Have you ever wondered what people are doing when they visit your website? What buttons are they clicking? How long do they stay on your page before leaving? More importantly, why did they click the button or leave the page? If so, you’re in luck! All of these questions (and many more) can be answered with Google Analytics.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a free software tool by Google that allows you to analyze data about traffic on your website. The tool adds code to track visitor’s actions when they are on your website, as well as capture data about the users themselves, like age, gender, location, browser, and device type. Once the information is captured, Google Analytics displays it in a dashboard so you can visualize the data.
For example, imagine you have an online retail store that sells clothes. With Google Analytics, you can get information about your customer demographic. By tracking the location of your online customers, you can figure out where the best place to open a pop-up store would be.
Google Analytics is also a powerful tool for improving your website, which leads to greater customer satisfaction. By using the data that tracks the visitor’s actions when they are on your website, you can better understand what they are looking for and identify any potential confusion or pain points for the customer.
For example, if you use it to capture what people have searched for on your website, you can better understand the wants and needs of the people shopping on your online store. If your customers are searching for “socks” after they add a pair of shoes to their cart, that’s a pretty good indication that you should add a direct link to socks on the shoe page.
Minted, an online marketplace for art and graphic design, uses Google Analytics to help them optimize their website. According to Mariam Naficy, the Founder and CEO of Minted, using Google Analytics “result[ed] in 400% year-over-year revenue growth for our art business.” Your eyes do not deceive you, that says 400% growth.
So what are you waiting for?
How does one use Google Analytics?
It is surprisingly easy:
1. Create an account on Google’s marketing platform.
2. Connect your website or app to the tool. Google calls this “Setting up a property” and is the place that all the data that is collected will go.
3. Configure a “reporting view” so that the dashboard only displays the data that you care about.
4. Add the code to your website.
For more details on how to set up Google Analytics, check out Google’s handy Getting Started support page. Take Google Analytics for a spin and learn more about Digital Marketing with Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree program.
