Google Analytics for your Business
Google Analytics is a free tool that will allow you to keep track of where your traffic is coming from, what they're looking at on your website, and much more.
Getting Started
The process is well-explained in Google Analytics, so we’ll just touch lightly on the steps required. If you’re having trouble with anything, the process is well documented in this Google Help page.
1. Sign up
Go to google.com/analytics/web and sign up with your Google Account, or create one if you don’t already have one.
2. Set up details
Once you’ve signed up, you’ll be redirected to a setup screen where you’ll be asked for your website’s details. All the fields will be annotated, so just follow the instructions.
3. Add your tracking code
The tracking code screen will appear after you’ve set up your website details, and you can also access it by going to Admin > Property > Tracking Info in Google Analytics. Adding the tracking code to your website can be confusing, so we’ll keep this part of our guide as simple as possible.
For platforms like WordPress, Weebly, or Squarespace
Most website platforms have a dedicated field where you can copy and paste your Google Analytics code into, and it’ll add the tracking code to all of the pages on your website.
If you can’t find the Google Analytics field on your website platform, see if it’s listed on this page.
Adding your code to the <head> section of your website
Find the source files for your website, and locate the head tag in your web page or page template. You should be able to see the opener <head> and closer </head> tags towards the top of the page. Insert your <script></script> right above the </head> tag.
Using your web developer
When in doubt, make your web developer do the hard work! Copy and paste your tracking code into an email and send it off to your web developer to insert into your website.
Once you’ve added your tracking codes to your website, it might take a few hours for your data to start appearing in Google Analytics.
Key Website Metrics
1. Uniques
A unique website visitor is one browser on one device that accesses your website within a certain period of time – often 30 days. Say you read this page 30 times, it would only show as one unique visitor.
2. Page views
Page impressions are the total amount of pages visited on your website. If you reloaded this page 30 times, it would count as 30 page views.
3. Traffic source
Traffic source tells you where the traffic from your website is coming from, be it from social media, search engines, or email marketing.
4. Sessions
In simple terms, a session is a visit to your website where a user can open multiple pages and interact with many elements of your website. A session expires after 30 minutes of inactivity, or at midnight.
Finding the information in Google Analytics
Popular pages
To find which pages are most viewed on your website, go to Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages. On the top right of the page, you should be able to find a date selector to view the most popular pages within a certain time period, although the default is one month.
Location of visitors
To find your visitors’ location, go to Audience > Geo > Location in Google Analytics. In the first column, you’ll see the number of sessions by country. You can also change this to City, Continent or Sub Continent under the Primary Dimension field to get a more in-depth view of your visitors. Over the next few columns, you’ll also be given data that shows you how users from different areas behave. For most practical purposes, this isn’t necessary information.
Traffic sources
Traffic sources are under the Acquisition sub menu in Google Analytics. Clicking on Acquisition > Overview will take you to a page that provides you with a visual representation of your website’s traffic sources, from search engine traffic to social media traffic.
You’ll also be able to see which channel provides you with the most new sessions, and which ones have higher user engagement.
The Acquisition > Social > Overview page will give you a more in-depth look into what social networks are referring the most traffic to your website.
New vs. returning users
You can find the ratio of new vs. returning users by going into Audience > Behaviour > New vs Returning. This will provide you with the session numbers for new and returning users, but to turn it into a nice pie graph, click on the pie icon to the right of the page.
Audience engagement
There are a few metrics that add up to audience engagement, and you can find them all under the Audience > Behaviour > Engagement tab.
The first page will show you session durations – this is the length of time of visits on your website. Clicking “Page Depth” under the distribution header will tell you how many pages are accessed during your sessions, as well as how many page views you’re getting.
Mobile traffic behaviour
To discover how mobile browsers are using your website, go to Audience > Mobile > Overview.
This page will provide you with a breakdown of sessions based on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices. The different columns will compare the behaviour of users on different devices, with bounce rate (single page visits), session duration, and pages per session all showing on this page.
To turn the data into a pie graph for better visual representation, click on the pie icon to the right.
Summary
Now that you’ve learned what to track, installed Google Analytics, and figured out how to find the data, it’s time to start putting this information to use for your digital marketing activities. For example, you could set up landing pages and track visits to them to see if you’re promoting it effectively. You could also track how many people visit the landing page that leads to your email list, or how many people visited your booking page.
