Digital marketers need to understand visitor interaction with their websites using Google Analytics. Why? Because it is being used by 55.49 % of all websites. However, determining the most key features can be challenging due to the numerous metrics available.
This article focuses on the top four Google Analytics features for optimizing performance, increasing traffic, and boosting conversions. By monitoring these metrics, businesses can gain a competitive advantage by understanding user behavior and engaging with their content and business.
So, let us dive into it!
Must-Have Feature: Goal Tracking
Set Up Goals
Define the actions or "conversions" you want to track as goals in Analytics. This could be things like:
Purchasing a product
Filling out a contact form
Signing up for a newsletter
Set a goal URL to track pageviews for the page where that action occurs. Then establish a goal value to signify the importance of that goal.
View Goal Reports
With goals set up, you will gain insight into how well your site is achieving key outcomes. The Goal Overview report shows totals for goals, conversion rates, and revenue. The Goal Flow report illustrates the path visitors take through your site to achieve a goal. See which content and campaigns are most effective at driving conversions.
Optimize Based on Insights
The insights gained from goal tracking should be used to optimize your site and improve goal conversion rates. Some options include:
Improving page load times
Simplifying navigation to your goal pages
Tailoring content to be more engaging and persuasive
Running A/B tests on elements like headlines, images, and calls to action
Goal tracking is a must-have feature in Google Analytics to gain actionable insights into how your site can better achieve the outcomes that matter most to your business. By monitoring goals and optimizing based on the data, you will see higher goal conversion rates and greater success.
Vital Feature: E-commerce Tracking
To analyze your e-commerce business performance, it is important to enable e-commerce tracking in Google Analytics. This requires connecting your Google Ads account and installing the Google Analytics tracking code on your website. This will allow Google Analytics to track important metrics like revenue, transactions, and average order value. You should also set up Enhanced E-commerce tracking to gain granular data on product impressions, clicks, and purchases.
Once e-commerce tracking is in place, you can gain valuable insights from metrics such as revenue, average order value, top products and categories, and checkout flow. These insights can help you accelerate growth, boost revenue, and improve the customer experience on your e-commerce website.
Crucial Capability: Custom Reporting
A crucial capability of Google Analytics that every website should enable is custom reporting. Custom reports allow you to analyze data that is most important to your business or website goals. You can create custom reports that combine metrics, dimensions, and filters to gain insights into how your users are interacting with your site.
To create a custom report in Google Analytics, go to Customization > Custom Reports and click '+ New Custom Report'. Choose between a flat table report or Explorer report, which offers more complex analysis with metrics, dimensions, segments, and filters. Name the report and select metrics and dimensions, such as Sessions, Bounce Rate, Pages/Session, Goal Completions, Source/Medium, Country, or Device Category. Add segments or filters to analyze subsets of data. Save the custom report and access it alongside standard Google Analytics reports.
Custom reports offer a quick view of key metrics for business or site objectives, uncovering trends and insights for optimizing content, ads, and marketing initiatives. Regular analysis of custom reports leads to data-driven decisions that positively impact key performance indicators.
Key Functionality: Audience Reporting
Audience reporting in Google Analytics provides valuable insights about who visits your website. It gives details like demographics, technical capabilities, mobile devices used, and interests of your visitors. This allows you to tailor your content and website to better match your audience's needs.
Understanding your visitors at this level helps improve the user experience, boost engagement, and increase conversions. Enabling audience reporting in Google Analytics is straightforward. You just need to check the "Enable Audience Reporting" box under the admin section and save the setting. The audience data and metrics will then be available in your reports. Using these insights can significantly improve your ability to attract, engage, and convert the right audience for your website.
Final Thoughts
Google Analytics usage for all websites grew by 0.558659% from June 2023 to July 2023. It offers valuable insights into your website and digital marketing efforts through user-level data capture, e-commerce tracking, goal tracking, event tracking, and custom dimensions. This free tool helps identify successful and ineffective interactions, enabling optimization and improved performance. Proper setup leads to improved business and bottom line!