Kayle Larkin
Data driven SEM strategist. Dedicated to making analytics easy to understand and accessible to all business owners.
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Contents
Building a successful website without data is hard. Really hard. Like doing a tightrope walk blindfolded, it is possible—but it’s way easier with the lights on. Enter Google Analytics. Google Analytics turns on your website’s metaphorical lights to reveal who’s visiting it, how they’re finding it, and what they’re doing there. You can then use this data to confidently put one foot in front of the other to improve your website. In this guide, you’ll learn: Google Analytics 4(GA4) is a web analytics tool from Google that lets you track and measure user traffic and behavior on your website for free. It’s used by an estimated 28.8 millionwebsites, giving it an estimated 85.9% shareof the web analytics market. Here’s what it lookslike: Sidenote. GA4 replaced Universal Analytics in October 2020. It’s now the default for all new Google Analytics properties. You started your website to inform potential customers of your products or services and convert them into loyal customers. To do this effectively, you need to know where visitors come from, what they’re most interested in, and which touchpoints help turn them into customers. Recording and analyzing your data with GA4 will help you build digital marketing strategies to attract more visitors and make moremoney. Google Analytics is completely free but does have collection and configuration limits. Most SMEs will never exceed these limits. If you’re worried, look for the green checkmark next to each report title; this confirms that you’re not looking at sampled data in the report. Sidenote. Google Analytics 360 is the paid version of Google Analytics, which costs on average $150,000 per year. This service supports enterprise-level hit volumes of up to 500 million hits per month, plus implementation and technical support. Just as you can’t catch any fish without first casting your net, Google Analytics can’t collect data without being installed. So the sooner you get things set up, the better. Follow these three steps to install and test Google Analytics: Follow these instructions to create your account correctly: You need to install the GA tag on your website before Google Analytics can collect any data. The simplest way to do this depends on your website setup. Google has links to instructions for most CMS’ here. However, you’ll notice that not all platforms provide native support for the new “G-” ID in GA4. So in some cases, you’ll need to install manually by copying the full gtag.js code into the Alternatively, you can use Google Tag Manager (GTM). GTM is a somewhat advanced option for a beginner. Still, it’s my preferred method for adding on-page tags because I usually need to add multiple marketing performance tags (Facebook, HubSpot, etc.) If you want to learn more about Google Tag Manager, read this. Google Analytics tracking mistakesare common, so it’s crucial to test your setup before calling it aday. There are a few ways to do this, but the most straightforward way by far is using Google’s Tag Assistant Chrome extension. It’s a legacy product, but it still works and is still available for download. Here’s how to test your setup with the extension: An incorrectly installed tag will be sad andred: A correctly installed tag will be happy andgreen: Google Analytics automatically begins measuring traffic to your website and user interactions such as page scrolls, outbound clicks, site searches, video engagement, and file downloads. All of these auto-tracked events have the option to be marked as goals. Any additional goals, like form completions or phone calls, will need to be set up as an event usingGTM. In your GA4 property, click “configure” in the left-hand navigation (it looks like a tableicon). You simply slide the toggle named “mark as conversion” for the events you’d like to trigger conversions from this screen. With everything correctly set up, you’re probably wondering how to use this thing. This question is a difficult one to answer because there’s no single way to use Google Analytics. It can tell you hundreds of things about your website, so the way you use it will depend on the data you need toknow. For that reason, instead of trying to explain every single report here, I’m just going to cover the basics of how you can use GA4 to understand how users get to your site, what they do there, and the multichannel journey customers take to conversion. Acquisition reports tell you how users get to your site. In GA4, this is separated into two categories: User Acquisition and Traffic Acquisition. User acquisition reports are based on user engagement, while traffic acquisition is based on session engagement. This distinction is important because one user can have multiple sessions. For this reason, we will be explaining the User acquisition report. To get to the User acquisition report: You can segment your report by adding a comparison for User demographics, Device, or Custom Event like a specific coupon code. For now, let’s stick to a high-level view and keep this as “AllUsers”: The bar graph and scatter chart will automatically populate using the metrics you set in the tablebelow. In the example above, we chose “First user medium” for the dimension in the first column of the table. This shows us the source by which users were first acquired. For example, “organic” combines traffic from all organic sources: Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc. Engagement reports tell you what users do on your site. Engagement is measured by the average length of time your site was the focus in the browser, the number of unique users who scrolled at least 90% of the webpage, event count, and