Google Analytics is one of the most popular digital analytics software available.

It is Google’s free web analytics service that allows you to analyse in-depth detail about the visitors on your website.

Since almost all good businesses have an online presence in the form of a website, it becomes very important for you to learn the inner structure of your site to see whether it is accomplishing its purpose or not.

For this, you need to know the details of what people do when they visit your website, how long they stay and what pages they visit on your website.

Irrespective of whether you are an ecommerce website or an informative blog, you would definitely want to understand and study the behaviour of your visitors to deliver better results.

One of the first things we recommend business owners do when they contact us is to get tracking set up for Google Analytics. Here’s 13 of the most important benefits the Free tool offers.

No matter what your budget is, you can afford it as Google Analytics is 100% free. It provides valuable insights that can help you to shape the success strategy of your business.

There are over 1 billion websites online right now. Each of them is vying for attention in the overcrowded world of the internet. For your website to do its job – whatever that might be – people have to be able to find it.

Google Analytics has an entire section, devoted to providing you with information on how the visitors to your website found you. Google tracks how many people land on your website after clicking on a link in search results (organic results), how many people come from links shared on social media, from other websites, from paid ads, and by typing your website directly into search.

Getting people to your website is the first big hurdle you face, but making sure they stick around and come back is just as important. Google Analytics tracks that information too.

The Behaviour section in Google Analytics provides information on which pages people often come to first on your website, what pages they click through to next (if any), and how long they spend on your website.

This information will help you understand which parts of your website are successfully getting traction and determine if you need to rework the design or improve your content to keep people around longer.

Most websites don’t need to reach everyone. There’s typically a specific type of visitor that’s most valuable to you. Google Analytics provides information on who the people visiting your website are in terms of demographics, geography, and their general interests online.

In addition, you can see what browsers they use and what devices they’re coming from. If your website offers a different experience on one device or browser versus another, you may be losing some visitors. Seeing how many people visit your site on mobile or through Safari lets you know how important it is to optimise for those people too.

Pretty much every website will have some pages that get more traffic than others. And you’ll also have pages that keep people on the site or achieve conversions more than others.

If you have content that’s ranking high or getting shared a lot that brings a disproportionate amount of your traffic, Google Analytics will help you identify it. Just as importantly, if some pages do particularly well at converting visitors to email subscribers or customers, Google Analytics helps you identify those as well.

When you can pinpoint the pages that are working the best for your various goals, you can analyse why they work and shape a strategy for your website moving forward based on past successes.

Different websites will have different actions they most want visitors to take. You can set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics for your website based on the actions you most want visitors to take, such as downloading a lead magnet, signing up for your email list, or making a purchase.

For most websites, this data will be the most important measure of whether your website’s doing it’s main job. Google Analytics will help you gauge what’s working on your website to achieve conversions and why.

The internal site reveals what potential customers are looking for after arriving on your website.

It also reveals the area of growth opportunity by uncovering the situations where the certain situation may be unclear or lacking on your site.

Thankfully, Google Analytics allows you to track the internal site searches with a bit of customisation.

With this feature of internal site search, you can gain better insights of what people are searching for on your website. With these insights, you can make necessary changes or additions accordingly to improve the performance of your website.

You can further make effective changes to your website navigation and product/service offers.

Bounce Rate is one of the most important metrics which refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your website after visiting only one page.

Moreover, it is extremely important to reduce this rate as much as possible.

A lot of businesses witness huge traffic but not sufficient conversions.

This means that visitors are coming to your website but are not finding what they are looking for. This leads to a high bounce rate.

A high bounce rate calls for an immediate action to identify the reason behind it.

However, Google Analytics provides a detailed report of the pages that are experiencing a high bounce rate.

The reason for a high bounce rate could be that your website is not optimised properly or maybe your landing page is not attractive enough for them to sign up.

Therefore, with the detailed report on bounce rate, you can find ways and means to reduce the bounce rate of your website.

With Google Analytics, you can uncover valuable data about your audience to determine which channels drive most of the traffic to your website.

The Audience section provides a lot of information about the people who visit your website like their age, gender, interests, devices, and location.

It also gives you data on how the visitors were driven to your website.

  (i) Age: It is one of the best indicators of where your audience spends most of the time. Knowing the average age of your website audience can help you to optimise your website accordingly.

  (ii) Gender: The gender variable helps you to describe your audience. Audience’s gender plays an important role in how they communicate and engage online.

  (iii) Interests: With Google Analytics, you can very well understand the interests of your audience and can optimise your website in accordance with their interests.

  (iv) Device: Google Analytics also gives you views of what kind of device are they using. With this information, you can help your website get more responsive in various devices. Not only this, with Google Analytics, you can also have a view on which kind of smartphone or tablet your audience uses.

  (v) Location: Understanding where your customers come from helps you to formulate marketing strategies according to the physical location of your potential customers.

Geolocation feature of Google Analytics not only lets you know the country from where your visitors are coming from but the city from where they are and even the language they use.

Social platforms are a great way to drive a lot of traffic and engage potential customers.

With Google Analytics, you have the access to view what catches the attention of the users and then place the ad accordingly.

In order to choose the best platform to advertise to your customers, you need to set a generous budget aside for social media ads.

With Google Analytics, you can gauge the performance of all the social platforms that you are using. You can also check how much conversion value each of the social platforms is bringing, traffic entering from social referrals and how many users are talking about you.

Content is the king and if created remarkably can help you to get a lot more traffic and potential visitors.

Good content is one of the best ways to reach out to your customers, this is the reason why so many businesses create blogs, infographics, and slide shares that can add value to your customers.

Google Analytics helps you to keep a track of all the content that receives views and shares. With this data, you can enhance the top viewed blogs so that they appeal to the customers in a more productive manner.

Google Analytics generates a breakdown of the page views each of your blog posts receive.

You can rework on the top performed blog in order to generate more traffic.

The goals in Google Analytics helps you to track how much your business is moving ahead and progressing.

You can also assign a number of goals that will help you to track the customer’s journey based on their actions.

There can be the different type of goals, like making a purchase, filing a lead generation form, subscribing to newsletters, downloading an e-book, coupon etc.

If you’re not very tech savvy, hearing about great software tools can make you think how nice that sounds for other people who can figure out how to use them. But Google Analytics is very intuitive for even newbie website owners with basic level tech skills to figure out.

So there you have it!

Investing in digital marketing services can help your company gain more leads, conversions and revenue. If you’re ready to take your business to new heights, contact us online to see how we can help.