What is Google Analytics? How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Targeting and Increase Traffic

When it comes to web analysis, you can look no further than the tool Google Analytics. This tool is so useful to online business and website owners because it will tell you everything you wanted to know about the people who visit your site, your sources of traffic (search optimization), and content performance. You can also set goals for your site and interact with other Google programs available to you. To get started with Google Analytics, you just sign up for a free account and you will get a code to embed on your site. Then you will have to apply yourself and learn the basics and beyond of how the program works so that you can make it work in your business’ favor.

Site Visitors

Google Analytics doesn’t just give you a counter with numbers to view visitors to your site; rather they give you detailed information about your visitors. They do this by tracking IP addresses that tell you how many visitors are considered unique to your site, which ones are returning visitors, how many web pages that particular visitor looks on, and what type of browser they’re using. Moreover, you can also view the bounce rates of all of the visitor details listed above. For example, if your analysis shows a high bounce rate from visitors with slow connection speeds or visitors with a particular browser, this could give you a deeper look into the loading times of your page.

Google Analytics also provides a locator of various geographical regions organized by color to show the countries of those who visit your site. This tracking tool not only shows you the locations of those in your country of origin, but also those outside of your country of origin –which is insightful information for you to use in determining what countries you need to reach and how you can begin the process of developing ways to reach those countries.

Traffic Analysis

Traffic goes beyond the definition of simple visitors and rather explains the “lanes” of visitors to your site. In other words, traffic is the high amount, or consistent flow, of visitors and returning visitors to your site. The Traffic page of Google Analytics allows you to track this by using a pie chart. This pie chart shows you where the traffic is coming from and the percentage of traffic it represents. These results are spread by search engines, referring sites and direct links. They also give you in-depth views of the number of hits from referring URLs, organic, referred, or direct traffic. This is basically the places your site may be mentioned on the web. There’s also a keyword view on the data page of Google Analytics that shows you what search queries generated traffic to your site.

Content

The analysis of your contents page is very beneficial. With the page-by-page view of the analysis, you can see the number of people who viewed your site and how long they stayed on the site reading your content. This information will let you know how long you have the viewer’s attention to send your message to them, and possibly make a sale. You have an option to join your Analytics account with AdSense or AdWords to monitor the results of pay per click, per impressions, and conversions by visitors to your site. You are able to see the lifetime average of all of these so that you can make updates in the future.

Finally, let’s talk about the goal page. This is where you want every visit to eventually be. On this page, your site funnels visitors to a page to give their email address, or another desired result. With the analysis on the goal page, you can track where you may have some discrepancies that don’t lead visitors to the goal page. Essentially, you want your goal page to be your exit page. This information will help you to optimize your site the best way possible.