How to use Google Analytics as a Business Tracking Tool

Google Analytics is one of the most memorable tools owned by website owners. Visitor tracking features from Google Analytics can make it easier for you to monitor website traffic.
Indeed, the most widely used basic features of Google Analytics are traffic monitoring, but various other features can help you further increase business potential from your website.
Features such as Visitor Demographic Data, Landing Pages, Source Traffic, Popular Content, and others can help you make the right decisions to improve your website. You can see which content needs to improve the quality, what plugins are needed, and so on.
For beginners, Google Analytics often seems very technical and frightening to try. Therefore, we make this guide shows how to use Google Analytics in full.
In this article, you will learn about the technical terms and the main features of Google Analytics and how to use it to improve the quality of your website.
Definition of terms on Google Analytics
Before we discuss how to use Google Analytics, you need to know about some technical terms that you will often find while using this Google artificial tool.
Here are some technical terms on Google Analytics and the full explanation:
- Properties: Property is a designation for websites, applications, or devices tracked by Google Analytics.
- Views: data group you want to see. This feature is commonly used to separate organic traffic, paid traffic, traffic subdomain, and so on.
- Session: The number of interactions between websites and visitors.
- Bounce Rate: Number of visitors who leave the website after seeing one page.
How to use Google Analytics
By understanding the term above, you will be able to explore the menus on Google Analytics with more knowledge. Below, there are 5 ways to use Google Analytics to track your website performance.
1. Monitor real-time visitor data
The real-time menu on Google Analytics shows the number of visitors and any page being visited at that time.
This feature can help you determine the hours in which your website is more crowded. By having data on visitor activity, you can optimize the schedule of publication content and procurement of promos limited at these times.
Overview.
On the Realtime menu> Overview, you can see the metrics as below:
- The number of visitors at that time
- Visitor Device (Desktop or Mobile)
- The number of pages per minute
- The most popular referral site
- The most popular social media referrals
- Top keywords
- Top Active Page
- Top Visitor location
The data above will help you monitor your website traffic at a glance and accurate. For more detailed data, you can visit specific sub-menus as below:
Locations
This sub-menu shows real-time data regarding the location of website visitors. The main menu will display the geographical data in the form of a state. You can also see geographical data in the form of a city by clicking the name of the country.
Traffic Sources.
This sub-menu shows a source of websites that are divided into several categories such as organic, advertising (CPC), social, referral, and banner. As in the other menu, you can see more specific information by clicking on each source of traffic.
Content
In this sub-menu, you can see which content is visited now and the number of visitors. You can also see the source of the traffic of each content by clicking the Content URL.
2. Getting to know website visitors with the Audience menu
You can browse more data about anyone who visits the website, from where they come from, and what their interests are on the Audience menu.
There are 14 sub-menus in the audience section that includes information such as visitor location, interest, devices used, and more. Among the 14 sub-menus, there are several items that you must understand to get to know visitors better.
- Active Users
This data shows the number of visitors on the last day, the last week, the last two weeks, and the last four weeks.
This report can provide valuable knowledge about the lack of your website. If you have the number of active visitors one day more than other groups, it can be concluded that your website lacks visitor retention capabilities.
- Lifetime Value
The Lifetime Value report provides an estimated value of your website visitors for the company. Google Analytics provides an estimated value of visitors from several categories, such as email marketing, campaigns, organic searches, and advertisements.
This feature is very suitable for websites that have on-site transaction features such as stores and online businesses.
- COHORT ANALYSIS
This report provides data on recording visitors based on certain characteristics. So far, the characteristics that can be used are “Acquisition Date” or the date of acquisition that shows the day where visitors enter your website for the first time.
- Demographics
This sub-menu has information about the age and type of visitor’s website. You can use this data to sort and target content following the age limit and gender.
- Interests
Information about the interest of website visitors who are divided into various categories. One of the main functions of this data is to know how much compliance between the interest of visitors and your website audience target.
- Geo.
Information about the location of visitors and languages ​​used in their Google search settings.
- Technology
Data on the type of technology used by visitors, such as browsers, OS, and networks.
- Behavior
Data on the comparison of new visitors and old visitors, frequencies and visit time, and engagement visitors while on the website.
- Cross-Device
This sub-menu provides information about any device used by one visitor to visit the website.
If you don’t need detailed information, you can visit the Overview sub-menu to see a glimpse of your website visitors.
3. Browse how visitors find your website
On the Acquisition menu, you can see where visitors find your website. This feature is very useful for tracking the success of the campaign or business optimization business that is running.
This Acquisition menu can show several traffic sources as follows:
- Overview.
Sub-menu Overview will display a summary of your website traffic sources, starting from organic search to email links.
- All Traffic
On the All Traffic Sub-menu, you can see the distribution of website traffic based on channels, treemaps, sources, and referrals.
- Google Ads.
These sub-menus are useful for collecting data and tracking visitors from Google ads that lead to your website.
- Search Console.
This sub-menu shows data that is identical to data from Google Search Console. The data shown is data obtained from organic visitors from the Google search page.
- Social
Data on these sub-menus shows traffic originating from known social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and so on.
- Campaigns
Track visitors who open the campaign special URL that is running
Of course, you can also monitor Traffic Revenue in a summary on Acquisition> Overview if you don’t have a special campaign path to promote the website.
With the information on this menu, you can find which paths can provide the biggest return on investment (ROI) in increasing website traffic.
4. Understand the behavior of website visitors
On the Behavior menu, you can see how visitors interact with the page and content on your website.
With this feature, you can track which pages are often visited and become landing pages, track visitor trips while on the website, and website speed data.
Behavior Flow.
One of the most interesting sub-menus under Behavior is Behavior Flow. Behavior Flow Report shows visitor travel flow on your website with visual elements, making it easier to understand.
You can use this report to determine how many engagement (engagement) visitors with the content on your website and to identify problems in content (if the engagement is low).
Behavior Flow Report can also be used to solve some problems such as:
- Is there a single page that provokes visitors to open another page?
- Are there pages that are more popular than others? And does that page should it be more popular?
- What is the Priority page (Product Page) that has received enough visitors?
The more things you know about website visitors, you can make careful decisions that can increase their loyalty and involvement.
Site Content.
This sub-menu provides a report on all blog posts, landing pages, and pages on your website. There are several more menus under the site content, the following is a brief explanation:
- All Pages: Reports on all pages on the website, starting with the page with the highest traffic.
- Content Drilldown: Times the website structure based on subdomains such as shop.abc.com, then subfolders like abc.com/blog.
- Landing Pages: This report provides a list of the first pages visited by website visitors.
- Exit Pages: This report shows any page which is the last place of visitors being before leaving the website.
Site Speed
This report shows the speed data of your website, both from the server-side or from the user/visitor side.
The speed of the website is one of the important metrics assessed by search engines. Therefore, you must choose a fast, safe and reliable web hosting service provider.
Site Search
This feature is used to track searches by visitors while on your website. Of course, if your website doesn’t have a search feature, there will be no data that appears here.
Events.
The thing that is meant by ‘Events’ on Google Analytics is a visitor activity, such as clicking a button, watching videos, downloading files, and so on. If you arrange to track these things, the data will appear in this report.
Publisher
If you monetize your website using Google Adsense or Ad Exchange, you can integrate the features of the AD Manager to Google Analytics. All data related to advertisements aired on your website will appear here.
5. Track Marketing Results with Conversion Tracking
If you set goals on Google Analytics on your website, then you can also track the percentage of success. This menu can be accessed under the Conversion menu.
You can set Goals on the Admin menu> Gouals> New Goal. There are four types of conversion that can be tracked using Google Analytics:
- Destination: This goal will be achieved if visitors arrive at a particular page, such as product pages or invoice pages.
- Event: This goal will be achieved if an event/event is activated, the event that can be traced can be in the form of shares, watching videos, opening links, and so on.
- Duration: This goal will be achieved if visitors are on your website for a certain period.
- Pages / Screens Per Session: This Goal will be achieved if visitors have seen some specified number of their visits.
Google Analytics also associates other data to track conversions that occur on the website, so you can get more specific information.
For example, you can track the amount of purchase made by visitors from Jakarta in the Audience Report> Geo> Location. You can also see the number of conversions made by visitors from social media on the Acquisition menu> All Traffics> Source / Media.
In general, this menu is used to track the success of marketing businesses that have been done. Therefore, the most commonly used report is the Goals report. Under the Goals report, there are several sub-menus like the following:
Overview.
This sub-menu contains a concise and comprehensive report about the conversion that occurs on your website. This report is very useful for comparing website performance as a whole from one period with another period.
Goal URLs
In this report, you can see data about the URL performance you have set into the final destination.
Funnel Visualization
For sequential or sequential goals, this report can help you track how the pattern of visitors fulfills each stage of conversion on your website.
Reverse Goal Path
This report can help you track the last three pages that visitors see before being converted. This report is very useful for websites with not sequential goals because it can conclude which pages are more effective in converting visitors.
Goal Flow.
This report is very similar to Funnel Visualization, the difference in this report you can see all the sources of visitor conversion visually.
Conclusion
Google Analytics is a tool that is very useful for all types of websites. All data provided is fairly accurate, and if it is well processed it can be a source of website development both in terms of SEO or business.
Don’t forget to re-read the complete guide using this Google Analytics if you intend to apply it to your website or blog.
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