Introduction:
Web analytics is a vital part in digital marketing career that has become indispensable for the growth of businesses. Fortunately, Google gives us an incredible free tool to make good use of the humongous amount of data generated about the behavior of the target audience groups on the Internet. Before searching for digital marketing agencies near me, you could read this article to understand how to configure Google Analytics for your business. The digital marketing agency will likely ask if you have access to Google Analytics and would you be up for sharing them before they start working.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is an extremely helpful and free web analytics service provided by Google that tracks, analyses, and reports website traffic. It is a part of the Google Marketing Platform brand launched in 2005 after Google acquired Urchin. This free-to-use tool has enormous potential in terms of business growth.
How does Google Analytics help?
Let me explain. Your website is the fertile ground for thriving digital activity. When users engage online with your marketing campaigns, such as advertisements on social media, they visit your website. Hence your website can provide you with a comprehensive idea about the effectiveness of your campaigns that promote your products and services on the Internet. And every local digital marketing agency near me is using Google Analytics to evaluate its digital marketing attempts.
How does it work?
Google Analytics tracks user activity through tracking codes embedded into your website’s code. They record user behavior and attributes like gender, age, and interests and send them to a server. It aggregates the data generated on four levels:
- User-level (user action data)
- Session level (individual visit data)
- Page-view level (page visit data)
- Event level (data about clicks, views, etc.)
Two types of data are available on Google Analytics:
- User acquisition data is about users before they visit the site.
- User behavior data is about users when they visit the site.
Google Analytics provides the data in two forms:
- Metrics are actual statistics from data about user behavior on the website generated by Google.
- Dimensions are different viewpoints to look at the numbers based on your objectives and interests.
Configuring Google Analytics for Local Businesses
Every SEO company near me is using these steps to maximize the utility of Google Analytics and have better results. Follow them and see results in no time.
Filtering bots and spiders
Researchers have found out that bots and spiders comprise above 25% of all website traffic. Anyone can see bot traffic on their site by minutely studying their Google Analytics account. Google allows us to exclude that while analyzing traffic.
By going to Admin > View > View Settings, you’ll find a box that reads ‘Bot Filtering.’ This utility gets information from the Interaction Advertising Bureau and filters out recorded bots and spiders.
Filtering personal traffic and spam
If your data is inaccurate, it isn’t beneficial. So you need to filter out the spam and personal traffic to have precise data guiding your SEO strategies. Although there will be a certain margin of error, the point is to minimize it. If you go to Admin > View > View Filters, you’ll be able to add various filters and have accurate information.
You need to filter out your IP address to deduct the personal traffic from the data. Find out your IP by searching ‘What is my IP’ on Google. After that, you can filter out traffic from your IP.
Setting up goals
Every local SEO company near me is setting up the goals on Google Analytics because that allows them to track their success according to the fulfillment of these goals. You have to go to Admin > View > Goals and set up a plan with a New Goal.
There are several types of goals that can be set up according to the requirements of your businesses like:
Destination based goals
You can set up destination-based goals to know what sort of websites are bringing you traffic.
Event-based goals
Event-based goals are a bit more complicated. They help you analyze events like form fill-ups, button clicks, video views, and more.
Connecting to Google Search Console
SEO consultants near me always connect Google Analytics to Google Search Console to leverage both the resources. GSC has a lot of valuable data on organic search, search queries, the performance of pages, rankings, and a lot of other information.
After setting up your Google Search Console account, go to Admin > Property > Property Settings. You will find an option to connect your Google Search Console account.
Using UTM tracking codes
SEO specialists near me never forget to use UTM codes. They are an effective way to track whether the marketing campaign is a success or not with the help of information like the sources of users and website visitors and the effectiveness of campaigns.
You can add UTM tracking codes in your Google My Business profile to accurately see the categorization of website visitors coming in through GMB.
Final words
Configuring Google Analytics is just the beginning of the way of developing a configuration of powerful analytics platforms to generate accurate data to produce valuable insights about your digital marketing campaigns. You must remember that knowledge is power. There is immense power in website data that can work wonders for your business. We hope that this guide will prove to be beneficial and will help you configure Google Analytics to derive maximum utility out of it.