Maximizing Analytics For Your Business

Everyday billions of consumers are bombarded with advertisements and options of goods and services to buy. With so many options, how can you measure if your marketing strategy is standing out from the rest? By using Google Analytics you can measure which consumers are viewing your site as well as finding out details about their visit to your site such as: amount of pages viewed, how long they stayed on the page, and the bounce rate. Understanding the data from your customers is crucial in developing a marketing strategy that will work for your individual business needs.

Google Analytics is a simple tool that is user friendly for businesses. By simply placing a simple Java script code on the back of your website, Google will track and analyze the visitors to your site, then deliver the data to Analytics. Google stores all previous information as well as provides real time data streaming to Analytics. Shown below is a screenshot of what Analytics will show you in the Real Time Overview tab. As you can see, since this is a demo, there are no users on the site. However, you can see it gives you data such as: number of users on the site, the locations of users, page views, what page users are on etc.

To get a more detailed idea of who your audience is in particular, you would click on the Audience tab on the left side of the screen. Here, Google gives you many ways to discover who your users actually are. By using this information, you can see: what location your users came from, gender, number of users overall, when the users visited your site, bounce rate, etc. Bounce rate is important to understand because it measures the percentage of users who visited one page then left without triggering any other data for Google Analytics to measure. A high bounce rate can either be a good or bad thing. If your homepage is a portal for the rest of your site's information, then you would want a low bounce rate to ensure that users are receiving maximum information. If you run a single-page blog or a small site with less information to offer, then a high bounce rate is more likely to be expected.

Is it possible to get even more detailed about your audience in Google Analytics? Absolutely. Below the Audience tab on the left side of the screen there are options such as: Demographics, Interests, Geo, Technology, and more. By selecting one of these you can get specific data on all of the topics. For example, if I select Demographics then Age, it breaks down the age of my users into several subsets of data for me to analyze.

Another way to get even more specific would be to click on a specific age group. By doing this, Analytics breaks down the age group you select into even more data sets. For example, if I select the age group of 18-24, it will then divide that data into gender for that specific age group. Then, I can see sessions for females ages 18-24 and compare the number to the sessions for males 18-24.

There are many hidden gems on Google Analytics. For me, one of the most interesting and perhaps the most useful, is the Browser and OS tab. By clicking on this, you can see which search engine your users utilized as well as which one was most effective. By measuring the data based on browsers, you can get a better idea of which you should focus more of your marketing on. This tool could save you money as well as time.

By breaking down all this data that Google Analytics provides you, you can then align your brand for your users needs. As a result, users can become more engaged in your website and receive more information about your product or service that you are trying to market. This is just a general overview about what Google Analytics has to offer for your business. Google provides many useful online resources and tutorials to further understand the data that it analyzes.