Google Analytics is an indispensable tool, especially if you’re managing an e-commerce site or any online business. It provides a dashboard where you can see all your data, including traffic statistics, all in one place. This tool is critical for your marketing strategies as it provides useful insights that can help optimize and improve your website.
With Google Analytics, you can observe how people access your website and from where in the world your visitors are located. You can also discover whether your website is optimized for mobile use and how many of your visitors are coming from mobile devices. This tool allows you to identify which websites are driving traffic to your page, which of your marketing campaigns are the most effective, and which pages on your website are the most visited.
Furthermore, you can determine how many site visitors have converted into leads or customers and where these converting visitors came from and their next destination after visiting your site. Google Analytics also offers the ability to improve and optimize your website speed and understand which blog content is most popular among your visitors.
To set up your Google Analytics account, use a Google account that you solely control. This is to avoid losing your analytics data if you ever part ways with your web designers, web developers, or web hosts.
To get the most out of Google Analytics, sign up, create an account, and decide which websites to associate with your account. Then, install your analytics tracking code on every page of your website. If you have a WordPress site, the Monster Insights plugin can be of great help. This plugin enables all advanced Google Analytics tracking features with a few clicks and offers a Google Analytics dashboard for WordPress that displays actionable analytics reports.
Activate goal setting in Google Analytics to tell the tool when something significant has happened on your website, such as when visitors complete a purchase or subscribe. Also, consider setting up site search, using the compare feature to track progress, and tools like Quill Engage that simplify your analytics data insights.
Adding value to your analytics experience is Google Tag Manager. This is a free tool that can help you gather information quickly and easily. Google Tag Manager allows you to add and update your Google Analytics code and other tags on your site without manually writing a line of code. This method saves you time managing and updating the different types of tags on your website.
A tag is a tracking code or JavaScript snippet that sends information about your site to a third party like Google. Tag Manager also optimizes page loading speed on both your landing page and all other pages with the Tag Manager code installed.
You might need a tag manager because many third-party analytics tools can slow down your website. Google Tag Manager allows you to use these tools without affecting your page loading speed. Even if you have analytics installed, many clicks aren’t automatically tracked unless you activate event tracking. File downloads and embedded video views aren’t automatically tracked either. But, if you have Google Tag Manager installed correctly, you can quickly add a new tag into your Tag Manager to set up file download tracking.
In using Google Tag Manager, you can deploy various types of tracking code on your site, including Google Analytics. To set up event tracking, create a tag and then a trigger in Google Tag Manager.
