Google Analytics - What Is It and How Can I Use It?

Integrating the multiple platforms of your company’s online presence—website, blog, social media—is a way to seamlessly drive traffic to your site. Managing your business’ online presence, though, can be tasking on its own, let alone trying to assess if your initiatives are working. With the help of Google Analytics, you now have easy access into the online world of your business. 

Google Analytics is a robust website management tool that provides key insights into the inner workings of your website and social media behavior. Tracking the performance of your online accounts can be a powerful tool for your business’ progress. To get started using Google Analytics, we’ve broken things down into a few simple steps. 

Goals Goals Goals

Establish objectives for your social media use that are in line with your marketing and business strategies as a whole. Follow the tried-and-true S.M.A.R.T goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) outline to set intentions for business growth.

Sign up

Get acquainted with Google Analytics-- you two will become close friends. To start learning more about your online website and/or moblie app traffic, visit google.com/analytics and sign in or create a new account.

Track it

Once your Google Analytics account has been configured, you can access the site-specific property ID. This tracking code is your key to collecting data on your website and can be implemented in two ways:

• Google Tag Manager: This method helps to streamline overall tag management on your site.
• Adding the tracking code directly to your website. With a little HTML coding, your tracking ID can be used to follow online progress across all your pages.

Set up Google Analytics goals

Think about your company’s website. What are some business goals you have for improving the effectiveness of your online platforms? These objectives can be directly recorded in Google Analytics to help your business visibly establish goals and reach them.

What does it mean?

Google Analytics has created eight Social Analytics reports to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your social media efforts up to this point.

• Overview reports
• Network referrals
• Data Hub Activity
• Landing pages
• Trackbacks
• Conversions
• Plugins
• Users flow

Report back

You’ve spent the time collecting the data from the eight different analytics reports, now evaluate it with your original goals in mind. Has social media effectively brought more traffic to your business’ website? Did you gain a specific number of new followers? Whatever your objectives were, the reports from Google Analytics give you the ability to see the strengths and weaknesses of your online presence. Use this information in a progress presentation to share relevant data of where your business’ online presence stands and how to continue moving forward.

For step-by-step breakdowns and videos on how to use Google Analytics, click here.

Jellyfish, a digital marketing company and tenant of Merritt Properties, offers in-depth training courses on how to better understand and operate Google Analytics. For more information on Jellyfish and the training classes offered, visit their website.