Hi there. If you own a business online, or if you are entitled “admin” to a website then, this is the right place for you to be. Running a program online, whether it is eCommerce or a website of any kind, you will always need to keep track of your end results as ‘analytics’. Here, you can know what purpose Google Analytics plays. Google provides this service for free to all the registered websites on the internet via a powerful tool called “Google Analytics”. Henceforth, you can always be aware of how your business and website are actually doing. Not only that, it paints a clear picture of how your website performs down to the tiniest level. Here, we will discuss what Google Analytics is and what is its purpose?
“You cannot manage what you don’t measure”- Peter Drucker
There are over 50 technical terms to known about Google Analytics. But not all can be memorized, so here provided is a list of must-know terms when using analytics.
- Home
- Customization
- Realtime
- Audience
- Acquisition
- Behavior
- Conversion
- Attribution
These 8 are the ones you will have on the left side of your dashboard and will guide you through all your analytics reports. Also, inside this 8 you will all the remaining terms per analytics.
But even within these 8, there are 4 major reports to consider in Google Analytics along with their purpose.
- Audience: To pinpoint your audience online.
- Acquisition: To know how users are arriving at your site.
- Behavior: To know the users better as they interact with your site. Also, to check where the site has its drawbacks.
- Conversion: To know what activity did your website complete as a goal.
Let us discuss it in detail about the informations available in these reports.
Audience Report
The audience section of the report generally provides information about the characteristics of the users (age, interest, gender, devices, etc). Additionally, this information is seen in a very systematic order. And some of the major points to study are:
- Overview: where you can get all the summarized information about your audiences.
- Demographics: where you can get information on the age and gender of the users.
- Interests: Information on in-market segments and affinity categories.
- Geo: information based on language and location.
- Behavior: where you can know about new and returning users.
- Technology: Browser and OS, and network information.
- Benchmarking: Channels, devices, location, and user flow.
However, there are also other important sectors to explore inside this report.
Acquisition Report
The Acquisition section reports on how the visitors are getting on your site. Also, it has tons of information for you to explore like:
- Overview: where you can get all the summarized information about how your audiences find you.
- All Traffic: Channels, treemaps, source/medium, referrals.
- Google Ads: information on keywords, search queries. Also, campaigns, treemaps, hours of days, and final URLs.
- Search console: information on landing pages, Countries, queries, and devices.
- Campaigns: information on paid keywords, organic keywords, and cost analysis.
In Addition, it also provides information on social relationships where they share, critique, and interact with content and each other.
Behavior Report
The Behavior section provides information on the behavior of users on your site. e.g. entrance and exit pages. Not only that, but it has tons of information on:
- Overview: where you can get all the summarized information about your audience’s behavior inside your site.
- Site Content: Vital information on landing pages and exit pages.
- Site speed: information on page timings, speed suggestions, and user timings.
- Events: information on top events, pages, and event flows.
- Site search: information on the search terms and also the search pages.
Conversion Report
To know the percentage of sessions that results in conversion, we see the conversion report. And, this report is handier if you are running an eCommerce site. Also, you can find important things to keep track of to evaluate your website, which are:
- Goals: to measure the conversion rate, for each goal you set up.
- Ecommerce: enable e-commerce tracking to collect transaction data.
The Conversion reports are not available by default. So, you need to enable these functions to keep track of your conversion rates.
Purpose of Realtime Report
Realtime reports are used to monitor activities that are happing right at the moment. And, within there are six reports for us to analyze from (overview, location, traffic sources, content events, and conversions). Here, you can see how many people are online at the very moment in time when you are analyzing the report. Also, we can see the device they are using to log into the site and where they are spending their time on the top activity page.
This reports on many things about the users and how they got to our pages. We can see where the users are coming from, like from social media pages, or organic searches via Google. This is one of the most useful purposes of a real-time report. Additionally, we can see page views per minute and much more handy information. If you are seeing all this information then you can rest assured your tracking codes are working fine.
Conclusion
You can decide for yourself how useful information can be to do anything. Analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your site is a must, so you can further plan what you want, and what you can do with your business online. Hence, Google Analytics plays a vital purpose in evaluating and helping one boost their presence online. Also, these are just some of the basic information that is like a “must-know” thing for people investing their time handling websites.
