Table of Contents
Google Analytics is used by virtually everyone, but few know how to use it to improve SEO.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this. Despite Google Analytics’s power, it can sometimes seem impossible to draw useful and insightful insights -especially for beginners.
Analytics vs Analysis
Despite their similarities, analytics and analysis differ primarily in what they emphasize. Both of these terms refer to the process of examining information, but analysis refers to a more general concept, while analytics refers to a more detailed process of analyzing data.
Analysis is more like an interpretation of information, you gather it and with logical understanding while building a plan of action through it.
Analytical analysis is the process of a computer accepting, storing, calculating, and presenting information for examination.
Therefore, an “analytics platform” describes a system that enables systematic calculation and analysis of data, whereas a “business analyst” is someone who applies an analysis process to a body of information for some purpose. Analytics puts an emphasis on data and systems, while business analytics does not.
Generally speaking, analytics is seen as something and analysis as an action.
Why You Should be Using Google Analytics
Digital analytics software such as Google Analytics is among the most popular.
You can analyze your website’s visitors in more detail with Google’s free web analytics tool.
Business success strategies can be shaped with the help of this report.
In the internet age, almost every business has an online presence. In order to ensure that your website is fulfilling its purpose, it becomes very important for you to learn about its inner structure.
It is important to know which pages your visitors visit on your website, how long they stay, and what they do while they are on the site.
No matter what kind of website you operate, whether an e-commerce website or an informative blog, you will always want to study and understand how visitors behave.
The following reasons should convince you to use Google Analytics in order to get a better understanding of your website and its visitors.
1. The service is free
“There is no such thing as a free lunch,” but that isn’t true when it comes to Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is completely free to use.
This way, you can invest your budget into some other key resources.
You can also get free access to important information, figures, and statistics that will help you optimize the performance of your website.
2. Collecting Data Automatically
To set up Google Analytics, simply copy the code on your website and set up your account.
Your website will now be able to collect data automatically from Google Analytics and generate reports on that data.
In order to get the data, you simply need to do nothing. Google Analytics takes care of everything.
Your reports are even available right away without any delay. Google Analytics has this feature which saves you time and gives you immediate access to the reports. Thus, you will soon be able to implement strategies to improve your website’s performance.
3. Reports can be Customized
You can create your own custom reports.
You can choose from one of the many reports that Google Analytics offers or you can design your own report by dragging and dropping elements into place.
Dimensions and metrics can be selected, as well as how they are displayed.
4. Platforms and Tools can Easily be Integrated
Google Analytics has the remarkable feature of being easily integrated with other tools and platforms.
The interface of Google Analytics is easy to read and understand, as it is for all other Google services.
Through its app on Google Play Store, it is also perfectly usable on smartphones and tablets.
Google AdWords and Google Analytics are highly integrated.
Essentially, you are aligning two tools with Analytics and making them work together by linking the two.
You will gain actionable insights from this combination of work that will help you succeed in your AdWords campaigns.
With Google Analytics, you can easily link data from all your devices to Google AdWords and Google Search Console, other well-known Google products.
5. Measuring Internal Search Engine Performance
After arriving at your website, visitors are looking for the contents of your internal site.
Additionally, it identifies the areas of your site where there may be misunderstandings or gaps in certain areas.
With a little bit of customization, you can track internal site searches with Google Analytics.
Internal site search helps you see what people are searching on your website, to give you a better understanding of what they want.
This insight will help you improve the performance of your website by making the appropriate changes or additions.
The navigation and product/service offerings on your website can also be modified effectively.
6. Understanding why your Website is not Converting
Bounce rate is one of the most important metrics because it measures how many people leave a website after only viewing one page.
Further, lowering this rate to the greatest extent possible is extremely important.
Despite huge traffic, many businesses fail to convert enough.
When visitors don’t find what they are looking for they leave the website, leading to a high bounce rate.
The reason behind a high bounce rate must be identified immediately.
The plus with Google Analytics it provides an immediate and detailed report of pages that are the reason for a high bounce rate.
Bounce rates often happen due to poorly optimized websites or landing pages that aren’t attractive enough for users to sign up.
Eventually, this detailed bounce rate report will help you understand your audience better and can help reduce the bounce rate and get more conversions.
7. To determine where, when and how old your audience is, as well as what devices they use and their interests.
You can use Google Analytics to find out which channels drive the most traffic to your website based on the data that it collects about your audience.
The Audience section of your website provides details about the people visiting your sites, such as their location, age, gender, and interests.
Furthermore, it gives you information about how visitors reached your site.
8. Understanding which Social Media Platforms to Target
Using social media platforms to engage customers and drive traffic is a great strategy.
You can monitor what ads attract users’ attention with Google Analytics, and then target them accordingly.
You should set aside a generous budget for social media ads before selecting the best platform to advertise to your customers.
You can, for example, set a higher budget for Facebook and comparatively less budget for Twitter if Facebook customer engagement is the highest and Twitter traffic is the least substantial.
Your social platforms’ performance can be tracked through Google Analytics. Additionally, you can check the conversion value each social platform brings, the amount of traffic that comes from social sharing, and how many people talk about you on social media.
9. Write the Right Content to Understand your Audience
When it comes to creating content, quality is king, and if it is done well, it can lead to significantly more traffic and visitors.
Businesses are increasingly creating blogs, infographics, and slide shares that can add value to their customers. This is one of the best ways to reach out to your customers.
Keeping track of all the views and shares on your content is made easy with Google Analytics. Based on this information, you can make improvements to the most popular blogs so that they appeal to customers more effectively.
Each of your blog posts is analyzed by Google Analytics to determine its page views.
In order to generate more traffic, you can rework on the top-performing blogs.
