How to Use Google Analytics as a Business Tracking Full Guide – Google Analytics is one of the most must-have tools for website owners. The visitor tracking feature of Google Analytics can make it easier for you to monitor website traffic.
How to Use Google Analytics as a Business Tracking Full Guide 2023
Indeed, the most widely used basic feature of Google Analytics is traffic monitoring, but there are various other features that can help you further increase the business potential of your website.
Features such as visitor demographic data, landing pages, traffic sources, popular content, and more can help you make the right decisions to improve your website. You can see which content needs upgrading, what plugins are needed, and so on.
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For beginners, Google Analytics can often seem very technical and scary to try. That’s why we created this guide to show you how to fully use Google Analytics.
In this article, you will learn about the technical terms and key features of Google Analytics and how to use them to improve the quality of your website.
Definition of Terms in Google Analytics
Before we discuss how to use Google Analytics, you need to know about some technical terms that you will often come across while using this tool made by Google.
Here are some technical terms in Google Analytics and their full explanation:
- Properties: A property is a designation for the website, app, or device tracked by Google Analytics.
- Views: The group of data you want to view. This feature is used to separate the traffic organically, traffic paid, traffic subdomains, and so on.
- Session: The number of interactions between the website and visitors.
- Bounce Rate: The number of visitors who leave the website after viewing only one page.
How to Use Google Analytics
By understanding the terms above, you will be able to explore the menus in Google Analytics with more knowledge. Below, there are 5 ways to use Google Analytics to track the performance of your website.
1. Monitor Real-Time Visitor Data
The Real-Time menu in Google Analytics shows the number of visitors and which pages are currently being visited.
This feature can help you determine the hours at which your website is more crowded. By having data on visitor activity, you can optimize the schedule for content publication and the provision of limited promos at these times.
Overview
In the Realtime > Overview menu, you can see the metrics as below:
- Number of visitors at that time
- Visitor device ( desktop or mobile )
- Number of page views per minute
- Most popular referral site
- Most popular social media referrals
- Top keywords
- Top active page
- Top visitor locations
The data above will help you monitor your website traffic at a glance and accurately. For more complete data, you can visit the specific sub-menu as below:
Locations
This sub-menu shows real-time data about the location of website visitors. The main menu will display geographic data in the form of countries. You can also view geographic data in the form of cities by clicking on the country name.
Traffic Sources
This sub-menu shows the source of website traffic which is divided into several categories such as organic, advertising (CPC), social, referrals, and banners. As in the other menus, you can view more specific information by clicking on each traffic source.
Content
In this sub-menu, you can see which content is currently being visited and the number of visitors. You can also see the traffic source of each content by clicking on the URL of the content.
2. Getting to Know Website Visitors with Audience Menu
You can explore more data about who visits the website, where they come from, and what their interests are in the Audience menu.
There are 14 sub-menus in the Audience section that includes information such as visitor locations, interests, devices used, and more. Among the 14 sub-menus, there are several items that you must understand to get to know visitors better.
Active Users
This data shows the number of visitors in the last one day, the last week, the last two weeks, and the last four weeks.
This report can provide valuable insight into your website’s flaws. If you have more one-day active visitors than other groups, it can be concluded that your website lacks visitor retention capabilities.
Lifetime Value
The Lifetime Value report provides an estimate of the value of your website visitors to the company. Google Analytics provides estimated visitor value from several categories, such as email marketing, campaigns, organic search, and advertising.
This feature is very suitable for websites that have on-site transaction features such as shops and online businesses.
Cohort Analysis
This report provides visitor acquisition data based on certain characteristics. So far, the characteristic that can be used is the “Acquisition Date” which shows the day on which visitors entered your website for the first time.
Demographics
This sub-menu has information about the age and gender of website visitors. You can use this data to sort and target content according to age and gender restrictions.
Interests
Information about the interests of website visitors which is divided into various categories. One of the main functions of this data is to find out how much the match between the interests of visitors and the target audience of your website.
Geo
Information about the visitor’s location and the language used in their Google search settings.
Technology
Data about the type of technology used by visitors, such as Browser, OS, and network.
Behavior
Data on the comparison of new visitors and old visitors, frequency and time of visits, as well as visitor engagement while on the website.
Cross-Device
This sub-menu provides information about what devices are used by a visitor to visit the website.
If you don’t need detailed information, you can visit the Overview sub-menu to see an overview of your website visitors.
3. Track How Visitors Find Your Website
On the Acquisition menu, you can see where visitors find your website from. This feature is very useful for tracking the success of ongoing campaigns or website optimization efforts.
This Acquisition menu can show several traffic sources as follows:
Overview
The overview sub-menu will display a summary of your website traffic sources, from organic search to email links.
All Traffic
In the All Traffic sub-menu, you can see the distribution of website traffic by channel, treemaps, source, and referrals.
