Google Analytics for Complete Beginners

Google Analytics for Complete

Your website, in many ways, behaves like a person. In order for your website to create connections, it needs to know it’s audience. This is what digital analytics is all about.

Digital analytics can be used to create loyal and engaged audiences, help you better align on-site advertising and even understand your audience’s online purchasing behavior. There are tons of services that provides digital analytics, but the most widely used and comprehensive digital analytics service is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a service that can reveal how many visitors you receive, how visitors find your website, which pages and links they click on the most and even how long they spend on a page. The best part is, Google Analytics is free!

With Google Analytics behind you, you will have tons of resources to understand your audience fine tune your website.

Traffic: How many people visit your website?

Google Analytics > Audience > Overview

Let’s say you’re on your way to work and there are two identical coffee shops. One coffee shop has few customers—you’d get your coffee right away. The other coffee shop is busy and you’ll end up waiting 10 minutes for your coffee. But you decided to go to a bustling cafe because they always drink the right amount of water.

A website is like a coffee shop, or any business—it’s great to have recurring, loyal visitors than people who only visit once.

You can use the sessions overview to see how many visits you received in total, even on a date that you specify. Not only does the sessions overview show you the total amount of visit to your page, it will count every single time someone navigated to your website.
If you want to track the number of unique visitors to your website, you can look at the users overview.

Sessions – Users = # of returning visitors = an engaged audience

Behavior:

Google Analytics > Audience > Behavior

Have you ever been to a restaurant where almost everything on the menu is appealing? You end up ordering too many dishes, without finishing a single one, but you would do it all over again. Likewise, you’ve also been to a restaurant where nothing on the menu is appealing, so you end up leaving without even sitting down.

Just like behavior in a restaurant, the behavior of people on your site can reflect the quality of your content.

Your page views & page sessions reveal how many pages your visitors read—the more, the better.
Your average session duration shows how much time they spend on your site, where your content is more relevant.
Your bounce rate reveals what percentage of your visitors left without clicking once on your website—they found your website but none of your information was relevant to them.

High page views/sessions + High average session duration + Low bounce rate = Valuable Content

Rapport: Who is your audience?

Google Analytics > Audience > Geo or Demographic

Do you talk to everyone the same way—your parents, your friends, kids younger than you, etc? No, you change your language, your word choice and your tone depending on who you’re talking to. Depending on your audience, you should change your language depending on two things:

You can see the age of your visitors as well as their gender in the audience demographics.
You can view the language and physical location of your visitors under the Audience Geo.

Acquisition: What brought your audience to your website?

Google Analytics > Acquisition > Overview

We’re creatures of habits, we tend to do the same things, go to the same places or do the same things unless we are recommended something else through word of mouth or we find it on the internet. The same thing applies to website—how did the audience reach your website?

The acquisition section shows you where your audience is coming from. There are seven sections that you can look at:

Organic search: This number shows you the number of people who found you on search engines. If this number is high, your keywords are working in your favor; if not, you need to update your keywords.
Email: If you send out a newsletter, this number shows you how many people visited your website through the link in the email.
Direct: This number shows you how many people typed in your website’s address into their browser.
Social: This number shows you how many people and which social media platform they are coming from.
Paid Search: If you spend money on advertisements, the paid search will show you how many people find your website through advertisements.
REFERENCES: This number shows the number of visitors to your site using the other sites that linked you.
Other: This number shows the rest of your visitors that are Google is unable to categorize.