Are visitors to your website converting into actual customers? A popular adage says you can’t manage what you don’t measure – this is especially true with website analytics.
Analytics answers important questions such as:
- Where are my site visitors arriving from?
- What actions are users taking while visiting my site?
- Are visitors completing important goals such as purchases or form submissions?
This article focuses on Google Analytics 4, a free and popular offering that provides data measurement suitable for most sites.
Starting with Website Analytics
If you don’t have an analytics provider for your website yet, the first step is choosing one to add to your site.
Google Analytics (“GA”) is by far the most popular provider on the market. You can create a free GA account at analytics.google.com, where you’ll be provided a unique code to install on your site. Most website providers, such as WordPress and Wix, offer settings where you can easily add this code. For more advanced users, Google Tag Manager is also a great option for adding code to your site.
Popular Website Analytics Reports
Once you’ve connected GA and begun recording data, you can begin learning about your visitors. Reports, as detailed below, help identify trends you can leverage to optimize your site’s user experience and performance toward your business goals.
Reports
The Reports section of Google Analytics offers high-level insights into your site’s visitors and their behavior. The Reports Snapshot page you’re taken to by default is customizable to display the metrics most important to you.
The Realtime tab provides real-time insight into visitors browsing your site. This is helpful for troubleshooting and for monitoring any anticipated traffic surges in real time. Otherwise, don’t linger on this data, as you can become distracted by overanalyzing a small sample of visitors.
The Acquisition tab under the Life Cycle section shows where your visitors come from and lets you compare metrics across sources. For example, do visitors from links on social media tend to abandon your site quicker than visitors from Google Search? Do they convert into customers as frequently?
The Engagement tab shares how users interact with your site, including which pages they visit. These reports are especially insightful for conversion-oriented pages such as checkout pages. For example, you may find that many users reach the cart or checkout page, but do not complete their purchase. If so, this may indicate a technical issue with your site or a poor user experience before order completion.
Data within the User tab provides detailed insights about your visitors, including their demographics, interests, location, and device type. While the information is neat in and of itself, consider its marketing applications:
- Does this data match your impression of your typical customer base and their behaviors?
- Is a certain audience segment underperforming on your site? Why might that be?
- Are mobile users engaging at a lower level than other users, potentially due to a poor mobile experience?
Explore
The Explorations section of Google Analytics is designed for advanced users who want to uncover specific insights or test hypotheses. However, GA provides several pre-made templates in its Template Gallery.
Advertising
The Advertising section of Google Analytics is admittedly a misnomer and may be renamed at some point. Whether you’re actively advertising or not, these dashboards report the conversion actions tracked on your website. This data answers the most important question: so what? While it’s great to produce high amounts of site traffic and strong user engagement, your website needs to advance key goals of your business, such as form submissions, subscriptions, or purchases.
GA allows you to set up and track several goal types, including when users arrive at a specific page (e.g., a checkout confirmation page), when visitors stay on-site for a specified time, and when users complete specific actions (e.g., playing an embedded video or submitting a form). These conversions can then be integrated with advertising platforms such as Google Ads to provide ROI data for individual campaigns.
Summary
Website analytics provides highly insightful information about your site visitors and is essential for measuring your marketing results. Ensure an analytics package is installed on your site and review high-level data consistently. Configurable reports that can be emailed on a recurring basis are available natively in Google Analytics or in connected platforms such as Google Looker Studio.
