The Importance of Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an important digital marketing tool, but often underutilized by most businesses. Google Analytics gives you the ability to measure the results of individual advertising campaigns and overall site traffic in real-time, compare the data to previous periods, and much more. Here are some of the reasons that you should be utilizing Google Analytics to measure the success of your website.
Overview of All Channels
Analytics gives you data from every channels that is directing traffic to your website, including:
Having the ability to monitor all the platforms lets you review what is working well and what isn’t. And with all the data in one place, it’s easy to compare the different channels. If you are currently putting money into your SEO, PPC, or social campaigns, you can use Google Analytics to assist in monitoring ROI.
Goal Tracking
It’s all good knowing how many people have visited your site, and where they are coming from, but how do you know if those users are doing want you want (buying, filling out a form)? Google Analytics lets you set up goals to track when a user completes a certain action on your site. Regardless of how many users each channel is driving to your site, you have to know if this traffic is completing the goals you want, otherwise there is little value to that traffic.
Customer Engagement
Google Analytics has a number of features that gives you the ability to review how users are interacting with your website and content. These metrics monitor different aspects of the customer journey, while showing the path the customer has taken.
Some key metrics to monitor:
Bounce Rate – The percentage of visitors that leave your website having only viewed one page.
Pages per Session – The average number of pages a visitor has viewed.
Average Session Duration – The average amount of time spent on a website by a visitor.
You can compare individual pages, giving you insight on which pages are performing well, and which may require optimizing to improve what is known as the user experience.
Device Overview
With Google Analytics you can monitor what type of devices your visitors are using when they come to your site. This can give you insight as to how much focus you should put on mobile. If you are receiving a similar amount of visitors from mobile and desktop, but visitors are spending more time on the site on desktop and bouncing on mobile, that could be a sign that your site is not fully optimized for mobile and it’s an area that requires improvement.
Conclusion
Google Analytics lets you to track many important metrics, covering every facet of your website. You can monitor and benchmark the effectiveness of your online marketing strategies, on-site content, user experience, and device functionality. All these statistics show you what is going well, and equally as important, what isn’t. It is only when you can identify the issues your site may have, you can create a solution. Google Analytics gives you the information required to improve your website, so it’s the best it can be.
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The Carl De Lucia Blog