Setting up Google Analytics is simple and a no-brainer for any business. It’s free and provides valuable insights about website visitor activity. Let’s walk through exactly how to setup Google Analytics. We’ll even explain the benefits of using Google Analytics and how to get the most value out of it.
The leading marketers leverage Google Analytics to gain visibility into their website. To take full advantage, you’ll want to make sure you set up goals, funnels, events, and dashboards.
Let’s start with the why and then we’ll dig into the details.
Why Should You Use Google Analytics?
Google Analytics provides you with data about your website visitors. You’ll be able to see insights such as:
- How many people are on your website, as well as what pages they viewed, what page they entered on, and what page they left on.
- How many people converted.
- What traffic source they came from including organic search, referral, and social.
- Visitor information such as geographic location, browser, operating system, and device used to access the website.
All of this insight and data is free with Google Analytics.
Without visitor data you are operating your website blind.
If you don’t know how many people are on your site, where they came from, and what they did when they were on your site, you can’t make intelligent changes. This data is pertinent to optimizing your website, and lucky for you, it’s free and easy to set up.
Optimize Your Google Analytics Account
Add Events
You can track website interactions such as downloads, video plays, and outbound link clicks in Google Analytics with events.
Setup Goals and Funnels
Having all of your visitor data in Google Analytics is great, but it isn’t very meaningful without goals. It’s important to know what the goal is for your website and track it so you can easily understand the value of each page on your website.
Some goals have a natural flow that the user will likely follow. That process can be setup as a funnel so you can view the full conversion path for the goal. If the goal has a specific path that must be followed, you can see where you’re loosing people in the path.
Google Analytics allows you to track a wide variety of goals. The right goals for your website varies depending on the business model. Common goals include making a payment, filling out a form, subscribing to a newsletter, playing a video, downloading a file, or sharing content on a social network.
Each of those goals can be configured in Google Analytics. View the full guide on how to set up goals in Google Analytics for more information.
Configure Dashboards
Creating dashboards makes it easy to keep track of your key performance indicators and keep an eye on the metrics that matter to you. You can even configure dashboards to be emailed to you or others on a regular basis.
Dashboard configurations can be shared. This is really nice because you can save time by fine-tuning an existing dashboard instead of starting from scratch. It also can save you time if you have dashboards you like on one account, you can go to Share > Share template link, then simply access the link to add to other Google Analytics properties.
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