What is google analytics :
Google analytics is a free analytics software from google. It helps the people understand what happening on the website and get actionable insights. Initially it was developed by Urchin Software Corp which was acquired by google on 2005. Google also offers a paid version of it with more features but for this course you will be learning more about the free suite which is still used by the large number of people and organisations.
Google analytics is one of the few centralized tracking software available in the market. So you can ask what’s the difference between centralized tracking software and standalone software. And why should someone use centralized tracking software over standalone tracking software.
Here’s the reasons to use google analytics :
- It will help you to get the birds-eye views of what’s happening with the website.
- Unlike the standalone tracking (offered by ad words and Facebook advert manager) it track the results per session,means if the user signs up for the same things 5 times for 1 clicks google ad words measure 5 conversions whereas google analytics measure 1 conversion
- Ad analytics only shows the commercial data ( like cpc, cost per conversion) but doesn’t show what page the user visits after landing page and what is the page user exists form the ad campaign- all those information can be found on the google analytics.
- It shows the customer behavior data on the websites ( like bounce rate, pages per visit) which other standalone tracking doesn’t show
How to setup for the website?
Step 1 :
You need to create a google account. After that, you need to have a google account to sign up for google analytics. Once you have google account, you can visit this page :
And then go the tracking code section and then you will find the tracking code like this:
Step 3:
Remember to install the tracking code in the head section <head> of the web page . You can use developer help to install this tracking code.
For example, if you use word press site you can use this plugin to install google analytics
You may use wordpress plugin.
How to create goals in google analytics
Goals are the specific actions or page views that happens on site which you want to track. For example, to my website the number of signups for the free digital marketing course is the metric that i care about.
So I create goals that will triggered whenever the user is signed up for the free digital marketing course.
In addition you can also get the number of goal completions for various time periods , various devices, various city, various state and what not !. There’s a plenty of options available.
Here’s the few basic metrics to start with in google analytics
Bounce Rate:
It’s a % of users who visits who drops off after visiting one page.
Average time on site
This metric is shows the average time spent by the users on the website. This usually will be displayed like mm:ss, or hh:mm:ss. User should spend more time on the site, which is a good indication that the website is relevant and useful.
Pages per session
This metric will help you understand how interlinked and how navigable is the website. This metric will be shows as 1.X , 2.X ,3.X etc. More is value is better the site.
Page Views
This is the metric that shows how many page views the site had served so far. This is vanity metric that doesn’t have much value.
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