Why is Google Analytics an Important Tool for Digital Marketers?
Analyzing web analytics helps your business grow, as it provides you with visitor data and allows you to identify what they are doing on your website. You can use many web analytics tools to collect website data, but Google Analytics is the most popular and free version that you can leverage.
Now, we shall learn more about google analytics, its uses, and how to leverage it to drive more traffic to your site. Using Google Analytics(GA), you can learn about your customers’ behaviors, user experiences, quality of your online content, and device functionality. The information provided by Google Analytics can help you plan your success strategy for your business, helping you learn things you probably didn’t know about your visitors.
What is Google Analytics (GA)
Google Analytics is a must-have for any webmaster, businessman, and SEO analysts or experts, not just because it is free. Digital Marketing with Google Analytics will help strategies be successfully executed and aligned with the company’s goals. Currently, Google Analytics, or GA as it is sometimes known, is the market leader and most used analytics program.
The free version of Google Analytics will suffice for most websites. Moreover, Google Analytics 360, the paid version of GA, comes with additional options for determining the validity of your reports and sampling sizes. However, the feature is limited to websites with more than ten million unique visitors per month.
The functionality of Google Analytics and its wide adoption in the market has made it the marketing industry’s one source of truth for data related to website traffic, engagement, and conversions.
In addition to tracking the user or consumer journey, Google Analytics provides rich data around the channels, locations, and multiple devices. On-site activity, goals achieved, exits, and returning visitors, which indicate loyalty, can be tracked through these journeys.
Benefits of Google Analytics
The most common marketing needs can be met with Google Analytics. The free standard version of Google Analytics offers the following benefits:
- You can use it for free.
- Installation and implementation are simple.
- User-friendliness is one of its most vital features.
- Google’s other products can be seamlessly integrated with it.
- Data collection, dashboards, and reports can all be customized.
- A variety of options are available, from the basic to the advanced.
- The insights it provides into web behavior are extensive and valuable.
- You can integrate post-click advertising with traffic sources other than Google, such as Facebook, Yahoo, and Bing.
An Overview
Analyzing data in Google Analytics can be divided into eight main categories– Dashboards, Shortcuts, Intelligence Events, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions.
These eight sections contain numerous sub-sections that provide lots of relevant information. This is why marketers should highly prefer GA without missing out on analyzing a single section.
Here are a few definitions of basic Google Analytics terms before we dive into the areas that matter most to marketers:
Users: This helps you know the visitors who have visited your site at least once within the range you selected, including both new and returning visitors.
Dimensions: Objects can be described by these characteristics. A browser, an exit page, and the duration of a session are examples.
Metrics: Depending on the dimension, these statistics can be helpful, such as Average Session Duration.
Bounce Rate: Essentially, it shows the percentage of people who entered your site and left it from the same page at which they entered; i.e., they didn’t interact with it.
Sessions: Your website engages users for a session when they are actively browsing through the pages.
Why is Google Analytics So Important?
Perhaps you’re wondering, what is the point in knowing about Google Analytics for digital marketers? In what ways can data help to grow businesses?
The answer is simple. When you know how to use Google Analytics, you can quickly gather information from consumers who are online, who interact with your site, regardless of whether it is an e-commerce, information, or lead generation site, to assist in identifying the purchase journey.
This allows you to analyze your data and better understand your Audience to improve your digital marketing and, in turn, increase profits for your business. You can even make a few bucks with this strategy.
A significant role for Google Analytics in developing an innovative business is understanding who your customers are. It’s easy to collect data as long as you add JavaScript tracking code to every page of your website. At first, it doesn’t seem very easy, but you’ll be guided through the process.
In the marketing field, all lives depend on analyzing data and using it strategically. That’s why we need to understand the importance of Google analytics in digital marketing.
Why Is Google Analytics Important to Digital Marketing Professionals?
Digital Marketing professionals often face the challenge of tracking and analyzing web data independently. As a result, the marketers were required to allocate a great deal of time and resources to obtaining and analyzing web data.
In addition, if digital marketers were successful, they would share their findings with business peers and superiors throughout the organization. However, as new, digital means of connecting with consumers emerged, digital marketers found it increasingly hard to communicate effectively with today’s always-on, always-connected shopper.
Today, brands and shoppers interact with one another through social networks, mobile devices, and other state-of-the-art technologies. As a result, digital marketers are challenged with providing customers with timely, relevant information about a variety of goods and services.
A business that does not follow this advice risks falling behind its rivals without a straightforward course of action. Web data analysis can now be simplified with Google Analytics. The platform provides online marketers with the opportunity to get real-time, actionable web data and insights when they need them.
The dashboards offered by Google Analytics display web insights conveniently and straightforwardly. In addition to charts, graphs, tables, and other visualizations, the dashboards are also interactive and can be viewed from any device.
