Google Analytics is something that every single website on the internet should have. It is a completely free tool that gives you incredibly useful insights about your website traffic.
Google analytics provides you with a treasure trove of valuable information – from details about your web traffic to which page is performing the best. Let’s take a closer look at what Google Analytics tells you.
Audience
One of the most important factors that Google Analytics tells you about is your audience – the people who visit your site.
You can gain a lot of useful insights by studying your audience. Analytics breaks down your audience data into multiple sets:
- Demographics – information about your audience such as gender and age
- Interests – their favourite websites, products, and interests
- Devices – which device your audience members use the most to access the internet
- Geo – their locations and languages
- Behaviour – how they interact with your site
Acquisition
The acquisition report is quite useful for understanding where you get your web traffic from. This data can help you understand how well your marketing campaigns are performing. The acquisition report can be broken up into:
- The main overview tab
- Audience channels report (organic, direct, social media, email etc.)
- Source/Medium tab
- Referrals
- Social media
All of this information can help you understand where you get the most visitors to your site. This way you can focus your marketing efforts accordingly.
Google Search Console
We can’t talk about understanding web traffic without talking about Google Search Console. This feature helps you break down and analyze in detail the traffic you receive from Google.
The Google Search Console offers the following data.
- Queries – the Google search queries that were then directed to your page
- Pages – the pages from your site that generated clicks on Google Search
- Countries – the countries where these clicks and searches originated
- Devices – the devices that were used to perform the most searches
Google Ads
Linking Google Ads to Google Analytics is quite simple. All you have to do is ensure you have provided the necessary permissions, and follow these steps:
- Sign in to Google Ads
- Click Tools and Settings
- Under Setup, click Linked Accounts
- Go to Google Analytics and click Details
- Select your Google Ads account and click Link
- Click Save and boom! You’re good to go.
Connecting your Ads and Analytics accounts will provide you information about Clicks and Users – two very important metrics to track!
Real-Time Reports
Finally, the Real-Time reports section allows you to follow activity on your website in real-time. Information like this is great, especially when you are running a marketing promotion or offer. These reports can help you analyse the response from your audience. You can view real-time reports for:
- Locations – the countries your audience is visiting your site from
- Traffic sources – mediums and sources for your audience
- Content – the pages your visitors are visiting
- Events and conversions – the number of times a conversion happened in the past 30-minutes