Google Ads
This sub-menu is useful for collecting data and tracking visitors who come from Google ads that point to your website.
Search Console
This sub-menu shows data identical to data from Google Search Console. The data shown is data obtained from organic visitors originating from Google search pages.
Social
The data in this sub-menu shows traffic coming from well-known social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and so on.
Campaigns
Tracks visitors who go to the specific URL of the running campaign
Of course, you can also monitor traffic revenue briefly in Acquisition > Overview if you don’t have a specific campaign path to promote your website.
With the information in this menu, you can find out which path can provide the greatest Return on Investment (ROI) in increasing website traffic.
4. Understanding Website Visitor Behavior
In the Behavior menu, you can see how visitors interact with the pages and content on your website.
With this feature, you can track which pages are frequently visited and become landing pages, track visitor journeys while on the website, and website speed data.
Behavior Flow
One of the most interesting sub-menus under Behavior is Behavior Flow. The Behavior Flow Report shows the flow of visitors on your website with visual elements, making it easier to understand.
You can use this report to determine how much engagement ( engagement ) visitors have with the content on your website and to identify problems with the content (if engagement is low).
The Behavior Flow Report can also be used to solve several problems such as:
- Is there one page that provokes visitors to go to another page?
- Are there pages that are more popular than others? And is the page really supposed to be more popular?
- Is the priority page ( product page ) receiving a sufficient flow of visitors?
The more you know about your website visitors, the more informed decisions you can make that increase their loyalty and engagement.
Site Content
This sub-menu provides reports on all blog posts, landing pages, and pages on your website. There are several more menus under Site Content, here’s a brief explanation:
- All Pages: Reports on all pages on the website, starting with the pages with the highest traffic.
- Content Drilldown: Details the website structure based on subdomains such as shop.abc.com, then subfolders such as abc.com/blog.
- Landing Pages: This report provides a list of the first pages visited by website visitors.
- Exit Pages: This report shows which pages were the last places a visitor was before leaving the website.
Site Speed
This report shows your website speed data, either from the server side or from the user/visitor side.
Website speed is one of the most important metrics that search engines evaluate. Therefore, you must choose a fast, safe, and reliable web hosting service provider from Gotechocean.
Site Search
This feature is used to track searches made by visitors while on your website. Of course, if your website does not have a search feature, no data will appear here.
Events
What is meant by ‘events’ in Google Analytics is visitor activity, such as clicking a button, watching a video, downloading a file, and so on. If you set up tracking for these things, the data will appear in this report.
Publisher
If you monetize your website using Google AdSense or Ad Exchange, then you can integrate features from Ad Manager into Google Analytics. All data related to advertisements served on your website will appear here.
5. Track Marketing Results with Conversion Tracking
If you set goals in Google Analytics on your website, then you can also track the percentage of success. This menu can be accessed under the Conversion menu.
You can set Goals in the Admin > Goals > New Goal menu. There are four types of conversions that can be tracked using Google Analytics:
- Destination: This goal will be achieved if the visitor arrives at a certain page, such as a product page or invoice page.
- Event: This goal will be achieved if an event is activated, events that can be tracked can be in the form of sharing, watching videos, opening links, and so on.
- Duration: This goal will be achieved if visitors are on your website for a certain period of time.
- Pages/screens per session: This goal will be achieved if the visitor has viewed a predetermined number of pages each session of their visit.
Google Analytics also links other data to track the conversions that occur on the website, so you can get more specific information.
For example, you can track the number of purchases made by visitors from Jakarta in the Audience > Geo > Location report. You can also see the number of conversions made by visitors from social media in the Acquisition > All Traffics > Source / Media menu.
In general, this menu is used to track the success of marketing efforts that have been carried out. Therefore, the most commonly used report is the Goals report. Under the Goals report, there are several sub-menus such as the following:
Overview
This sub-menu contains a concise and comprehensive report on the conversions that occur on your website. This report is very useful for comparing the overall website performance from one period to another.
Goal URLs
In this report, you can see data about the performance of the URLs that you have set as final destinations.
Funnel Visualization
For goals that are sequential or sequential, this report can help you track how visitor patterns meet each conversion stage on your website.
Reverse Goal Path
This report can help you track the last three pages a visitor viewed before converting. This report is very useful for websites with non-sequential goals because it can conclude which pages are more effective in converting visitors.
Goal Flow
This report is very similar to Funnel Visualization, except that in this report you can see all the visitor conversion sources visually.
Conclusion:
Google Analytics is a very useful tool for any kind of website. All the data provided is quite accurate, and if processed properly can be a source of website development both in terms of SEO or business.
Don’t forget to re-read this complete guide to using Google Analytics if you intend to apply it to your website or blog.
To develop your website, of course, you need support from a fast, safe, and reliable website hosting service provider from Gotechocean. The Ninja support service which is available 24 hours can help you solve all technical problems at any time. Greetings online success!
