What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is definitely the most commonly used web-analytics application. This analytics package is developed by Urchin Software Corporation, which was bought by Google in 2005.

This tool becomes publicly available for free under the flagship of Google Analytics in 2007 with edited, developed and released.

Google Analytics can evaluate every element of a website, from unique visitors to referral sources, to bounce rates, device types, time on page, click-through-rates, etc.

Google Analytics can generate up to 85 different reports that will help you analyze all possible data about any website traffic.

It can see which content gets the most visits, a time duration of a visit on a website, which ads are driving the most visitors.

It can track the performance of your marketing campaigns includes Google Ads (AdWords), Google AdSense and Emails.

Google Analytics is the best web-analytics solution that gives rich insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness.

It’s controllable, flexible and user-friendly features where a user can see and analyze traffic data. In Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

Google Analytics will only track pages that contain the Google Analytics tracking code which is a small JavaScript snippet which you can add to each page either manually or through any plugin.

Google Analytics Provide Information –

• See how many people are visiting your website
• Find out how visitors arrive at your website
• Track backlinks
• See how long people stay on your website
• Find out how many pages visitors looked at
• See what keywords and key phrases are being used in search engines
• Track visitors by country
• Receive weekly PDF reports by email

Integration of Google Analytics & WordPress –

Google Analytics is the standard when it comes to web analytics tools. Analytics Cat is an easy-to-use plugin that only takes a couple of minutes to set up.

It’s some Google Analytics specific functionality that lets you exclude certain logged-in users from being tracked to ensure the integration of your Google Analytics data.

To use the plugin, first install and activate it like any other WordPress plugin.

• Once you activate the plugin, go to Settings > Google Analytics Manager. You have to enter your Google Analytics ID and choose which users to exclude from tracking. It’s recommended to leave the Exclude Users option as the default.
• Go to your Google Analytics account and log-in to find your Google Analytics ID.
• Click the Gear icon to access your administration page
• Select Tracking Info to expand to the list
• Select Tracking Code
• You would see Tracking ID, copy the code and paste it into Analytics Cat
• Click Save to activate your tracking
• You would be able to view stat in your Google Analytics dashboard when your website receives traffic.

You should know a few terms which are used frequently about Google Analytics as here –

# Account – Where each property lives in your dashboard. You can set up multiple properties in one account or have multiple accounts for different properties.

# Property – The website or mobile app you want to track

# Tracking ID – A unique code added to your website that allows Google Analytics to track it.

# Channel / Traffic Source – Shows where your traffic came from, like referrals or links from other websites, search engines, social media, and emails.

# Session Duration – How long visitors spend on your website.

# Bounce Rate – Percentage of visitors that view only a single page and then leave.

# Event – Specific visitor behavior, like when a visitor clicks on an ad, watches or stops a video, or downloads a file, etc.

# Landing Page – The first page a visitors sees when visiting your website.

# Organic Search – Visitors who visit your website from a link on a search results page.

# Segment – A way to filter data, like category and types of visitors and types of reports.

# Acquisition – Shows you where traffic comes from, such as social media, search engines, email marketing campaigns and links from other websites.

# Keywords – Tells you what search words visitors used to find your website on a search engine.

# Conversions – Tracks how many visitors are converting into newsletter subscribers, shoppers, and actual customers.

# Lifetime Value – Tracks visitors throughout their lifetime, from their first visit to conversions, return visits, future purchases and beyond.

It can help you figure out what turned these visitors into customers and what made them keep coming back so you can implement changes.

# Landing Page – Shows you which pages are the most frequent landing pages so you can track down where those visitors are coming from and what’s working on those top pages that are attracting customers.

# Active Users – Monitors how many visitors are actually active on your website within a specific time period, like the past week, 14 days or month.

It’ll show you which pages the most active are visiting so you can figure out what’s keeping their attention and apply it to the rest of your website.

Google Analytics Dashboard Features –

Google Analytics works by recording a website’s data and then presenting into in-depth tables, charts, and graphs as explained under:-

Reports Menu – The Reports menu on the left side of the page lets you access deeper reporting for specific areas.

