Would you love to learn how to use Google Analytics to organize and manage traffic on your website? Are you concerned about creating quality content with fluctuating readers on your website? If you do not understand something during your lectures, this article will help.
Very often students of different specialties face a problem when some aspects of education are not clear. This is perfectly normal, because that is what learning is all about. If you have problems with writing papers, you will turn to Writix, when you can not solve the problem, you will google on the Internet, and what to do when you can not use Google Analytics and you need a lot of practice to study? We have created a special guide.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a user-behavior tracking tool used among over 50 million website creators and managers. It analyzes visitors’ activity whenever they access any data or page on your website. People like to think of it as a spy tracking tool that tags every user’s activity without their knowledge. If used properly, the data and metrics provided with the tool can cause a significant leap in traffic management and sales generation.
The tool allows you to get important metrics about how a user found your website and how many pages they checked afterward. You could easily track and put a number to the number of daily visitors and returning visitors over a specific time. Brands and businesses are more concerned about the pages with the highest views and engagements. They can easily integrate what works into their content and products, moving on with this information.
Why Should You Use Google Analytics?
Google Analytics works for all types of businesses, both private and public. Most social networks on the internet today utilize the data of their visitors when launching targeted social campaigns. Your website might not tackle social problems in society, but your content does matter. Therefore, you need to create content that interests your audience.
Being a product of the “King of Search Engines; Google,” Google Analytics provides a wide range of metrics management tools to websites for FREE! It’s like handling your new website with the same analytic tool used by leading brands and businesses in your niche. Of course, as a beginner, it’d take some time to fully set up and hands-free on using the features effectively. Aside from that, everyone has access to the same Google Analytics dashboard
Understanding Google Analytics Interface
As a college student looking to start a blog or business – you need to set up an account to sync your website with Google Analytics functionalities. The interface allows website creators and managers to connect multiple URLs with customized features to edit the dropdown. You can easily spot the basic traffic data from the dashboard with their specific dates included. The dates can be altered to help you view the traffic based on your needs per time.
Just on the left-hand side of the page, you’d find the section with the list of report options. Google Analytics designed this section specifically for brands and businesses that’d love more detailed info about their users. The button doesn’t reveal so much from the dashboard, but after clicking, you’d soon find a library of report options tailored to your website. The report options provide more optional features that are more beneficial to the website that posts frequently.
On the far right of the page, you’d spot a blue box with a layout of real-time metrics. The box displays the average number of users on the website and the number of pages viewed per minute. Google Analytics also shares information about the user’s data through the blue box. It’s also a hands-on tool when searching through your website for a specific keyword or key phrase. You can easily type the words or phrases in the blue box to get related searches on your content.
As you scroll further down the page, there is more information on the source of every user. Google Analytics triangulates the source of every user’s clicks to your website. It’s funny how accurate the information could get on the clicks that eventually get a user to your site. This feature works best for eCommerce websites that sometimes generate multiple affiliate links to marketers and the public. Google Analytics provides the necessary information needed to approve their incentives.
Common Metrics Tracked with Google Analytics
Google Analytics allows websites to track all sorts of metrics using a centralized tool. Whatever story or lesson you choose to track on your website, you need a time frame to help the tool compile your data. Without narrowing down the specifics of your search, the results could be so irrelevant with data from months or years ago. Analyzing specified data helps you to achieve your marketing goals fully. Let’s take a quick run through some common metrics to get started.
Tracking your Visitors with Google Analytics
As a beginner, you want to keep track of the numbers of visitors you get per time, their activities, and how long they stay on the website. Keeping track of this data helps to remain intentional about the content you publish. The data you receive about your visitors’ session durations and bounce rates can help you deduce what your target audience expects from the site. The “Audience” section on the tool also helps you implement these metrics better with more targeted results.
Tracking your Traffic Sources
Website creators tend to benefit a lot from the traffic sources feature, which helps them understand their audience’s community. The data provided under this section answers a beginner question on how people find their websites. You can check the “Acquisition” tab for more information on how your traffic got directed to specific content.
Most traffic comes from Google Ads, social media, and search engines. These metrics allow you to implement your marketing efforts better.
Tracking your Content
As a beginner, you’d probably love to create and publish as much content as possible within a short period. But without keeping track of your content, you wouldn’t differentiate what works and what does not.
