Google Analytics is a web analytics service by Google that helps its users to track and report website traffic. This is an easy and free way to see the number of visitors to a website. If you have a website, it is possible that you have thousands or millions of visitors on your website, but it is of no use if you have no idea who they are and what are they looking for.

Google Analytics comes into the picture at this place where you want to get more details on your audience.  The tool helps you to make the most of your visitors and turn them into customers. Google Analytics helps you to get key insights about your website performance and what can be done by the business to generate high results. The tool allows you to track everything starting with the amount of traffic that is generated from the website and from where the traffic is coming.

The tool helps you to even monitor social media activities, identify trends, track the mobile application traffic, and integrate other data sources to help you make well-informed business decisions.

Below are the steps to use Google Analytics for your website.

Step 1: Use your Google Account to sign in to your Google Analytics

Step 2: Click on the Admin button on the bottom left sidebar of your dashboard.

Step 3: Create an account or select an account.

Step 4: Create a property by clicking on the drop-down menu.

Step 5: Click on the Website option and Add your website’s URL.

Step 6: Select your Industry

Step 7: Select your Time Zone

Step 8: Select Get Tracking ID

Step 9: Install Tracking ID on your website.

Step 10: Finish

These steps will help you set up your Google Analytics account for your website.

Here are some of the technical terms that you should be familiar with while setting an account.

Account: This is the place that gives you access to your dashboard. This allows you to set up multiple properties in a single account. You can also have multiple accounts for different properties.

Property: The website or the mobile app that you want to track.

Tracking ID: This is a unique code that is assigned to your website that allows Google Analytics to track it.

Conversion: The visitors that gets converted into customers.

Channel/ Traffic Source: This is the place from which your traffic comes. These can be referrals or links that are coming from other websites. These can also be traffic coming from social media and emails.

Session Duration: This is the time that is spent by the visitors on a website.

Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of the visitors that stay on your website for a short duration. These people leave the website after visiting a single page.

Landing Page: This is the first page that is viewed by a visitor when they are on your website.

Event: This is a specific visitor behaviour, such as when a visitor clicks on an advertisement, downloads a file or pauses a video.

Organic Search: When the visitors visit your website accessing a link that is present on a search results page.

Keywords: These are the search words that are filled in by the visitors to find your website or on a search engine.

Segment: This is a method to filter data by category and by the types of visitors.

Active Users: This feature keeps track of the number of visitors that are actually active on your website. This can be within a specific time period, such as a week, a month, or 15 days. This will also show you the pages visited by the active visitors so that you can determine what is attracting them to your website.

Acquisition: This is the option that shows the Google Analytics user from where the traffic comes in. This can be from emails, search engines, or social media.

Landing Page: This option shows you what are the pages that are most frequently visited by your website users. This helps you to track down from where they are coming and what is working on those top pages to attract the customers. Reports under the landing page option will show you all the details.

Lifetime Value: This option is present under the audience tab. These reports track the visitors throughout their lifetime. Right from their first visits to the conversations, return visits, future buys, and much more. This option helps you to understand what are the factors that helped these visitors convert into customers. You will also find the factors that made them keep coming back so that you are able to implement changes in your marketing activities.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that helps you integrate your social media accounts under the social settings option. The tool also gives you an option to add other members of your team so that they can view the Google Analytics results and help to make informed decisions.

Source – Business news daily