If you’ve always wanted to improve your business’s digital marketing but never seem to find the time, now could be an ideal opportunity to get started with some online content creation.
The world is increasingly turning to the internet for distraction, inspiration, ideas, and information. So, if you’ve been meaning to write that blog post, upload that case study, or flesh out that news section, this is the time to do it.
Why is Google Analytics so Useful?
If you’re going to start getting more content out there to encourage more people to come to you, then it’s a great idea to start looking into Google Analytics (GA) if you haven’t before. A guide to Google Analytics will show you that putting out content is pointless if you’re not tracking the results. Google Analytics can provide a number of useful insights, such as tracking the people who visit your site, seeing what they’re looking at, how long they’re staying, and even where they came from.
Understanding Google Analytics for beginners is essential as it’s important to recognise the limitations of GA as well as its usefulness. For instance, if users don’t allow cookies, Google finds it hard to measure them and could then give stats that aren’t 100% accurate. Moreover, some of the platform’s more advanced possibilities can be tricky and may require some specialised skills and knowledge to get right.
However, Google Analytics remains one of the best ways to help you understand your website and digital marketing activities. If you’ve never really sunk your teeth into it, don’t worry – we know that Google Analytics can be a bit off-putting and confusing, which is why we’ve put together this beginners guide to Google Analytics, offering quick tips so you don’t have to worry about what all those numbers and graphs in your GA account really mean.
Glossary of Terms on Google Analytics
You might think that it would make sense to start by talking about how to link Google Analytics to your website. However, as most web developers will do this for you, we’re going to dive straight into some basic terminology. If you’ve designed the site yourself or need to link up GA, getting started with Google Analytics is straightforward – check out how to do it here. The terms you’ll probably encounter first include:
- Users: A user is anyone who has initiated at least one session during the date range in question. They might have visited 100 times, but they still count as one user. This isn’t iron-clad, as it relies on the person using the same device or browser each time and not deleting their cookies, otherwise, they will count as multiple users. The term “users” is similar but different to “new users”, which specifically refers to first-time visitors to your site.
- Sessions: This is the total number of visits to your site and includes both new and repeat visitors. This means that if one person visited your site 10 times, they’d be counted as one user but 10 sessions. GA will start a new session after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight, so if someone loads your page and then leaves for lunch, returning after 45 minutes and loading your page again, it will count as two sessions.
- Bounce Rate: This is an important metric often used as a measure of how engaging your site is. If a site or page has a high bounce rate, this means that users are landing on your site and almost immediately leaving again without doing anything. If you have a high bounce rate, consider how many items there are on the site/page for people to interact with and whether it’s obvious how they do it. Pages with limited options will inevitably have higher bounce rates compared to, say, the homepage of a news website that has numerous features to click, read, watch, etc. It’s vital to understand what bounce rate means in Google Analytics to make informed decisions.
- Referral: Looking at the referrals to your website will help you identify where people are coming from. In GA, go into Acquisition in the left-hand menu and then All Traffic – Channels to get a quick overview of the different ways people are finding your site. Digging into this report will help you understand which websites are funnelling users your way, which social media platforms are working for you, and how many people are going straight to your site.
Being Contented with Content
In the Behaviour section of the left-hand menu, you can go into Site Content and get some very quick, very useful insights into the type of content that’s working for you. By ranking all the pages on the site, you can see what your audience is most interested in – whether it’s a type of product, advice on a particular topic, or even what style of content is proving most effective. Knowing what your audience likes is a great way to inform future activity in a number of ways, whether it’s for more content on your site, for a press release that you want to get out into the media, or even to help think about how your business can better cater to its customers in general.
It’s a Date
This might seem obvious, but make sure that the date range for the data you’re looking at is relevant. For example, if you want to evaluate the success of some new content or design changes, then ensure you know the date it went live so you’re not accidentally accounting for time periods that won’t give you an accurate picture of what you’ve just done.
One thing that’s fun to do is to click the “compare to” button in the date box, as this lets you see really quickly what effect a new campaign or activity has had compared to what your site can usually expect to achieve.
Goal!
Setting up goals is a useful way to track what you consider to be the most important objectives for your site. This is a little techier than the other points but can be done by clicking on the Admin button and then Goals, where you’ll see that you can create a new goal for your site.
You might want to use this to report on every time a purchase has been made, the number of times something has been downloaded, or when a contact form has been completed. If you go into Conversions in the left-hand menu and then Goals, you’ll be able to monitor these to see how the site is doing.
Summary
Obviously, Google Analytics can do so much more than what’s covered above, and is something that you can easily keep updating, improving, and learning about to help you inform your website and understand whether it’s working. But we hope that this beginner’s guide to Google Analytics has helped prompt you to get stuck into it if you never have before.