Google Analytics for beginners Series
By: Stenburgen Ruwa
Tags: Google Analytics, Google Analytics Tips, Google Analytics Services, Google Analytics Reports

Google Analytics for beginners Series Part 1

Start using Google Analytics data to improve product, marketing, and strategy decision.

In this blog I will help you understand four key questions using your own Google Analytics setup; who your users are, where those users come from, what actions those users are taking, and eventually the results of all those users actions? You will also learn how to properly track your traffic as it is coming into your site and you’ll learn how to tie that into the actual results that your users are generating.

Without the right data and ability to understand it, you find yourself blind when you don’t have to be. Google Analytics is the world’s most popular digital analytics tools. Prioritizing it in your digital marketing campaign helps you focus on the right stuff and allocating marketing resources wisely.

Introduction to Google Analytics — Basics

Your company’s online presence is very important to its success. But how well do you really understand how your customers are engaging with your site and apps? How do you know what’s working and what isn’t?

With Analytics, you can uncover the insights that drive real results. Analytics give you comprehensive digital tools to help you better understand your customers and evaluate your site, content and products. You get the insights that matter — plus the ability to put them to work and transform your business.

Understanding how customers engage with your site

Analytics take you deeper into the customer experience. It helps you see exactly how customers are interacting with your site. Analytics reveals which pages they spend the most time on or which pages they visit before leaving your site without taking action. Insights like these help you make high-value site improvements

Three easy features in Analytics:

1. Enhanced E commerce

This feature helps you get insights into shopping activities. It gives you even more insight into shopping activities on your site. It helps you find out which products are the most popular, generate the most sales, and support the most repeat purchases so that you can make smarter, more informed marketing decisions.

2. Goals.

This feature helps you follow the path your visitors take to get where they are going. Setting up goals helps you stay on top of key business activities and determine how successful your site is at turning users into customers. Creating goals unlocks new reporting in Analytics that can help your website succeed.

The goal Flow report in analytics helps you improve user experience.

It shows the path users take to complete a goal that you have setup like “completed a purchase”. You can use this report to see if people are moving through your site efficiently, or where they might be having trouble.

If you have found groups of users who haven’t completed a Goal on your site, you can take steps to bring them back to your site. Simply create an audience in Analytics and share it to your Google Ads account, then create an Ads campaign to re-engage those users.

3. Analytics Intelligence.

This feature machine learning meets Analytics to answer your questions. Google’s machine learning to Analytics helps your digital analytics data to work hard for you.

With Google Analytics intelligence feature, you can simply ask questions in plain English and will give you answers fast. Asking basic questions like “where is my traffic coming from? “or monitor performance by asking “How does the trend of new users this year compare to last year? “Analytics Intelligence gets smarter over time the more questions you ask.

Analytics Intelligence makes it easier to discover what’s important in your data and then take meaningful action. The insights feature automatically shares trends, changes in key performance indicators, and opportunities that can impact your business.

Making better, data-driven decisions

Making sense of all the data you’ve gathers from your digital channels can be challenging. But Analytics helps you better understand how customers interact with your site. You can make the journey from awareness to purchase more rewarding for your customer — and for your company — by creating better online experiences that re based on deep insights.

In the second phase of this series I will be covering how Google Analytics works, how to use GA reports, introduction to Admin section in the GA, understanding GA Audience reports, GA acquisition reports, GA Behavior reports and GA conversion reports.