Google Analytics for a Website

Google Analytics is a freemium web analytics service offered by Google that tracks & reports website traffic. It is one of the most popular analytics platforms available. Google Analytics is used by millions of websites to keep track statistics. Google Analytics also tracks browser sessions & other demographics on websites.

Google Analytics in the workplace for better statistics

Learn more about Google Analytics & how it will benefit your website & brand. Google Analytics is used to track a wide variety of website visitor metrics. The basics of understanding Google Analytics are below.

Google Analytics sorts the metrics connected to properties owned by User accounts. Inside a Property are the Reports that form part of a Lifecycle.

As it stands at the time of writing this article, the Lifecycle Reports get sorted into x4 base categories with their sub-categories:

Acquisition: Overview, User Acquisition & Traffic Acquisition.
Engagement: Overview, Events, Conversions, Pages and Screens & Landing Page.
Monetisation: Overview, E-Commerce Purchases, Purchase Journey, Checkout Journey, In-App Purchases, Publisher Ads & Promotions.
Retention: Overview

Digital Marketing Phase 1 - Acquisition

Even though this might seem difficult to grasp when seeing it for the first time, it makes sense that it splits this way. When first launching your website online, you should ideally start acquiring new visitors to your website. Website user acquisition is the first step to gaining control of your website metrics & increasing the number of website users.

Digital Marketing Phase 2 - Engagement

Once you have enough website visitors coming to your site, you can start to measure your audience better and find out how to engage with them & how they prefer to engage with your website. Understanding how visitors engage with your website is very important when looking at how to improve it.

Digital Marketing Phase 3 - Monetisation

When your website has enough online traffic & you understand the way that your website visitors engage, you are ready to measure monetisation using Google Analytics reports. This step takes time after Google crawls your website for content.

To allow Google to crawl your website, submit your sitemap.xml file on Google Search Console.

Measuring your E-commerce purchases or a website visitor's Checkout Journey is critical to improving your purchase funnel strategy, allowing your website to accept more sales and ensuring a better Return on Investment (ROI).

Analytical data using Google Analytics for businesses

Digital Marketing Phase 4 - Retention

Why is retention a step in Marketing? The answer is that there is room for improvement as technology develops on website e-commerce API & systems. Measuring retention on your website will allow you to see where your website visitors go and spend time. Seeing where your website visitors don't spend time will also allow you to improve on other sections of your website.

When you follow these phases of Digital Marketing together, you give your website & your brand the best chance of online success. Remember to pull reports often and make conscious & calculated decisions about where your website and online company is going.

How Often should I pull Google Analytics reports?

For the companies I've worked for, we used to pull daily reports, weekly reports, monthly reports & annual reports. Based on the statistical data given through well-measured online analytics, you can gain better insight into the world of your website visitors.

It also depends on where in the digital marketing phase your company is & how well-developed your website is, keeping in mind that not all websites are equally mature. Thus, not all websites have equal search engine optimisation installed on each page. The small things matter in the world of SEO, often overlooked by beginner programmers of SEO best practices.

Why does it matter where most of my website traffic comes from?

There's a saying: "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.". This saying is true about your website analytics & means that you should try to understand how your website visitors navigate & behave on your mobile-responsive website. If you see that you made a change, let's say your marketing payment funnel & your conversions go up, then you've done something right on your website, leading to better ROI (Return on investment). If you have a higher bounce rate on your payment process, you've done something wrong on your website. But either way, if you can not measure the data on your website, you will probably never know.

Understanding Google Analytics will allow you to gain much value for your online presence. Custom reports can be generated using Google Analytics & sent to your whole team, empowering better decision-making for your e-commerce efforts.

Measuring analytical data using Google Analytics

A blog by Stefan de Beer