It Is estimated that more than 50% of all websites use Google Analytics, it’s also one of the most trusted and popular tools out there for digital marketers and for good reason. Google Analytics is an essential tool in the armory of the Digital Marketer to track website performance and collect visitor insights. It can help marketers and webmasters in:
- Determining top sources of user traffic
- Analyzing amount of traffic your site gets overall
- Understanding the websites your traffic came from
- Gaining Insights on Individual page traffic
- Gauging the success of their marketing activities and campaigns by determining the amount of leads converted
- Discovering patterns and trends in user engagement and obtaining other visitor information such as demographics (e.g. where they live)
- Tracking goal completions (such as purchases, adding products to carts).
- Retail websites also use Google Analytics to obtain and analyze various customer behavior analytics, which can be used to improve marketing campaigns, drive website traffic and better retain visitors.
Google Analytics is a platform that collects data from your websites and apps to create reports that provide insights into your business:
- Google analytics enables website owners to analyze their visitors, with the objective of interpreting and optimizing website’s performance.
- Google analytics can track all forms of digital media and referring upstream web destinations, banner and contextual advertisements, e-mail
- Google Analytics integrates with other Google products.
Reasons why we should use Google Analytics:
- It’s available free for use:
You might have heard that “nothing in life is free”, but in the case of Google Analytics, it’s not true. Google doesn’t charge even a single penny for using this product. Additionally, it provides you with important information, numbers and statistics to help you maximize your website’s performance.
There are other analytic tools available also, few offer an initial free period then an ongoing monthly fee, others have a one-time charge. They all can provide you with relevant information about your website’s performance, but we feel Google Analytics provides more choices of data analysis.
- Automatically Collects Data
Google Analytics does all the hard work for you, simultaneously reducing the time required to place huge data sets into documents or spreadsheets.
Although we set up our clients to receive a monthly report by email, you can access your reports at any time, allowing you to implement strategies for the better performance of your website.
- Availability of Customized Reports
In Google Analytics you have the flexibility to choose from available Google report templates or else you can build a customized report of your own picking the dimensions and metrics you want to see and you can also choose how they should be displayed as a graph or data point.
- Can be Integrated with other Google Ecosystem Tools and Platforms
Google Analytics has a robust and easily understandable dashboard.
You can use the desktop version or download the app on Google Play store onto your smartphone or tablet retaining all the features.
Google Analytics can easily be integrated with Google AdWords, Merchant Centre Account, Search Console providing actionable insights to help achieving your marketing objectives
How to Set up a Google Analytics Account?
- How Google Analytics works
Google Analytics collects data from your websites and apps & creates reports that provide insights into your business.
- To measure a website, you first have to create a Google Analytics account.
- Then you need to add a small piece of JavaScript measurement code to each page on your site. Google Analytics acquires user data from each website visitor using the page tags.
- A JavaScript page tag is inserted into the code of each webpage. This tag runs in the web browser of each visitor, collecting data and sending it to one of Google’s data collection servers.
- Google Analytics can then further generate customizable reports in order to track & visualize data such as the number of users, bounce rates, average session durations, sessions by channel, page views, goal completions and many other metrics.
- The page tag functions as a web bug or web beacon, to gather visitor information. However, because it relies on cookies, the system can’t collect data for users who have disabled them.
- Setting Up Google Analytics Account and Installing the Global Website Tag
Step 1: Create a Google Analytics account
- Go to Analytics: Create an account or sign in to Analytics
- Click the “Start for free” button.
Step 2: Enter the welcome page
- After creating an account or signing in, you are taken to the welcome page.
- Press the “Start measuring” button to proceed.
Step 3: Account setup
- Enter your account name. (The name of your Business or anything that you want the account to be known as)
- Decide what data you want to share. (Check all the buttons here)
- Click the “Next” button.
- Note : One account can have more than one tracking ID. You can track more than one website with an account.
Step 4: Property setup
Let me explain to you what a Property is. It is the service you measure, such as a website, application, link tree, etc. You can use the domain name (Dmdendigital.com) here as the best practice.
- Enter a property name.
- Enter your time zone.
- Enter the currency that you use.
- Click the “Next” button.
Step 5: Add business information
- Select your industry category.
- Select business size.
- Tick the boxes for how you are planning to use Analytics.
- Click the “Create” button to proceed.
Step 6: Terms of Service Agreement
As a best practice it is recommended to read and understand the terms of service.
- Tick the GDPR box and click the “I accept” button if you agree.
Step 7: Email subscriptions
- Tick or uncheck all boxes. (My recommendations is to check all the boxes and you will get regular updates about the new things and updates from Google)
- Click the “Save” button to continue.
Step 8: Select the Platform or the Property Type
Choose the platform or the property type for which you want to collect data. It can either be a Website or an Android App or an iOS App
Then, click the relevant property type to continue.
Step 9: Set Up the Data stream
Enter the details of the data stream which includes:
- The URL to your site.
- The name that you want to give the stream.
- Decide if you are to enable enhanced measurement or not.
- Click on the “Create stream” button to continue.
Step 10: Web stream overview
- Here you can see a detailed overview of the web stream.
- Up over there you will see a unique code that will be the distinct identity of your website property
Step 11: Global site tag (gtag.js)
- Go to the “Global site tag (gtag.js)”, for that click on the “View Tag Instructions”
- You will see two options there “Install with a website builder or CMS” or “Install Manually”
- I recommend installing Manually or You can take help from your Web Developer as well
- For installing manually, if you are using WordPress then you can login into the backend and open the header.php file under theme editor and install the code before the </head> section it is also known as closing head section in HTML.
Once you have set up the code in your website it will start measuring the traffic and other allied data, you will have to open your recently created analytics account and check if it is showcasing any data or not, in order to check the same you can login to your website and check the status in the real time section of the Google Analytics, if it showcases a traffic that means the codes are working properly.