A Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics

Kiley Peters

Content Marketing,
Digital Marketing

A Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics

Knowing your consumer has been a pillar of any and all business since the beginning of time. Luckily, we have tools like Google Analytics that allow us to do a bit of learning.

The landscape of Google Analytics is constantly changing. As a result of this constant state of motion, it’s sometimes difficult to keep up with the latest trends. So we've brought it back to basics: here is your beginner’s guide to Google Analytics!

Below are a few features and functionalities that may be most useful, along with additional insight as to how this can applied to your websites!

Getting Started

Before Google can begin analyzing your traffic, we’re going to need to add a bit of extra code to the mix. It's pretty straightforward, but making sure it is setup properly will make all the difference in the long run. This will allow Google to collect the data that we so desperately need. There are plenty of instructional videos that will take you step by step through the implementation, and within minutes you should be up and running!

Audience

Google will now begin to analyze the individuals that visit your site, along with their respective behaviors. Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool, and it has become somewhat of the industry standard for traffic analysis. Under the Audience tab alone, information pertaining to demographics, conversion analysis, interests, and geography is at your fingertips. Analyzing this data correctly is crucial to any internet business.

Demographics

The demographic information offered by Google Analytics provides a wide range of information. A realistic view of your site visitors can help guide more effective marketing decisions. Seemingly simple information like age and gender helps any website owner understand their audience better.

Google Analytics Demographics tab

Conversion Analysis

Going hand in hand with their demographic information, is a helpful conversion analysis tool. Now, there are other tools that will allow you to do a deeper dive on conversion analysis and optimization, however, this is a good place to start. There are tons of ways to enhance the default settings to get very granular in analyzing your conversions within this platform. At its core, it will tell you what type of people are buying your products, highlighting which audience segment you should continue to target.

Interests

Google Analytics’ Interests tab provides the additional insight into visitors' personalities, hobbies and overall interests. If your visitors are movie-lovers, TV lovers, or Social-media enthusiasts, Google will let you know in real time. This is also great information to bake into your content marketing strategy.

Google Analytics Interest tab

Geo

The Geo tab is another functionality that has proven useful. It is powerful enough to drill down to specific cities and zip codes, providing insightful information on the conversion rates of a different region. This information could play a significant role in marketing campaign planning. It is also helpful to spot any spammy traffic that you might want to filter out of your analytics results.

Google Analytics Geo tab

Acquisition

The Acquisition tab located in the left navigation is useful because it shows how the visitor came to their site. Whether it be organic  search, referral, social, direct (branded) search, or paid search, Google automatically categorizes visitors upon arrival. You can find out where your traffic is coming from via the "All Traffic" report. It's one of the best reports the platform has to offer!

This is a good place to start if you want to know if your campaigns are actually driving any traffic. The Behavior Flow reports allow you to follow your visitors during their visit to your site.

Google Analytics Acquisition tab

Behavior

The Behavior tab is another useful feature. It allows you to see what visitors are doing on your website on a page by page basis. Under the "All Content" report, you'll find metrics like time spent on page, bounce rate, and page views --which are all important when evaluating page content. This is a great opportunity to identify pages that are performing well and pages that aren't performing well. In some cases, this might also provide the chance to see if a certain page is proving to become a blocker in conversion optimization while, on the flip side, it might provide additional information into the types of content your audience is most interested in!

This is a good place to start if you want to know if your campaigns are actually driving any traffic. The Behavior Flow reports allow you to follow your visitors during their visit to your site.

Google analytics flow chart

Learn your consumer!

There are so many additional features, tips and tricks to Google Analytics - there's a reason this is some people's full time jobs! However, hopefully with this beginner's guide to Google Analytics, you feel a bit more comfortable in understanding some of the basic features that can make a big impact.

Taking the time to implement Google Analytics can end up saving a fortune! And it just might help you build yours.

Best of luck and happy learning!

Kiley-Peters-Headshot-FINAL-web

Kiley
Founder & CEO

Kiley Peters is the Founder and CEO of Brainchild Studios, a boutique audience research, content strategy, and website creation agency primarily serving brands targeting Millennial Moms or business owners. She is also the Founder of the Work From Home Playbook, a series of online courses guiding aspiring entrepreneurial moms through the steps of starting a virtual business. She also launched the Brainchild Fund, a nonprofit initiative to support women and girls in business and entrepreneurship Follow her on Instagram.

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