What Does Google Analytics Track?
Google Analytics is one of the most popular, free tools you can use to track valuable data regarding your website. It provides information on your user demographics, traffic sources, conversion rates, and engagement levels.
If you want to learn SEO and analytics tracking, then it's well worth investigating the subject further!
You can drill down into all sorts of activities, including bounce rates and pages per session. The insights you can get from the data provided can help you develop improvements to your site's overall design and functionality.
We're now on the fifth iteration - Google Analytics 5. So let's explore what you can do with the tool to maximize analytics information usage and work on measuring performance through conversion tracking.
Choosing Your Conversion Analytics Weapon
Now, there are thousands of conversion tools, plug-ins, extensions, and apps. You might decide to compare Google Tag Manager vs Google Analytics before landing on the applications that best fit your goals.
But, for now, we're sticking with GA 5 to highlight some of the great functionality you should be using.
Organize Analytics Data By Importance
One of our favorite Google Analytics options is the ability to customize your dashboard and see the info that matters most.
Users can get detailed insights at a glance and compile as many dashboards as they want, each with many widgets.
For example, you might want to see one key piece of data. This could be a pie chart showing your performance metrics or a timeline. No matter the request, you can get a quick update on how things are going.
Evaluate Your Highest Performing Traffic Conversion Ads
Identifying those campaigns that are plugging away at driving up conversions is essential.
It's not helpful to have a ton of ads and see excellent results if you haven't a clue which are your top performers and which are dead weight!
Advanced Segments in Google Analytics allows you to track traffic from anywhere, this includes local searches and social media, so you can start to see exactly which aspects of your marketing campaign are delivering the results as intended.
Tracking by goal conversion data provides perfect insight into what's working for your site, and will also allow you to discover what you can leave behind.
Discover The Best Pages For Conversions
Bounce rates are a big deal in conversion optimization, and Google Analytics makes it easy to see which pages keep visitors the longest.
In essence, though, it's how you use that data that makes an impact!
Once you've got a firm idea of which CTAs, copy, graphics, or interactive content keep your customers interested, you can replicate that on other pages or feed the knowledge into new campaigns to build on your success.
Refine Audience Location Targeting
There are a crazy number of options when you're deciding where to spend your advertising dollars. For example:
- Google Ads
- Local directories
Add to the mix geographical targeting, and it's near impossible to accurately set up your ads without a core understanding of your audience’s locations.
Google Analytics allows you to see all your location demographics under the Visitors menu, with global data including time spent on the site and bounce rates.
If you're refining a specific ad for one country, for example, you can dig in even further and determine your conversion rate targets for that region.
Visualize What Your Customer Wants
The purpose of all web content is to cater to the user's needs. Seeing where visitors click most (and which internal links aren't worth the screen space) is a great way to manage your site structure.
Say you have a link you need customers to see and click.
You can position it within your site in the most popular pages, where customers spend the most time and pinpoint the types of visual layouts that capture the most attention.
Using Google Analytics Effectively
So - what does Google Analytics track?
Pretty much everything you need to know about how your customers are engaging with your content.
Google Analytics tracking gives you a world of personalized data at your fingertips, but it's all about applying that information before making your next move.
The question is: when you have access to every detail of customer actions that underpin your conversion performance, what will you do with that knowledge to take your business to the next level?