The Ultimate Guide to Google Analytics in 2020

Google Analytics is probably the single most important tool for any digital marketer and webmaster out there. First, it provides you with all relevant metrics regarding the performance of your website and the way in which both search engines and individuals are interacting with it. Second, it gives you all the information you need in order to establish a strategy that will improve the effectiveness of your website and deliver the results you need. Before this can happen, nonetheless, you need to know a thing or two about Google Analytics, ranging from the proper way to set it up all the way up to knowing how to properly use it.

Like the majority of Google products, Google Analytics is a free tool that you can, for a fee, upgrade into a premium version. So, like with the majority of Google’s services, the first step is to create an account or simply login. Next, you need to add the property for your website, after which you’ll receive a unique UA-Code. Lastly, you need to connect your Analytics property to your CMS (content management software). The latter is done by adding your UA-Code to your CMS. This is all it takes.

The next thing you need to do is learn how to set proper objectives for your website and in order to get there, you need to understand which metrics are relevant. We’re talking about visitors, visitor retention, independent inquiries and social media shares (which increase your reach). As soon as you know relevant metrics, you need to check out your current state and compare it to the industry standard. Next, you should develop a plan to take you from point A to point B. For instance, you want 50 percent more visitors, 5 percent of them to share your content and for the majority of your readers to visit at least 6 pages of your content. The crucial thing is that your objectives are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).

Let’s not beat around the bush and admit that the main purpose of Google Analytics is to allow you to reposition your website on the SERPs. Regardless of whether you’re handling this as a DIY project or if you have decided to outsource this part of your digital marketing to a prestigious SEO company from Hong Kong, the insight provided by Google Analytics remains key. Like always, you simply can’t replace financial investment with proper entrepreneurial ingenuity.

In order to tailor the user experience, you need to stop talking about visits and start thinking about sessions. You see, a visit can be anything (even a bounce counts as a “visit”). What you need is a string of interactions. Imagine what a perfect session looks like. First of all, in e-commerce, the shopping cart abandonment rate tends to be high, seeing as how people have a habit of checking out several places before committing to a purchase or an interaction. Second, they may return several times within the same day. Sure, each of these visits counts as an individual session, however, return visits are a particularly important SEO metric.

This is perhaps the most important thing regarding the correlation between traffic and Google Analytics. The way in which this works is fairly simple – on its own, Google Analytics is incapable of providing you with traffic. It can, however, allow you to understand it better. It gives you a unique insight into the demographic characteristics of your audience. It helps you learn where your audience is coming from, as well as what some of their characteristics are. Once again, it helps you alter your strategy.

The very last application of Google Analytics that we will cover here is the ability to analyze your content. Previously, we’ve mentioned that the number of pages seen is one of the metrics that are of the biggest interest to the majority of digital marketers. So, when it comes to posting content on your blog, you have the ability to see which of the posts have the highest retention/abandonment rate. You also get to see which of your content pieces have the best audience response.

At the end of the day, if we had to choose one trait of Google Analytics to single out as its biggest perk, it would have to be the word “insight”. By allowing you to understand how people use your website and how they interact with your content, you can help improve your online presence. Without such a tool, this kind of approach would be completely impossible.