If you are an online marketer or own a website, you will agree that in most cases, decisions have to be made based on data. In most cases, marketers and website owners make the assumption that data is something that you can always go and acquire on-demand. Yes, some data is available on-demand but there are instances where once that data is gone, it’s gone forever. If there are no mechanisms or techniques being used to record and store collected data, it is an impossible task to accurately create reports, run an analysis or launch a campaign.
In most cases, data tracking on a website is done using Google Analytics. But what exactly is Google Analytics and what does it do? Google Analytics is a free website analytics service that is offered by Google and gives you insights into how users find your website. There is so much that you can do with Google Analytics and truth be told, not everyone fully understands everything that it has to offer. Most people will log into their analytics account, check the dashboard, look at the statistics and are happy if they have traffic and then move on. As most people don’t have the time to become Google Analytics experts, the question is what should you really care about?
How Does Google Analytics Track Data?
Google Analytics tracks all of its data via a unique tracking code. Once you obtain this tracking code from your Google Analytics account, install it on every page of your website. This code is basically a small snippet of Javascript that runs in the viewers’ web browser when they visit your web pages. The Javascript code with a Javascript file on the Google Server to collect information on user activities on the website. Each time there is a user on the website, the code tracks the information about their visit.
What Does Google Analytics Measure?
The basic building blocks of Google Analytics are Dimensions and Metrics. Dimensions are all the attributes of your website data such as the city where traffic is coming from, the pages you are measuring, or the social media channel that you are analyzing. Metrics are the quantitative measurements for the dimensions. A very good example of this is if you were to look at how your Google Ads are performing in Lusaka (the dimension) and the 5,000 paid sessions you’ve recorded would be your metric. In summary, Metrics and Dimensions make up every single report in Google Analytics.
What Can You Do With Google Analytics?
With everything we have covered so far, we can now see how Google Analytics helps website administrators make decisions that are based on data. It is easier, for example, to justify spending more on your advertising, discover where you should be advertising and even determine what type of content you need to put on the website.
Google Analytics categorizes data into the following sections:
- Acquisition
- Behavior
- Conversions
Problem Solving With Google Analytics
In conclusion, Google Analytics is basically a problem-solving tool. Don’t enter analytics looking for a solution instead, look for problems. Look at things like the website’s overall page speed, points where site visitors are dropping off, etc. Both issues mentioned here can be identified using Google Analytics aiding you to dive into the root cause of the problems and ultimately leading you to fixing them.
Another very important thing worth noting about Google Analytics is understanding Google Analytics Referal Spam and what to do about it. Google hasn’t developed a global solution as can be seen with recent rises in Google Analytics, meaning the most reliable methods of curbing this are not reliable.
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