What Can I Track Using Google Analytics?

There are few opportunities in the marketplace to establish an actual competitive advantage through your services or products. One of the most powerful sources for gaining such advantage that business leaders can lean into and achieve measurable improvements to the bottom line is to access your business’s digital performance metrics through the Google Analytics platform.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that tracks and analyzes various aspects of your website’s performance. With it, you can gain valuable insights into your audience’s behavior and identify areas for improvement.

In this blog post, we’ll explore some of the Google analytics metrics tracked using the Google marketing platform and how to use that information to gain page views, boost your SEO, and make overall improvements to your website’s performance.

Why Google Analytics Tracking is Important

Google Analytics 4, the current iteration of the tool, is accessible through the Google Marketing Platform. It is a powerful tool that small business owners can use to gather and analyze valuable insights into your website’s performance.

By tracking your audience demographics, behavior, traffic sources, conversions, and e-commerce metrics, you can identify patterns and trends that can help you improve the user experience and increase conversions.

It’s essential to have consistent and regular monitoring and analysis of your Google Analytics data, to ensure that you are keeping up with the latest trends and changes in your audience and website performance. By staying on top of this information, you can make data-driven decisions that will help improve the overall success of your website.

Using the Google Analytics Dashboard

New users of Google Analytics have several ways of accessing their company’s Google Analytics account:

• Through a standalone account at Google’s Marketing Platform
• Through your business’s Google Ads account

Unlike Google’s Search Console which is focused on search engine tactics for improving visibility and boosting SERP performance, the Google Analytics tool is focused on your data as a business owner. It provides you with information about landing page and website visitors and how those visitors interact with your page. There are a number of important metrics that business owners can access to learn more about the performance of their digital assets.

Using Audience Demographics to align to your target audience

One of the more basic things you can track with Google Analytics are audience demographics. This includes metrics such as user location, age, and gender. This data can be found in the “Audience” section of Google Analytics under the “Demographics” subcategory.

By understanding your audience’s demographics, you can tailor your content and marketing efforts to appeal to your ideal audience better. For example, suppose you find that a large portion of your audience is located in a specific country or region. In that case, you may consider creating content that explicitly targets that location.

Similarly, if you find that a large portion of your audience is a certain age group, you can create content that appeals to that age group and tailor website SEO to boost organic traffic from specific sources.

You can also segment your audience according to their interests, which is available under the “Interests” subcategory in the Audience section. This data can provide you with information about what topics your audience is most interested in, which can help you to create content that aligns with those interests, boost brand credibility, and gain more returning visitors.

Tracking Audience Behavior to determine opportunities to improve your site

Another important aspect of your audience that you can track with Google Analytics is their behavior on your website. This includes the ability to track how visitors arrive at your website, whether through search engine or a referral link; how long they stayed on your website; which pages they visited; and whether they’re a new or returning user.

This data can be found in the “Audience” section of Google Analytics, under the “Behavior” subcategory. By understanding your audience’s behavior on your website, you can identify patterns and trends that can help you improve the user experience.

For example, it can help you discover that a landing page in ineffectual and a large portion of your audience is leaving your website after visiting that specific page. In that case, you may want to consider revising the content or design of that page to make it more engaging.

You can also track the bounce rate, the percentage of visitors who leave your website after only visiting a single page. A high bounce rate can indicate that your website is not providing a good user experience or that the content on your website is not relevant to the visitor’s interests.

Traffic sources reveals issues in your SEO

Another important aspect of your website’s performance that you can track with Google Analytics is your traffic sources. Similar to how how the Audience Behavior subcategory tracks how users arrive, you can use get a deeper insight into traffic from the Acquisition section of the Google Analytics dashboard. This includes information such as if your website visitors are coming from search engines, referral sites, or social media.

Found in the “Acquisition” section of Google Analytics, under the “All Traffic” subcategory, users can use this data to identify which marketing efforts are most effective in driving traffic to your website.

A great example of what the data can reveal is that you might find that a large portion of your traffic comes from a specific referral site. In that case, you may want to consider reaching out to that site to see if you can establish a partnership or collaboration, increasing your chances for engaging with customers where they’re already discovering your brand in some way.

An extremely important source of traffic in modern marketing campaigns, it’s crucial that you have insight into how the effectiveness of your social media campaigns by checking the “Social” subcategory under the Acquisition section. This will give you an idea of the number of visitors coming to your website from social media platforms and which platforms drive the most traffic.

Conversion tracking helps get the results you need on your website

Another important feature of Google Analytics is tracking conversions on your website. A conversion is an action you want your website visitors to take, such as filling out a contact form, making a purchase, or subscribing to a newsletter.

To track conversions, you’ll need to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics. This can be done by creating a “Goal” in the “Conversions” section of Google Analytics. You can set up different goals for different actions you want your visitors to take and assign a value to each goal. Once you’ve set up your goals, you can track how many conversions you’re getting and which pages or traffic sources are driving the most conversions.

By understanding your conversion rate, you can identify areas for improvement and optimize your website to increase conversions. For example, if you find that a specific page has a low conversion rate, you can experiment with different elements on that page, such as the call-to-action button or form fields, to see if you can improve the conversion rate.

eCommerce tracking available for online shops

If you have an eCommerce website, you can also track specific eCommerce metrics such as revenue, transactions, and average order value. This can be found under the “Conversions” section, under the “Ecommerce” subcategory.

This data can provide valuable insights into the performance of your online store and can help you identify areas for improvement. For example, suppose you find that a certain product or category is not performing well. In that case, you can analyze the data to see if there are any issues with the product page or if the product is not being advertised effectively.