When you create a website, Google Analytics is a must-have Google tool. Because, by installing Google Analytics on your website, you can easily monitor web traffic.
However, it’s not just traffic that you can find out. This platform also provides various data about the performance of a site. Starting from where the traffic sources, visitor demographic data, popular content, and others.
You can use all of this data as material for evaluating content and websites. For example, you can decide which content needs to be rewritten or optimized. What plugins need to be added. What technical aspects need to be improved. Which content or products attract visitors.
Important Terms in Google Analytics
Before talking technically about how to use Google Analytics, it’s a good idea to learn the terms first. Because, Google Analytics has lots of menus and sections.
Without knowing a few important terms well, you might get confused and not use this service to its full potential.
Here are some important terms in Google Analytics:
– Organizations ━> When you have a lot of products and metrics to measure, Organization is grouping them all in one “folder”. Through Organization, you can use several Google tools at once such as Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Optimize. You can also manage users, data access, and integration between products.
– Accounts ━> Is your access point to the Analytics service. You need at least one account to be able to use and monitor metrics from Google Analytics.
– Properties ━> Properties are designations for objects whose metrics are monitored by Analytics. The object in question can be a website, mobile application, or device. Later, Analytics will issue a unique tracking ID for each monitored property.
– Views ━> Names for the specific data you want in a property. For example, you can create each specific view of overall web traffic, Google AdWords traffic, subdomain traffic, and so on.
– Session ━> Interaction between the user and the web page within a certain period. Generally, Google Analytics counts interactions until the user is inactive (does not interact) for 30 minutes.
– Bounce rate ━> The percentage or number of visitors who leave the web after viewing just one page.
How to Use Google Analytics
After you understand the terms above, we will immediately discuss how to read Google Analytics data. Actually, the six ways below are only a small part of the total data that Analytics can get.
However, for starters, these six ways are enough to introduce you to Google Analytics. These six methods are also more than enough to analyze the performance of a simple web or blog.
1. Realtime
In the Realtime > Overview menu, you can check realtime web metrics. When you open the web, application, or your device at that time, the recorded data can be accessed immediately
For a more complete view, you can access the Locations, Traffic Sources, Content, Events, and Conversions submenu under Realtime.
2. Audience Demographics / Audience Demographics
Who visited your website? Where do they come from? What topics of discussion are they interested in?
It can all be known with Google Analytics. In fact, compared to the other four main menus, the Audience section provides very complete insight.
To see a simple view, aka a summary of audience data, you can go to Audience > Overview.
Apart from the data above, you can also find out specific information about the audience. Click Audience > Demographics to find out the gender and age of the audience.
You can also find out what topics your audience likes via Audience > Interests. Through this menu, you can find out what topics your visitors are interested in (Affinity Categories), what products are in demand and ready to buy (In-Market Segments), and both (Other Categories).
3. Visitor Behavior
Don’t think that visitor interaction with web content cannot be mapped. Through Audience > Behavior, you can find out how the audience actually responds to each page on the website.
Because this data is very important for you to know, we will discuss this section specifically. There are five types of data that will be discussed, namely new visitors vs. past visitors, frequency and recency, engagement, session quality, and possible conversions.
4. All traffic / Overall traffic
The amount of traffic is an important aspect that you need to know. This data shows how much your website is visited in a certain period of time. From here, you can see how popular your website is.
However, the amount of traffic differs from the number of unique visitors. In this section, Google only counts the number of times the page is opened. If a visitor opens a page up to 10 times, that number of opens will also be counted.
To find out all traffic, you can click the Acquisition > All Traffic menu.
Under All Traffic there are still options for channels, treemaps, source/medium, and referrals. You can use these four options to see in detail web traffic.
For example, in the Channels section, you can see which marketing channels are contributing traffic to the web.
In the Treemaps or Hierarchy Map section, you get a visual aid to see traffic trends on the web. This kind of display is more intuitive. Besides, you can also know which data is relatively important, the relationship between two different data.
Then in the Source/Medium or Source/Media option, there is a list of marketing channels along with specific sources that contribute traffic to the web. You can know, for example, what social media works and in what way (referral, cpc or organic).
The last option is Referrals or Referrals which contain the website address. The web address mentioned, most likely, contains a link to your website.
5. Traffic Sources
There are many ways to get to your website. The most common way is to type the URL into the address bar of the browser. But it could also be that visitors find the website via search engines, other websites that provide backlinks, or advertisements.
You can find out the “walks” that visitors take with Google Analytics. By knowing this data, you can evaluate traffic sources. You can also use data as material for consideration in making promos or strategies to reach an audience.
To find out the source of website traffic, click Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.
6. Website Speed
Apart from Google PageSpeed Insights and other SEO tools, you can also check website speed via Google Analytics. For that, just click Behavior > Site Speed.
Google also provides ideal recommendations for page loading. Click the Speed Suggestions or Speed Suggestions section. Choose which pages you want to know about. Then click the link in the Page Speed Suggestion column.
Later, you will be immediately taken to the Google PageSpeed Insights pop-up. This pop-up will analyze the requested web page. In no time, you’ll find workable suggestions to speed up load times.
Conclusion
There are many kinds of data that can be obtained with Google Analytics.
But as a beginner, you need to know at least six things: realtime, visitor demographics, visitor behavior, traffic volume, traffic sources, and website speed.
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