Making the most of your website and your marketing efforts is a never-ending process of optimization and fine-tuning. The more you learn about how your business performs and how your current and potential customers react to the changes you make, the better you can improve your sales funnel, capitalizing on every visitor that stumbles across your site.
But how can you capture and analyze all the data you need to help you make your business the best it can be? How do you access and track your customers at each stage of their journey? How do you figure out where your advertising campaigns are losing traction? A digital analytics platform like Google Analytics can help you do all this and more.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a platform that collects data and compiles it into useful reports. It’s free to use and provides you with real-time data regarding your website and online applications’ performance in terms of user activity. It accomplishes this through the use of javascript code inserted on all of your web pages that stores anonymized data from users while they’re browsing your site or using your apps.
Basically, Google Analytics is Google’s digital analytics platform that provides all-in-one data collection and analysis services. This digital analysis is possible thanks to the amount and variety of information that is stored and processed by analytics platforms like Google Analytics.
The information collected by Google Analytics includes details of how each user interacts with each page on your site as well as details about the device they use, what language their browser is set to, and what link they clicked on that brought them to your site, among other things. Aggregating this data and then sorting through it based on a variety of filter criteria can help you nail down exactly which gaps your customers are falling through.
The information that’s collected is all the details of each person’s experience with a web page, site, or app. Google Analytics is capable of collecting behavioral data from mobile apps, video game consoles, customer relationship management (CRM) software, and more. This banquet of data can provide a lot of insight into each stage of the customer journey, enabling you to better optimize your sales funnel and content.
How Do You Get Started with Google Analytics?
Creating a Google Analytics account is easy to do and there are lots of helpful tutorials to guide you through the process if you get stuck anywhere along the way. Once you have everything set up, the interface itself should be quite easy to navigate as it is user-friendly and intuitive.
Google Analytics allows you to create what they call “properties,” which are your individual sites, apps, or other digital assets. You can also create different properties for different sales regions or brands to keep everything neatly separated for easier and more detailed analysis.
Every account can have multiple properties, and every property can have multiple “views”. And the views are where all the good stuff happens.
How Do Google Analytics Views Work?
Views are created using filters that segment out the data based on a massive variety of factors such as only looking at users who visit the site during certain times or users that accessed your site from specific links, like ones you might put in your email campaigns. This information will help you see exactly where your sales funnel is performing well and where it could use some work.
Views can also be used to take advantage of the Google Analytics goals feature that lets you track all kinds of crucial metrics and milestones for your business. For instance, you could create a goal for acquiring 5,000 more sign-ups to your email newsletter. Basically, the views are where you drill down into all that data and find the truly actionable information you need to improve your business.
Make the Most of Your Business
If you’re still looking for more details, Google has created a helpful Google Analytics for Beginners academy course that’s perfect for people who want to wrap their minds around the entire platform but don’t know where to begin. This video series is a bit dry but does a great job of walking you through everything you should be aware of when getting started. It even takes you through the process of setting up an account and creating your first reports.
If you just want someone else to take over all this work for you, give us at Cardinal a call to learn about all the ways we can help launch your digital marketing efforts to the next level.
