How to setup and use Google Analytics in 2024
Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to understand how your website or app users engage with your company. It is very useful for business owners to see which pages on their websites are performing the best and driving the most traffic and revenue. By analysing each page on your site, you are able to track your customers’ buyer journeys in order to see where your marketing funnel is weakest and optimise those pages. You are also able to see which online behaviour led to purchases and use that data to reach new and existing customers. As Google Analytics integrates with the full Google tool suite, you can observe paid advertising campaigns to see demographic data, for example, and optimise your campaigns to maximise conversions in these areas. Google Analytics compiles all of this data into useful reports you can use to perform an in-depth analysis of your customers’ behaviour, which you can then use to keep improving the efficiency of your marketing and website.How to set it up
– Sign up for an account using gmail – Add the name of your site and the URL, plus the industry you’re in – Grab your unique Javascript tracking ID to allow GA to aggregate data from your site – Add the code just after the <head> tag of your site. – Check your GA portal to verify everything is working and that visitors are being tracked on your site As long as your site uses the same page type throughout, you won’t have to add the code manually to each page. If you have multiple page types, you’ll need to add separate code for each page variation.Analytics data collection
For every page that loads, GA compiles and records all the activity on that page into a file called a session. After a period of 30 minutes of inactivity, it loads a new session. It tracks data coming from many different sources including the browser, the language used, the device OS and where the traffic came from. It then takes the activity from that session and aggregates it into useful reports. Here’s an overview of how that happens.
How to organise your account
Depending on the size of your company, you can create segments: organisation > account > property. Each property can have multiple views and you can use filters in each property to tell the analytics what data you want it to include. Here’s an overview of this concept:
Analysing the data
Here’s an overview of the GA summary page. The main data table is split into the three main factors of the marketing funnel: acquisition, behaviour and conversion. You can use the data table to view your unique visitors and sessions in the acquisition section. To view user activity, head to the behaviour metrics and if you’ve set up any goals, you can analyse those under conversions. Furthermore, you can use the various rows and sections to analyse different metrics and also use the search function to filter key data like certain demographics, for example.