Google Analytics helps track each content’s performance from the overall user behavior. The metrics give you a breakdown of what pages (content) get more attention and engagement. This could be an essential tool to help you scale as a website owner or manager. Check the “Behavior” section to stay in control of how much ranking content you publish on your website.
Tracking Conversations Using Google Analytics
Engagements! That’s one word you should prioritize as a beginner looking to have a successful website. These metrics provide accurate information on how traffic gets converted to sales or conversations on your website. Do visitors just dash in and dash out without purchasing a product or engaging in the conversation? Google Analytics can help you review the purpose of your website and what you expect visitors to do whenever they come on board. Reading is not engagement!
These metrics require more specific data to provide accurate information than the previous ones. You’d have to set goals for every page on your website to get the conversion analytics targeted at the content. The process works by tracking your traffic after they get redirected to a page on your website to the point they get converted. Google Analytics gives you a breakdown based on research of returning visitors, buyers, and visitors that are converted following the goals you set.
Tracking Mobile Performance
To build and grow a successful website, you need to understand how your site’s mobile performance helps make a difference. You should consider staying up-to-date on these metrics since almost everyone uses mobile devices to inquire about information online. Check the “Mobile” subsection under the “Audience” section of Google Analytics. If you spot a spike in users from certain devices, you can easily learn how to improve your content’s readability and appearance on those devices.
Creating Custom Reports
As you get better at navigating your website’s content based on Google Analytics metrics, you’d soon find the need to create custom reports. Customized reports help you create better evaluation metrics tailored to your target audience and website. Many businesses use the apples-to-apples comparison between periods to achieve astounding analytical results, while others find it overrated. With custom reports, you can track the metrics of product campaigns or activities on promotional offers.
Custom reports work better when you have a team working on various aspects of your website. It’s also a great analytical feature for gathering specific data for investors. Anyone on your team can easily refer to data on the custom report instead of having to decipher the general metrics. You also get the custom reports in more visually represented formats like graphs and charts. This way, you can easily tell when there’s a spike in one section of your website metrics.
Other Common Metrics on Google Analytics
While we just discussed the major metrics to help with your website’s content optimization, there are others to help you actualize your marketing goals.
Learn What Visitors Search on your Website
As you grow, you’ll have published more content than you can remember in a flash. The best way to help your visitors navigate through that much content is by creating a search function on the site. By keeping track of the keywords of your users, you can plan to create more relevant content. Check the “Site Search” tab on the “Behavior” section for more information about this feature.
Point out Under-performing Pages
Your ability to point out under-performing pages would help you scale up your site’s success quickly. You can easily optimize these pages for SEO, edit some parts of the content, or delete the page entirely when you spot these pages.
To explore this feature on Google Analytics, check the “Site Content” under the “Behavior” section. From the “Site Content” tab, click on the button that allows you to reorder the page’s popularity. This helps you to see the pages with the fewest views.
Work with your Most Important Analytics First
If you are running a website about a school or university, you should not be so bothered about metrics that help promote shopping activities. As an education website owner, you should be more concerned about using a “Dashboard template” created for educational purposes. Custom dashboards help websites get exactly what they need in one spot without having to keep going all over Google Analytics. You can create a custom dashboard under the “Customization” tab.
Steps on Creating Custom Reports on Google Analytics
- Go to the “Customization” section then; “Custom Reports.”
- To begin, click the “+ New Custom Report” icon. You also have the option of naming each report to keep things more organized on your dashboard. There’s also the option of naming tabs under each report to enable you to have different variables.
- Narrow down the specifics of the custom report to include overarching metrics. The dropdown feature would help you select more specific dimensions and an overview of your content. You can check the question mark icon for more information about your selection.
- See or Hide all views. For now, you should probably start with seeing all your views. You can always change that setting in the long run. After which, you have to click “Save” to be redirected to the section to share, export, or edit the report.
Conclusion
Interestingly, you don’t need a paid academic course to learn how to use Google Analytics on your website. The above metrics can get you outstanding results even as a beginner if implemented properly. With Google Analytics, you can now create content knowing what your audience expects to get from your website. It’s like having coursework or a single book to the mysteries of wealth creation. As a website manager, this could make you the brand’s hero with proven results.