Google Analytics is a powerful tool designed to analyse all data concerning a website — traffic pattern, visitors, bounce rate, you name it. It is one of the most useful web analytics applications today, and it’s free, so there’s no reason why website owners shouldn’t take advantage.

If you are a business selling a product, or a blogger writing to inform and entertain, analytics provides insight you can use to improve traffic and conversion. Still not convinced? Continue reading.

Gain intel on your visitors

Analytics can be used as a tool for market research because it shows the demographics and geographic location of your visitors, the language they speak, and the computers and browsers they use to find you.

Other useful data includes:

  • The time of day you get the most visitors — Knowing this helps you pick the best time for publishing posts or releasing new items for sale.
  • Average viewing time — This tells you which pages are more effective and engaging than others.
  • How they found you — This could be through a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing, or a social media network like Facebook or Twitter.Knowing this can help you decide which channels to focus on.
  • Goals reached — You can establish and keep track of different goals in your Analytics account. This could be purchases, e-book downloads, registrations, contact form submissions, etc.

Find parts of your website that need improvement

Because Analytics keeps track of the time spent by users on each page of your website, you will have a rough idea on pages they like, and pages that don’t get much love. You can also see how high your bounce rate is, which is the percentage of visitors that come to your site and leave without viewing any other pages.

Being aware of these figures helps you decide on a game plan, such as improving the look of a landing page so visitors would stay and be compelled to look at other pages, or changing the content of your website so readers would be more engrossed.

Track campaigns that drive traffic to your website

It can be quite messy to track all your online campaigns and near impossible to know which ones are most effective without Analytics. Through the use of link tracking, you can have every campaign accurately monitored.

The results are collected in a section in Analytics called “Campaigns”. Under each campaign are useful metrics including sales resulting from that particular campaign, goals, bounce rate, page views, and more. The data helps you understand what’s working, so you could maximise effective campaigns, and stop ineffective ones.

Find out if your SEO works

As previously mentioned, Google Analytics determines pages that attract the most search engine traffic. Having this information is handy, as you can start working on improving user experience on your most popular pages.

Integrates easily with other Google programs

Google Analytics works well with Google AdWords, Adsense, and Search Console. Connecting Analytics with all these other programs only takes a few simple steps. You can see more detailed insight in Analytics once connections are in place, and you won’t have to switch programs to see much of the data you need. Reports are also very easy to generate.

Google Analytics is more than just a statistics tool with interesting graphs. It presents useful data that you can use to launch effective campaigns. Bambrick, a digital marketing agency in Brisbane, has led successful campaigns in Google AdWords, Remarketing, SEO, Facebook, Instagram, and many more. We have helped over 500 individual businesses in our 15 years of trade. Talk to us about your next campaign today.