How and why to use Google Analytics?

Whether you are a Growth Manager, Marketing Manager, UX Designer or Entrepreneur … It is imperative to install and use Google Analytics. 

What for? This tool allows you to learn more about who is visiting your website. It also invites you to adjust your strategy to increase your revenue. Focus on the specifics of Google Analytics, its advantages and its setting.

What is Google Analytics?

The specifics of the tool

This is a free website analysis tool. The product comes in the form of a complete dashboard that deciphers your users’ behaviors. 

Google Analytics educates you about your traffic, audience and site performance. The many data and insights presented allow you to gauge the health of your site in real time or over a period of time. 

Examples of KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

The tool is complete and well thought out, it has several features that highlight different indicators also called KPI.A

mong them and listed in a non-exhaustive manner:

• The number of users, these are users running at least one session over a given period.
• The number of sessions (or visits) implies an active presence of the user on your site for a fixed period.
• The bounce rate, it refers to the percentage of users who arrived on your site and left without consulting a page.

The conversion rate translates into a percentage of the formula: number of conversions/number of interactions.

Why is Google Analytics an indispensable tool?

In addition to its free, the platform has many advantages for your site and more broadly the good performance of your business, namely:

1) Know your users to get closer

The tool allows you to accurately view audiences and analyze their behaviors. In particular, you’ll get information about:

• The demographics of your visitors (age, gender…)
• Their location
• The type of device
• Their language
• Their interests

This information improves your target’s knowledge and allows you to adjust your strategic actions. It is by becoming aware of your target’s habits that you will be able to adapt your content. For example, if you determine that 90% of your traffic comes from mobile, you’ll need to work your web pages to make them mobile-friendly and focus mostly on the mobile user experience.

2) Identify the most useful traffic sources for your website

You can easily determine the source of your users and therefore the most important traffic sources (the ones you will have to focus your efforts on) via the tool. 

There are different possible sources of traffic on your site:

• Direct traffic: visitors who arrive directly on your website.
• Organic traffic: Visitors who clicked on a link on your non-paying site on the search engine results page. Good natural referencing usually leads to a high rate of organic research.
• Paid traffic: These are the people who land on your site by clicking on a sponsored ad.
• Social networks: Maybe your visitors went through Facebook, Linkedin or Instagram before you arrived on your site? (Warning though the tool does not distinguish between organic or sponsored visits from social networks)
• Email campaigns: these are the people who arrive on your site via a mailing, a newsletter…
• Other websites: we‘re talking about traffic that comes from links in a web page outside your site. A good netlinking strategy optimizes this channel.

The source of your traffic is a key element that will be used to determine the resources allocated to each channel in order to maximize their performance. 

3) Monitor the performance of your website

Google Analytics lets you determine the amount and quality of traffic generated on your site. 

With this knowledge, you have the opportunity to make effective and informed decisions in a timely manner.

4) Enjoy the multiple features of Google Analytics

The tool also gives you many features that make it easier to find information.

So to control the performance of your site and make the necessary decisions in case of a pitfall, you can set up alerts. These allow you to verify that the numbers are following the desired trend and if not, you should take the necessary steps. To set up an alert, go to the administration tab and then « view » and click « custom alerts. »

Depending on the set KPIs you can create custom dashboards. This way you avoid getting lost in a flood of superfluous information and focus on the essentials. Click « dashboard » in the left column and select « new dashboard. » Then set your table by choosing the data you want.

For even more accurate analysis of your traffic, you can set up segments. This is a data group that meets specific criteria. This feature can be found in the « view » section of the Administration tab.

The tool also allows you to learn more about the behavior of users of your site since it has a tracking of internal searches of the site – section « Behavior » section « Site search ».

To get to your apps faster, you can create shortcuts by clicking « shortened » at the bottom of Google Analytics pages.

How do I set up Google Analytics? The essentials

First of all, be sure to set your overall goals upstream. They must be at their maximum: specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic, temporally defined.

Once these are defined, you will need:

1. Create a Google Analytics account: provide your ID (email address), indicate your password and activate your account. 
2. Once connected, you’ll create a backup view – (> View Administration > create a new view): it’s important because it allows you to create different views without losing the information and their history. For example, you can create a production view and a pre-production view.
3. Exclude YOUR employees’ IP (Administrator > View > Filter > add a filter > exclude > Traffic from IP > equal to > IP address)
4. Set up users: In the admin tab, you can add/delete users and assign them a profile according to the permissions. 
5. Identify your ID to create tags related to Google Analytics on Google Tag Manager
6. Setting Goals (> View > Goals > New Objective > Goal > Recording): They are essential and allow you to analyze user behavior on a specific action. 
7. Link Google Search Console to Google Analytics (Direction Administration > Property > Property Settings > « set up the Search Console »)
8. Link Google Adwords to Google Analytics (Administration > Property > Association Adwords), useful especially for remarketing actions.

Product associations with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics can be connected to many applications in the Google suite (Display – Video 360, Google Ads, AdSense, AdMob and Ad Manager) but also with other tools (WordPress …) 

As you will understand, using Google Analytics is essential to the success of your business. If you need to dig deeper into the specifics of the tool or be supported in its use, contact us!