10. To determine if you are achieving your goals
Your business’s progress can be measured using the goals in Google Analytics.
According to the customer’s actions, it will be possible to assign a number of goals that you can use to track the customer’s journey.
One type of goal may be to make a purchase, to fill out a lead generation form, sign up for a newsletter, or download an ebook.
Upon visiting your landing page, a visitor may fill out the given form, including their email address. You’ve just accomplished a goal. In this way, your website just added to your business’ success by converting a visitor into a customer.
Analytics: What it Does
By definition, analytics is the discovery, interpretation, and communication of significant patterns in data. By using analytics, we can uncover valuable insights and data we wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.
Web analytics - What is it?
Qualitative research and testing findings can be greatly supported by web analytics. Consider the following best practices:
- Make decisions based on data. Find out how you can improve your KPIs after collecting the necessary data to evaluate whether your goals have been met (or not met). Are there any high-value articles on the website that do not receive traffic (based on feedback from users)? Analyze top sources of traffic on the page to find out why. Test different solutions and see which placement generates the most engagement for that page using the experimentation & testing tools.
- Provide more than just traffic reports. Visitors, page views, top sources, and top pages are only the tip of the iceberg when reporting them. The number of visitors can be misleading; the more time spent on a site does not necessarily translate into more business success. It is largely a tactical exercise to report these numbers. After all, how do 7 million visits contribute to the success of your program?
- Data insights should always be provided. When you report metrics to stakeholders without any insight into your business goals or user goals, you miss the point. By using the website data to show what areas of your site are succeeding and what areas could be improved, your data will become relevant and meaningful.
- Reporting should not be snapshot-centric. The web is evolving at a faster rate than ever before, and only focusing on visits or just a specific time period doesn’t capture the greater depth and complexity of what’s happening now.
- Stakeholders should be communicated with clearly. Consistently provide information to your stakeholders, know the audience, and disclose the system’s weaknesses.
What is Data Analytics?
Data analytics can be simply described as a way to analyze raw data so that conclusions can be drawn. With data analytics, you can see patterns in raw data in order to extract useful ideas. The core research of data experts nowadays involves data analytics. Many organizations are making informed decisions based on data analytics.
There are numerous kinds of data analytics included under the term data analytics. In order to get a better understanding of how things work, any type of data can be put through a data analytics strategy. Data analytics is used by gaming corporations, for example, to set price schedules for players to keep most of them engaged in the game. The use of data analytics by other types of companies varies based on their needs.
What are different types of analytics
1. Descriptive Analytics
An example of descriptive analytics is the analysis of raw data from various data sources to figure out what happened and gain insight into what transpired. Nevertheless, these outcomes don’t really state whether something is right or wrong, and there is no explanation of why.
2. Diagnostic Analytics
Historical data can be classified against other data at this point in order to understand why certain events occurred. Diagnostic analysis gives you a holistic understanding of an issue.
3. Predictive Analytics
As the name suggests, predictive analytics has something to do with predicting the future. Indeed, it tells us what will happen in the future. In addition to identifying groups and special cases, it also predicts future trends using the discoveries of descriptive and diagnostic analytics.
Predictive analytics belongs to advanced analytics types and offers numerous points of interest, including complex analysis driven by deep learning or machine learning and proactive methodologies sparked by predictive analytics.
Even so, our information advisors state it clearly: Prediction is only a gauge, whose accuracy is highly dependent on the accuracy of the information and the security of the situation, so it warrants careful management and constant streamlining.
4. Prescriptive analytics
In prescriptive analytics, the goal is to tell what you should do in order to avoid a future problem or to capitalize on a promising trend. Machine learning, business rules, and algorithms are among the tools and technologies used in predictive analytics, making it easy to manage and implement.
Furthermore, this cutting-edge type of data analytics requires both recorded inner information and outside data in order to function, due to the algorithms it depends on.
What are the differences between KPIs and analytics?
The key performance indicators in an organization allow you to know if the organization’s goals have been met, while other analytics can explain what is driving those results.
An onboarding pre-assessment trend might be simply another analytics result, while the percentage of employees compliant with your security awareness course is a key performance indicator.
They are only distinguished by the meaning and importance attached to the latter.
There’s usually a good reason for this importance placed on a certain metric. Stakeholders can rely on logic and their experience to determine the results that are most relevant to their ongoing decisions.
With a KPI based on sales results, for example, a company’s future plans, personnel decisions, or training programs are almost certainly geared towards meeting the changing needs of this indicator.
In what ways are people misusing the term "analytics" instead of "KPIs"?
According to Einstein, not everything that can be counted counts. There’s more to the quote, but that first part stands well on its own. There’s a good chance none of the 50 different KPIs in your team will be perceived as key indicators.
Your analytics results may all differ in importance or meaning, leaving you with a lot of data. Yet KPIs are meant to summarize and sum up this data.
What are the benefits of using analytics and KPIs together?
The results of other analytics are usually backed up by KPIs. To explain the unexpected values or changes in a KPI, it is necessary to provide secondary figures or details.
It may be necessary to look at other metrics to understand a spike in sales, for example sales by product, sales by division, or call volume. In the absence of additional metrics, a KPI quickly loses meaning, as the value bounces around and is misinterpreted.
How are learning KPIs different from business KPIs?
The Learning KPI is a special type of KPI. In this sense, they are conceptually grounded in the same way as key performance indicators, namely, they are endowed with significant and meaningful meanings.
These KPIs are individual indicators that are specific to the learning domain. These will differ from organization to organization.
About the Author
My name’s Semil Shah, and I pride myself on being the last digital marketer that you’ll ever need. Having worked internationally across agile and disruptive teams from San Fransico to London, I can help you take what you are doing in digital to a whole next level.