What is Google Analytics and How to Use It?

You have surely heard the concept “What cannot be measured cannot be improved.” Or the famous words once said by American John Wanamaker: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half…” If you ask what these have to do with our topic, the truth that what you do has no meaning when you cannot measure it leads you step by step to the Google Analytics tool. Because without measuring the data at hand, developing an appropriate strategy for your business would not be a useful and realistic approach.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a service connected to Google that is used to measure your site’s traffic in detail. Google offers this service for free. According to the detailed data you can obtain from Google Analytics, you can plan your business strategies, starting with your SEO strategy.

Why is Google Analytics Important?

If you think that your website is a symbol of your presence in the digital world, all movements on your site are critically important for you. Any digital investment will directly or indirectly affect your website traffic. Google Analytics also provides you with a holistic perspective for all campaigns you run online. Did you know that Google Analytics can generate up to 85 different reports to help you analyze all possible data related to your website traffic?

Google Analytics is a free tool that can help you monitor your digital marketing effectiveness. It also tracks many data about your site continuously, allowing you to quickly and easily learn key data. For example, while it gives you the opportunity to observe the time spent on pages on your site, bounce rates, and traffic in real time, it also indirectly provides the opportunity to take action accordingly. That is why more than 50 million websites worldwide use Google Analytics.

How Do I Open a Google Analytics Account?

To open a Google Analytics account, you need to go to “https://analytics.google.com/” and register with your Google account. In this section, you first need to give a name to your Analytics account and then give a name to your site. If you have more than one site, the second step is important so they do not get mixed up. You can open a single Google Analytics account and observe the traffic and movements of all your sites from the same account. Do not forget to select your country’s time zone because when you want to pull a report, Google Analytics will present the report according to the time zone you entered.

Finally, by following the instructions to add the Tracking code given to you by Analytics to your website, you can start collecting data in your Analytics property. Google Analytics only monitors pages that contain the Google Analytics tracking code, which is a small Javascript snippet that needs to be added manually to each page of your site, with a plugin, or using a tool. If you want to upload the code to your pages manually, copy the code segment and paste it below your content, immediately before the body tag of each page you want to track. Or there are other tools that can do this automatically; you can benefit from them.

You have created your Analytics account and added the code to your site, now let us look at what data about your site you can obtain through Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is built on 4 main core components.

Data collection: In Google Analytics, data is collected with the help of javascript code snippets. This line of code transfers to your Analytics account which URL users visit and which browser or device they use.

Data processing: Collected data is sent to Google’s servers and categorized to make it meaningful.

Configuration: After the data is processed, it is saved to the database. Data saved to the database can no longer be changed.

Reporting: The component where the collected data is presented in reports to Google Analytics users.

Custom Reporting

Custom reports in Analytics provide faster access to the information you need and fewer data reports to examine. Simply, they leave you with the bare bones reports you need. You select the information and metrics you want to see, arranged the way you want to see them.

Google Analytics groups the main services in its account under 8 headings. These are: Customization, Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, Conversions, Discover, and Admin. Each heading allows you to measure the site at a different metric and is quite comprehensive. Let us examine together the most important data headings you will acquire with Analytics and how to access them.

Visitors

The number of people visiting your website is very important for you. Understanding this and dividing it by time is quite easy with Google Analytics. For example, if you want to know the number of visitors in the last 30 days or the annual visitor count, you can easily do this with a report you will pull by marking the date range.

When you click on the ‘Audience’ section on the left, a window will open where you can see the visitors of the site. This range generally gives a 1-week range but you can play with the dates in the upper right corner. You can learn your total visitor count daily, monthly, or annually with this table by selecting the date range you want.

Real-Time

In the real-time section, you can instantly examine the number of visitors on your site with the ‘overview’ option you will select. With this tool where you can see how many people are on your site and which pages people are predominantly browsing, you can track your site in real time and when there is something wrong on the site, for example when the number of visitors on the site suddenly drops to 0, you can notice the problem and intervene urgently.

The General Overview (Graphic Table Analysis) - Locations - Traffic Sources - Content - Events headings under the real-time heading provide instant insight about the source, geographic locations, or from where incoming traffic is directed.

Acquisition - Page Views

The options under the Acquisition tool allow you to see the total views of your pages, and obtain important information such as views of visitors coming through Google ads. The ‘overview’ sub-heading under this heading allows you to learn the number of visits made to your entire site and to customize this by selecting the date range you want from the date range section in the upper right. Filtering while pulling reports from Analytics can prevent you from seeing spam traffic coming to your site and ensure that the data provided is realistic. By clicking to add a filter from the Filters section, you can also exclude the IP address and ensure a realistic reporting is presented.

Google Analytics and E-Commerce

After activating e-commerce operations, Google Analytics will generate very detailed reports for each transaction. You can monitor your e-commerce activities with Google Analytics. By using Google Analytics on your e-commerce website, you can gain valuable information about your transactions, return on investment, and customers.

Abdullah Altunbaş

Content Writer

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