Nailed Digital

The Basics of Google Analytics you should know

One of the most vital aspects to track on your website, is information about your visitors. You may have hundreds of thousands of visitors, but if you don’t know anything about them, it’s meaningless.

Google Analytics offers an easy and free way to analyze and track the number of visitors to your site, offers insights into how your website is performing and what you can do to improve your reach and achieve your goals.

With excellent metrics like conversion rates, traffic sources, engagement, audience demographics and reporting tools, you can track everything. You can record how much traffic your website is getting, where that traffic is coming from and how visitors are behaving. Your social media activities can also be monitored, and it’s effortless to identify trends, track mobile app traffic and integrate data sources to assist you to make well-informed business decisions.

Here’s how you can use the data to your advantage to boost your digital marketing and SEO:

  • Create a Google account. Go to google.com/analytics. Sign in or Create an Account on the upper left corner. If you’re already signed in, click on Access Google Analytics. Fill in the required information – account name, website name, URL, industry, time zone and data-sharing settings.
  • Click on Get Tracking ID to finish setting up your account.
  • Google Analytics can be integrated on your website through a <script> tracking code. This information is crucial in evaluating how effective your SEO strategies are and see where you can make improvements. The tracking code must be on every page you wish to track:
  • Copy and paste the code directly into your website template OR create a “analyticstracking.php” file with the code and add <?php include_once(“analyticstracking.php”) ?> after your template’s <body> tag.
  • Check with your web host, website developer or blog platform that Google Analytics has been integrated.
  • Traffic – find out where your visitors are coming from. The Acquisitions tab on the left sidebar will be able to display all traffic sources, such as channels, referrals and organic searches. You’ll also be able to find which search terms visitors are using that led them to your website.
  • Custom reports – allow you to configure metrics based on your own categories that are not included in the default settings. For example, if you own an online store, this section allows you to track traffic based on things such as size, color and product SKUs. You can also integrate external data like your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Go to the Customization tab and create your metrics.
  • Social media – It’s vital that you track your results of your social media marketing campaign.  Google Analytics integrates social media into your tracking metrics. You won’t be able to add your Google Analytics tracking code to your social media accounts, but you can add them under Social Settings. For example, if you own a YouTube channel, activities are tracked by adding your account using your YouTube URL.
  • Events – allow you to track customizable interactions users have with your site in real-time. This can include ad clicks, white paper downloads, or video views. You can further customize data by viewing “Events (Last 30 min)” to see events in the past half hour or click an event category to see activity specific to that category.
  • Content – provides insight into what page users are landing on when visiting your site and how long they are staying there. You can see the page title, URL, and the percent of active users on a specific page.
  • Conversions – for every strategy you implement, someone is going to want to know “did it increase conversions?” In the conversions report, you are able to view the top goals, how many users completed that goal, and the percentage of users who completed that goal – all in real-time or in the last 30 minutes.

If you want other members of your team to view your Google Analytics account, you simply add their email addresses. On the Admin tab in the left sidebar, choose an account and click on User Management. Add new users and set permissions.

You can limit users to read and analyse traffic only or give them admin-level access to do things like edit your settings. Adding users also makes it easy to present reports and collaborate.

Please get in touch if you need help with adding Google Analytics to your website: