Businesses want to work smarter and have a better understanding of where they get traffic from and how people behave when they reach their site. The number one search engine, Google, has a number of free tools to help understand how your business is performing in the digital world. One of the most important tools they offer is Google Analytics
What Is Google Analytics And What Is It For?
Setting up Google Analytics for you site is an easy way to get critical information on your website’s performance and visitors. In Google Analytics you can view the number of website visitors, where they came from, and how they behave when they reach your site. After Google Analytics is set up, you can track and measure goals that you set up for your site like visitors and conversions.
Why Should I Use Google Analytics?
Google Analytics has become a popular tool in digital marketing because it is vital to track and understand a massive amount of information about your website. This in-depth information about your website traffic can help you make educated decisions on which marketing campaign is working best and where you should allocate your marketing budget. With Google Analytics you can see where you get the most traffic from, where your site is generating leads from, the demographics of leads, how people engage with each page, and much more.
Your website is where the majority of sales or leads will start or come from. Understanding how people interact with your website and how to make your site more efficient will make your business more efficient.
Set Up Google Analytics
Now that we walked through why Google Analytics is important for your business, here is how to set up Google Analytics for your website.
1. Start A Google Tag Manager Account
While some businesses skip this step, we highly recommend using Google Tag manager on your site to integrate Google Analytics. Google Tag Manager takes the information on your website and sends it to other platforms like Google Analytics and Facebook. This will help you save time in the future by removing the time spent on writing code and allows you to add tags easily.
To start a Google Tag Manager account click here. Make sure that you install the container in your website as instructed by Google Tag Manager and remove any pre-existing tags.
2. Create A Google Analytics Account
Once you have a Google Tag Manager account, you will need to create a separate Google Analytics account. You can create a Google Analytics account here. After creating the account a unique tracking ID will be created for you. This tracking ID is code that allows Google Analytics to get information from your site for your use. Once you have your tracking ID from Google Analytics, you can move on to the next step.
3. Integrate Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
The next step is to integrate Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. You will need the unique tracking ID from the previous step.
Through Google Tag Manager you will be able to customize the configuration and triggering of your tag for your entire site. Configuration of your tags determines where the information the tag gathers is sent. Triggering is the event or action that you want your tag to collect information on.
From the Workspace Overview screen click on New Tag, click Tag Configuration, and choose Universal Analytics. From there you can select what Track Type you want and create a new Google Analytics Setting Variable. Google Tag Manager gives the ability to customize a great deal further for any tags you are creating. If you are an ecommerce business there are a few additional steps to get the most out of Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
4. Format Goals in Google Analytics
It is important to set key performance indicators (KPIs) for your marketing plan and business and here is where Google Analytics can help track that data. This is an important step in setting up Google Analytics for your site to make benchmarking and optimizations easier. In addition, this makes your KPIs easily recognizable for other team members that want to review results. While Google Analytics tracks a large amount of data on your site, this is where you can specify what specific events or actions are important for your business.
To get started, from your Google Analytics account, click on the Admin or gear icon and under All Web Site Data click on Goals. From here you can choose from a variety of goal templates and customize to your specific goals. Some of the templates include destination, duration on site, pages per session, or events. With some additional customization you can set up conversion goals for purchases from your site, form fills, or click to call actions.
With the ability to customize so much, setting up metrics in Google Analytics can be a daunting task. It is best to start with the KPIs that are most important for your business and marketing plan.
Next Steps After Google Analytics Is Set Up
Now that you are capturing data on your website performance, there is so much you can do. Analyzing data to make better decisions for marketing and advertising will be much clearer. After setting up Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, there are few things you can do to take it one step further.
Add Your Website to Google Search Console
Google Search Console gives you the ability for gain valuable search data on your website. This will include which keywords your website ranks for on search engines, when Google does an analysis of your website, and what pages like to your site. This is a great tool to start looking at where you stand for organic searches and how you can improve.
Add Permissions For Team Members
Typically there are multiple people that can get useful data from Google Analytics for making decisions or just benchmarking the business goals. Adding additional users from the Admin tab is very easy, but make sure you are giving the permissions at the correct level, such as the account versus property. From here you can give varying permissions to read and analyze, edit, or manage users.
Link Your Google Ads
From what Google has shared with us, linking Google Analytics with your Google ad account will help track the buying cycle and how users first interact with your marketing to how they finally convert. This is very helpful for connecting the dots from your Google ads to final conversions. Linking Google Analytics and your ad account will also allow you to be more effective and optimize for conversions instead of just clicks.
Create Dashboards And Customize Your Views
We are no strangers to providing weekly or monthly updates and reports on the same metrics. Creating dashboards and customized views makes the task of analyzing and reporting much easier. If you are looking for just social traffic or Google Ad performance, customize your views so that you see the metrics that matter the most to you.
Google Analytics will only track the data from your website after you set it up. Any data from before that day will be lost information that could have been used so the sooner you can start the better. While it may seem like an overwhelming task to ensure the code is placed properly on your site and both Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics are configured properly, know that you don’t have to do it alone. As we mentioned, any good marketing plan will have KPIs and goals that it is being benchmarked against. This is why we ensure we have the right analytical tools in place, like Google Analytics, and properly set up for any of the businesses we work with.
Marketing Qubed is here it help bring all sides of the equation together for effective marketing that provides real results. Our experience, creativity, and skill will take care of the details while you can focus on the big picture. If you would like to know how Marketing Qubed can help maximize your marketing efforts, call us at (248) 677-1240 or just fill out the form on our site and we can make the first move.