Rather than investing a great deal of time and resources in mining web data, digital marketing professionals can use Google Analytics dashboards to obtain the insights they need. Additionally, Google Analytics accelerates the transformation of web data into actionable insights.
This tool provides up-to-date insights to empower digital marketers at any time with the web insights they crave. This allows digital marketing professionals to gain unparalleled insights into how online shoppers view websites, including what can be done now and in the future to make them more appealing.
Don’t forget that Google Analytics dashboards can also be customized. This means a digital marketer can set up a custom Google Analytics dashboard or use an existing template. With these dashboards, digital marketers can easily integrate web data analysis into their daily routines.
Alternatively, dashboards can be shared with all digital marketers across a company or with specific groups of employees who are authorized to access the dashboards. Additionally, mobile analytics dashboards can be generated in just a few minutes for digital marketers who like to monitor their campaigns on the go.
10 Important Metrics: Why is Google Analytics an Important Tool for Digital Marketers?
Number of Users and Sessions
Using the users metric, you can track the number of unique visitors visiting a site over a certain period, while sessions measure how long users spend actively exploring the site. In the example above, with 100 users and 200 sessions, it’s reasonable to infer that, on average, each of them visited the site twice during the specified timeframe.
Average Session Duration
An essential metric for determining user engagement is a high-level proxy. The average session duration is how long users spend on the website in a single session. Audience > Overview has this information in the dropdown box above the first graph, or call GA: Avg session duration if you interact with the API.
Average Pages Per Session
A single session of your site is generally measured by a single user’s average number of page views. The metric can be accessed via the Overview section’s dropdown menu under Audience, or through the API, by using ga:pageviewsPerSession. An excellent proxy for user engagement is the number of pages a user interacts with. However, this metric should be considered along with the average session length since the amount of content (e.g., long text blocks) or the structure of user funnels can influence this ratio.
The Ratio of New to Returning Visitors
Your campaigns can be evaluated based on their ability to generate new or existing user traffic by comparing new-to-returning user ratios. Increasing returning users can signal an increase in lifetime value (LTV), whereas increasing new users can signify growth.
Bounce Rate
In website statistics, bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who visit one page and then leave. High bounce rates may indicate a technical issue, inadequate content, a web page without internal links, a call to action (CTA), or poor marketing targeting. The metric can be accessed via the API using ga:bounceRate, or you can select it from a dropdown in the Overview section under Audience.
Organic vs. Paid Sessions
Traffic originates from users who have visited a page other than the paid search results (SERPs). Users click on advertisements on a search engine results page to access paid search results. Your SEO strategies are judged based on Organic Search, whereas your paid campaigns are evaluated based on Paid Search. It’s crucial to have both metrics to sustain your website, but organic traffic is more important.
Average Time on Page
To determine how well your marketing campaigns target relevant customers, you can analyze how much time users spend on a particular page. The average number of times users spend on a page reveals the level of engagement. In cases where customers spend a long time on your site or your bounce rate is low, this indicates that they are interested in the content you have on your website. This metric can be looked at on individual pages to get additional insight into which content performs well and which does not.
Top 10 Landing Pages
You can use the Landing Pages metric to determine the most popular pages, evaluating user experience, content quality, and campaigns. You will find it in the Behavior section of the report.
Goal Conversion Rate
Website goals are specific objectives defined through interactions with the site. It is common to define a goal as a purchase or registration of a customer, though it could also be described as a user visiting a certain number of pages or downloading content. You can track conversion rates over time spent, determine whether your marketing efforts are making a difference in conversions, and analyze other metrics to understand what influences success or failure for your users.
Google Ads
If you link your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account, you can view detailed metrics about your Google Ads campaigns. After a customer clicks or views an advertisement, you can use this information to analyze their behavior on your website.
What Can You Do As A Digital Marketer on Google Analytics?
Digital marketing is a multifaceted practice that is heavily reliant on analytics. It monitors campaigns and implements consumer behavior-based solutions to show you how to enhance conversions and drive traffic with data-driven solutions. It is essential not only to track reports but also to utilize the information you find.
The process of analyzing data will ultimately aid you in planning the best customer experience possible. As a digital marketer, it is critical to gather and utilize data, as the data collected by businesses today can be used to the advantage of the company and its customers.
Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools in the marketing world. Creating content and images that capture the desires of your Audience is possible if you pay attention to their demographics. Consequently, you will see a rise in direct traffic. With this information, you can create a relevant and custom experience for visitors to your site so that they keep coming back.
You’ll begin to see what guest blogs increase your online visibility when you monitor your referral traffic. In this way, you can spend more time creating content that generates returns (in the form of visitor traffic) on your efforts.
In the same way, if you examine your social referrals, you’ll have valuable insight into which social media platforms to share your blog posts on. When you analyze, utilize, and focus on these separate sections within Google Analytics, you’ll have a clear picture of who your audience is, what they want, and how they’ve found you.
You can check out the DAN Institute to know more about digital marketing and how to leverage it to grow your business.