• Real-Time –Here, you can see how your audience is interacting with your website in real-time. You can find out where they have come from, what content they are viewing, and much more.
  • Overview – It’ll give show you generally all the information on a single dashboard, but you can drill down a little deeper by selecting any reports including Location, Traffic Sources, Content, Events, and Conversions.
• Audience – Here, you will find out about audiences. Look at the demographics of your visitors, how they engage with your content, and what devices they use to access your website.
  • Overview – It’s important to understand the mix of new and returning visitors to your website. Returning visitors are your loyal customers. You can promote your content, services, and products to them. You should also be constantly engaging with new people and driving this new traffic to your website. If your new visitors are low, look to improve your website’s SEO. You can share your content on social media to reach a wider audience. Low returning visitors’ means your audience doesn’t like your website enough to return. It’d be due to poor design, low-quality content, or difficult usability.
  • Interests – It’ll present you with a broad view of three interests reports – Affinity Categories, In-Market Segments, and Other Categories. We can get a better idea of who our typical visitor is.
  • Mobile – If mobile usage is down compared to other devices, then you may need to look at improving the functionality of the mobile version of your website.
    • Overview – This report shows the number of sessions from a mobile device. Here, you can clearly see how mobile visitor sessions compare to other platforms in terms of engagement metric you prefer like bounce rates, pages per session, or average session duration.
  • Users Flow – Analyzing the flow of traffic through your website can provide insights on whether your visitors are finding what they came for and where they might be diverging from the intended path to conversion. You’ll find that green boxes represent website pages arranged in groupings. The pages are labeled as URLs so the pages that are simply marked “/” represent your home page.
• Acquisition – You will find out where your traffic is coming from, how people are reaching your website, and how each traffic source is behaving on your website.
  • Overview – This report will give you a good insight into whether your marketing strategies are working.
  • All Traffic – You can compare traffic by date.
    • Channels – You can select and compare in order to see whether there is a growth in your online business. It’ll tell you if your work or digital marketing campaigns have an impact. The best channels are those that convert visitors at a higher rate when considering social media channels. You need to view that data that relates to the specific conversion goals.
  • Google Ads – It can offer a lot of valuable information to it. The PPC data can help you to create a better SEO strategy to improve conversion and other important metrics. You can take the keywords data and make a connection with your best performing landing pages from Google Analytics. There are 3 steps:-
    • Pull out PPC data to find out your best performing landing pages
    • Compare Google console data to PPC data
    • Plan and implement your SEO strategy
  • Campaigns – Google Analytics allows you to quickly create and automatically track campaign but simple using a special URL. You need to enter the link you want to track and a bit of information to describe your campaign. As you use the URLs that you built for your various campaigns, Google Analytics will automatically recognize and tag the campaigns.
  • Behavior – You will learn how people behave and move around on your website. You can view data on bounce rates, page views, time spent on a website, and more.
    • Site Content – You can find out how each individual page on your website is performing.
      • All Pages – You can analyze which pages are receiving the highest number of views, average time spent on each page and which pages your visitors are joining you and leaving you. You can use this data in your content management strategy and publish more of the same content.
        • Content Drilldown (Bounce Rates) – If your bounce rates are high then you need to look at the pages. It’d be those keywords are not relevant to the actual content displayed. There may be other reasons like slow loading times, bad usability on mobile devices for high bounce rates.
        • Landing Pages – This shows what pages are greeting your visitors. You can take advantage of and implement an online marketing strategy based on what visitors notice when they get there. You should be aware of the performance of every landing page that you have on your website.
        • Exit Pages – It’s important to track exit page data. Some pages will have high exit numbers. Compare the pages to other similar pages that have low exit numbers. It’ll help you to understand what aspects of these high exit pages need changing.
      • Site Speed – Optimizing load times is one item which is often overlooked. Besides, the user experience and conversion rate, page speed is a really important factor in search rankings.
        • Page Timings – It means that we should keep an eye open for slow pages and we should see as well how it’ll impact conversion rates.
      • Site Search – Internal site search can paint a valuable picture of how your users got to your website.
        • Overview – You can check out a list of search terms that users have looked for on your domain. It’ll show you a breakdown of a couple of stats related to site searches and a list of terms that were searched in the timeframe you are looking. Here is a brief description of the metrics used as:-
          • Sessions with Search – Total number of sessions that involved someone completing at least once search within your site.
          • Total Unique Searches – Total Number of times people searched your site
          • Results Page Views/Search – Average number of times people viewed the search results pages after completing a search
          • % Search Exits – Percentage of Sessions in which people left the site right after completing a search
          • % Search Refinements – Percentage of times people conducted an additional search after their initial search
          • Time after Search – Average amount of time spent on the site after completing a search
          • Average Search Depth – Average numbers of results pages people viewed after completing a search
        • Search Terms – When some time has passed and you’re ready to see what your visitor has been searching for on your site, you can find the reports here. You
        • Conversions – You can track specific actions that your visitors take and how effectively your website gets people to take those actions.
          • Goals Overview – Goals are specific actions that visitors take on your website that you’d like to track. Here, Goals are limited because you can track only a few precise options.
          • Ecommerce – Ecommerce platform will pass information about your products, sales, and conversions to Google Analytics for further analysis and information including about:-
            • Products – Which products they buy, in what quantity, and the revenue generated by those products.
            • Transactions – The revenue, tax, shipping, and quantity information for each transaction.
            • Time to Purchase – The number of days and number of sessions it takes to purchase, starting from the most recent campaign through the completed transaction.
          • Multi-Channels Funnel – You can measure the quality of any traffic source or any type of traffic, whether it’s PPC, affiliate, display, email, social traffic, etc. Here are a few multi-channel funnel reports available in Google Analytics:-
          • Overview Report – This report contains a multi-channel funnel conversion visualizer through which you can visualize how different marketing channels are working together to create conversions.
          • Assisted Conversions Report – This report shows the number of conversions each marketing channel initiated, assisted and completed. It’ll show the value of assisted and last interaction conversions.
          • Top Conversion Path Report – This report shows all of the unique conversion paths that lead to conversions. It also shows the number of conversions from each path and value of conversions.
          • Time Lag Report – This report shows how long it took for users/visitors to convert. Through this report, you can get an insight into the length of your online sales cycle.
          • Path Length Report – This report shows the number of interactions it took for your website’s visitors to convert.
            • Attribution – It’s something which requires a deep understanding of your business model and how different marketing channels work together to create sales and conversions. Paid Search, Organic Search, Direct, Social Media, Email, Affiliate, Referral, etc are all acquisitions channels. The acquisition channels are called marketing channels in multi-channel funnel reports. In multi-channel funnel reports, you can find out:-
              • How marketing channels work together to create conversions
              • How much time elapsed between visitors’ initial interest and purchase
              • What role did prior website referrals, searches, and ads play in a conversion
              • How to attribute conversions to a marketing channel