conversion count. Let’s take a look at just one of the Engagement reports: Pages and screens. To get to this report: Segment your report by adding a comparison for the marketing channel you’re looking to analyze. For example, include dimension “First user medium” with a value of “organic.” The bar graph and scatter chart will automatically populate using the metrics you set in the tablebelow. You can edit the dimension that will change the descriptive attribute or characteristic of data in column 1. For example, choosing “Page title and screen class” will show the page title, while “Page path + query string and screen class” will show theURL. Remaining columns in the table show “metrics.” A metric is a specific element of the dimension. For example, the dimension for “Page title” can be associated with a metric like new users, unique user scrolls, event counts, and other engagement metrics. The conversions report tells you which user activities are contributing to the success of your business. For an ecommerce store, this might be making a purchase. For a lead generation website, it might be submitting a contact form. In GA4, “goals” are measured as conversion events. The events data you see in your GA4 reports are triggered as users interact with your website. To get to the Conversions report: Sidenote. The Conversions report is technically a type of Engagement report, but I wanted to point it out because it’s one of the most important reports inGA4. The bar graph and scatter chart will automatically populate using the metrics you set in the tablebelow. Within the table, you will find events listed by name, number of associated conversions, total users, and event revenue. Click on the name of an event to open a report about that specific event. For an eCommerce store, you may want to see additional information about users that start the checkout process. To do that, click on the event name ‘begin_checkout.’ This will open a new report displaying the traffic source, number of conversions, and value for the selected eventonly. Click the dropdown menus in the upper left corner of the line chart to adjust metrics and dimensions in the report. For example, you can choose to view the number of conversions or event value. You can also choose to see the origin of the events by Event source, Event medium, Event campaign, overtime, or by Google Ads metrics. Add a secondary dimension, like city, to the explorer table by clicking the blue plus icon next to Column 1. Setting up Google Analytics and understanding how to configure reports is just the beginning. The advantage of learning how to use GA4 is that you can answer marketing questions with realdata. If you just installed Google Analytics, you need to wait at least 24-48 hours to allow data to populate in reports—although I recommend waiting at least 3-4 weeks before making a decision based on reports. Below are three simple ways you can use the data in Google Analytics to improve your website. At a very basic level, search engine marketing is about getting more engaged users to a site. To do this, you need to know which channels are bringing in the most traffic in the firstplace. Here’s how to find your best performing marketing channels: These marketing channels are bringing in the most new users (first-time visitors) to your website. Explore other metrics in the table to further understand each marketing channel’s contribution to your website’s performance. For example, clicking on engagement rate or average engagement time tells you which marketing efforts are winning visitors’ confidence. Engagement rateis the percentage of sessions that interacted with your website divided by all sessions. In contrast, engagement timeis the average length of time your website was in the forefront of the user’s browser window. To measure improvement add a comparison for your benchmark date range in the top right corner. Understanding which content brings in the most organic traffic will help you fine-tune your content marketing strategy. Here’s how to doit: These organic landing pages are bringing in the most new users (first-time visitors) to your website. You will want to create more articles likethese. On the flip side, click the header a second time to sort the table by ascending value. If there are organic landing pages with zero user traffic, you will want to reevaluate their relevance to your business goals and adjust your strategy accordingly. This may include republishing the contentor removing it from yoursite. If you’re investing in ads or multi-location SEO, you need location-specific insights to understand where to increase or decrease marketing efforts. You can use the Demographic details report forthis. Here’s how to doit: This report is very useful for fine-tuning Ads location targeting. If you want to get more specific with your segmentation, click the Countrydropdown in the first column of the table and change it to Town/City or Region. Setting up Google Analytics may feel like learning Klingon, but a basic report setup is all you need to get started. Investing twenty minutes of your day to learn how to set up GA4 and how to pull a handful of reports will pay for itself time and timeagain. Success is in thedata. Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.Is Google Analytics free?
1. Create and set up your Google Analytics account
2. Add the GA tag to your website
If you’re using WordPress…
If you’re usingWix…
If you’re using another CMS/platform…
<head>
section of your website.3. Test yoursetup
How to set up goaltracking
Acquisition
Engagement
Conversions
Improve traffic: Which channels bring in the most traffic?
Improve content effectiveness: Which pages bring in the most traffic?
Improve geographical targeting: Where do my best customers comefrom?
Final thoughts