Google Analytics, launched in 2005 is a web analytics tool offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.
It tracks the data with help of a unique tracking code that can be installed on every page of your website. This code is a small snippet of Javascript or a coding language that runs in viewers’ browser when he visits your pages.
No matter if you are an E-commerce website or an informative blog, a small or multinational business, you would definitely want to understand the behavior of your visitors to deliver better results.
Here are a few reasons to use google analytics-
1. It is a free tool, you don’t have to pay anything for using GA, nor for the configuration & integration and neither for the usage. You can easily integrate GA with other Google products like GTM, AdWords, optimize, etc for free.
2. GA provides a super-easy interactive dashboard that allows you to customize and measure metrics & dimensions to help you achieve your KPIs, goals and make the right future decisions.
3. Google Analytics collects data automatically from your website by just putting a small snippet of code and make reports accordingly. You can access these reports immediately without any delay.
4. Gives liberty to create customized reports so that you can choose one of the many reports or even build your own customized report using the drag and drop interface.
You can pick or customize the dimensions and metrics and decide how they should be displayed.
5. GA has the ability to measure internal site search, it reveals what potential customers are looking for after arriving on your website and the area of growth opportunity by uncovering the situations.
6. The bounce rate metric in the GA report gives insight into why visitors are bouncing off your website. With this information, you can take steps to optimize your website or work on a particular landing page.
7. With Google Analytics, you can uncover valuable data like age, gender, interest, device, and location about your audience to determine which channels drive most of the traffic to your website.
8. With Google Analytics, you have the access to view what catches the attention of the users and accordingly target the social media platforms to place the ad.
9. Google Analytics helps you to keep a track of all the articles or blogs that receive views, shares or comments. With this data, you can understand what kind of content you should write.
10. The goal tracking in Google Analytics helps you to track how much your business is moving ahead and if you’re achieving the desired goals.
11. Google provides extensive help documentation online to get you started quickly. There are also free video tutorials that explain how to use Google Analytics.
12. You can access real-time data statistics of your website which can be really useful to launch a new product, make changes to your site, include a new promotion, campaign, and a landing page.
13. It helps you discover if you need a mobile site by providing insights into the specific device view and giving you the percentage of total visits that you have got from a mobile device.
14. Advanced Segments within your Google Analytics reporting allows you to isolate specific types of traffic.
15. GA provides the liberty to easily use annotations to document a spike in traffic for a particular marketing campaign and keep track of everything that might impact your business.
16. The custom alerts in GA trigger an email alert when the alert condition is met. You can also set up mobile phone triggers for yourself or share them with your team or client.
17. With profiles for long-term segmentation analysis, you can choose to exclude ‘own’ traffic or focus on certain traffic channels.
18. Multi-Channel Funnel reports show how your marketing channels (traffic sources) work together to generate sales or other conversions on your site.
19. Testing becomes very easy in Google Analytics because of real-time reports and gives you accurate data with other tools.
20. Google has a great community with world’s most popular analytics software and fellow marketers who are willing to help you with any problem you come across.
Closing thoughts-
Analytics is a critical component for your online presence. Without it, all your data would be haywire.
You can learn a lot just from just clicking around otherwise, you can also find instructions & videos about how to see the few most important metrics.
There are a lot of good reasons to use Google Analytics and no good reason not to. Go ahead and get it set up on your website and enjoy the data interactions to boost your business.