In multi-channel funnel reports, a conversion can be a Goal Conversion or E-Commerce transaction. In the non-multi channel funnel reports, a conversion is called Goal Conversion.

The e-commerce transactions are accounted for separately in non-multi-channel funnel reports.

The total numbers of conversions in multi-channel funnel reports can be different than the total number of conversions in non-multi channel funnel reports.

Few other important aspects of the Google Analytics interface include –

# Search – You can use this function to quickly find reports and help documentation.

# Customization – You can set up your own report dashboard, custom reports, and more.

# Discover – You can read up on Google Analytics and its suite of tools.

# Admin – You can access your Google Analytics account, alter your settings, and more.

Google Analytics Homepage Quick Reports –

# Users – The number of unique visitors

# Sessions – How many visits to your website. If any user makes multiple visits, so the number will be equal to or higher than Users.

# Bounce Rate – How many visitors leave your website without visiting a second page.

# Session Duration – How long an average visitor stays on your page.

# Traffic Report – It gives you an immediate picture of where your traffic has come from. It can be used to help inform your marketing strategy.

# Audience Report – The 3 Audience reports can help inform your content strategy. You can know where the majority of your audience lives will help you localize and personalize your blog articles.

The data on when your audience visits your website will help you plan when to post new content.

# Behavior – This Behavior report will show you top pages and give you a quick idea of what content is performing and which pages aren’t.

Few Google Analytics Reports Information –

# Mobile Overview Report – Google first announced its plan to roll out mobile-first indexing in 2016. The importance of having a mobile-friendly website has become increasingly important.

