What is Google Analytics?

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

What is Google Analytics?

- As a business owner or marketer, you understand the importance of having information that allows you to make informed decisions on how to grow your business. Whether you're running a small boutique in town or working at a large brand, the odds are, your business has a presence on the web. You might be selling products online, running a blog, or just using your site to provide information about your services. But no matter the purpose of your website, you're going to want to fully understand the customer journey as they interact with your content. And Google Analytics does just that.

It's a free service with some premium options that helps you analyze visitor traffic and paints a complete picture of who your audience is and what their needs are. It's a platform that connects to every page on your website. And through various dashboards and reports, you'll have the opportunity to unlock tremendous data. Google can provide you the routes people take to reach your site, the content they viewed, and even the devices they use to get there. Their software can also measure sales and goal conversions, say, getting someone to sign up for your newsletter.

And with advanced tools such as funnels and attribution, you can see exactly how all the pages on your site are working with or against you. At its core, Google Analytics helps you understand what's working and what isn't. It gives you the insights you need to make changes so you can meet your performance goals. You'll be able to uncover the why behind the data. If you see a strong uptick in traffic, you might uncover the source as a blog you haven't heard of. If you're seeing a strong decline, you might identify a problem with your site or a competitor that's poaching traffic with better SEO or paid ads.

Let's think about Google Analytics alongside your business objectives. In the online world, it can seem like there's endless ideas. But I think we can boil online objectives into five common categories: Ecommerce, lead generation, content publishing, online information, and branding. For Ecommerce, your objective is to sell products or services. You'll use Google Analytics to find ways to increase those sales and track your performance over time.

For lead generation, your aim is to collect user information, and you'll test strategies and the landing pages to find a working combination. For content publishers, the goal is to encourage repeat visits and engagement. So you'll be tracking what keeps people clicking and interacting with the site. For online information, it's important that users find what they're looking for when they need it. So you'll be interested in what content they're finding or not finding. And for branding, the key objective is awareness and loyalty.

Is your site being shared, linked to, and engaged with on the greater web? It's more than just looking at how many people visit your site. That information is just a fraction of what you'll need to make informed decisions. Every site will have actions, and Google Analytics tracks all of those actions. And then it boils it down into easy-to-understand reports. This equips you with the right data to understand what you need to do to improve the outcome of your site.

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/google-analytics-essential-training/what-is-google-analytics