal Name”. Make it something easy for you to remember when you look at your reports.
- The “Goal Type” will be “URL Destination”.
- Tell GA which one is the “Goal URL” of this page. So if it is a thank you page, take the URL from your website and put it in GA.
- Finally give GA a “Goal Value”. This is basically a setting that lets you give your conversion a monetary value, so GA understands how much a conversion is worth.
Where Do Your Visitors Come From?
This is a very important step. You have to make sure you have Google Analytics and Google AdWords connected together so you can actually see your AdWords traffic in GA. By default this should be already set up in your account, but let’s see how this work anyway:
1. Make sure you are the administrator on both the GA account and the AdWords account. You do this through using the same administrator username and password on both accounts. On GA, click on “Admin”, then see “Profiles” to check if you are the administrator for your account, as shown below.
In case you do not know, AdWords is a product from Google that lets you advertise your online business on the Google search engine. You may have noticed when you do a Google search you see some text ads at the top or and the right side of the page. Those ads you see after you perform a search are from the AdWords program. It is obviously a paid service, and not free like GA.
2. The other step is opening the AdWords account itself. So login to your Google AdWords account, go the “My Account” tab at the top of the page, scroll down until you find the section called “Tracking” and make sure the “Auto Tagging” is on “Yes”.
Well, I think that is enough for today. I believe this is a good introduction, you have a lot to work on before the next article. Next time we are going to see some more cool stuff about GA, so see you soon.
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