The more mobile users that are visiting and the better it’s staying on your website. If your mobile visitors are kept growing, it’s a good sign that your website is healthy and will likely rank well in Google Search.

# Audience Behavior Report (New vs Returning) – An increase in new visitors to your website is a great sign. It means you’re generating visitors’ interest in your business and may expand your brand reach.

An increase in returning visitors is a good better sign of the health of your website. It means that users are interested in the products or services to come back again.

Returning visitors are more engaged in your content, and they’re more likely to take an action such as fill out a form or make a purchase than a new visitor.

# Landing Pages Report (Bounce Rate) – It’s important to know which pages people are visiting and spending time on against pages where they land and immediately leave.

It’s best to know your top landing pages and analyze which ones are contributing to your website’s high bounce rate.

Once you identify the pages that are causing users to leave, focus on fixing those pages to keep users more engaged on that page like adding more targeted content, images, and call to action.

# All Traffic Channels Report – It’s important to know which channels are producing traffic to your website.

You can compare to the previous year to see how was your traffic when looking at a specific date range for this report.

Here, you can see your website improvement over a period of time. This report is especially important if traffic is down since it’ll help you see which channels have changed.

# Conversion Goals Overview Report – It’s one of the important measurements to track daily, the weekly and a monthly number of goal completions.

The goals report in Google Analytics tracks specific interactions you setup as form submissions or downloads. Google Analytics can compare these metrics to the overall traffic on your website.

You can focus on specific metrics and dimension which depend upon the type of your website and your short and long term goals.

In the field of web analytics, Google Analytics has supremacy. It’s free, widespread, and incredibly popular.

Alternatives Tools to Google Analytics –

If you don’t like that Google has access to all your data and you need additional functionality, you can look for an alternative to Google Analytics.

Here are some tools:-

# SE Ranking – SE Ranking is a very powerful tool that gives you with comprehensive website analysis. You can find out exactly who’s visiting your site, and where you’re getting traffic from.

It’s a range of very useful features like competitor monitoring, social media activity, custom reports, the ability to track website rankings and traffic, the depth of information, paid web analysis solutions, and backlinks monitoring.

This tool lets you build better websites and provides data points to your clients about their own websites. It’s a very clean and streamlined interface that makes understanding data easy.

This tool has graphs and diagrams for many different types of information that’s simple to digest for visual people.

# Piwik – It’s another great alternative that offers a lot of the same features and other solutions. Its setup is not quite easy.

You’ll need to install the software on your server in the paid version. It offers a range of great features like the customizable dashboard, goal tracking, a detailed log of individual visitors, and a marketplace plugin.

But, the Piwik interface can get very congested if you’ve too much information, which can make it tricky to use.

# Kissmetrics – It’s a great analytics solution focused on web analytics at the individual level. It can track your visitors.

This tool lets you optimize conversion rates by giving you detailed visitors actions, unlimited funnel reports; A/B split tests, and data segmentation.

The setup process is complicated, but it provides plugins for most popular systems. The software offers solutions for mobile apps, Saas, e-commerce platforms, etc.

# Woopra – It provides an attractive web dashboard with many analytics features to help you instantly see what’s happening on your website.

This tool shows you how many visitors are online and what they are reading. This software creates a behavioral profile for each customer and user which can be essential to your online business.

Woopra has a bunch of some interesting features like advanced segmentation, real-time stats, advanced reporting, tracked categories, comments, blogs authors, custom tagging, and live chat feature.

It can be integrated with your online store and track what visitors do there.

# Chartbeat – It’s a great content intelligence solution that shows data for desktop and mobile users, traffic sources, top pages, Twitter links and mentions, server load, etc.

You can instantly know how your content is performing and how to optimize it for reader engagement.

This tool offers scroll mapping and the option to see how visitors are connecting with your content and why they’re on your website in the first place.

It gives you a detailed overview of content performance, editorial KPIs, and video content analysis.

Conclusion – Google Analytics initially can be scary. The thought of a bunch of data, graphs, and charts can be panic a lot of people when first diving into it. Google Analytics can be an extreme way to track your website’s performance. You have to familiar with Google Analytics if you want to understand what the data is telling and to make informed decisions.