Yes, you do need to set up Google Analytics on your web property to track and understand visitors. Data gathered using Google Analytics will give you useful insights that can be used for marketing purposes.
If you have ever wondered whether you need to set up Google Analytics for your website and why, this article is for you.
What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. It is used by website owners to understand traffic to their web property (website or an app). The data collected by Google Analytics is anonymous. This means that that It does not collect personally identifiable data like your name and email address.
What data does Google Analytics collect and how can I use it to help my business?
When a user visits your property, Google Analytics starts tracking the visitor and collecting data. At its basic set up, it collects data like:
- Time of visit, page visited, and time spent on each webpage
- Referring site details (such as the URI - universal resource locator, the user came through to arrive at your website)
- Type of web browser
- Type of operating system(OS)
- Network location and IP address
- Location (which country your audience lives in)
- Gender
With custom modifications, Google Analytics can be set up to collect more data, like:
- document downloads
- click on links leading to external websites
- scroll depth
- clicks on videos
A business can use this information to tweak its marketing efforts and/or troubleshoot the website.
Below are a few examples of how website owners may benefit from using the data collected by Google Analytics
Time of visit: A blog owner might find that information useful for deciding when to post the next update to the blog to maximize exposure and get more hits.
Time spent on each webpage: Visitors not spending enough time on a webpage may signal some design problems, namely lack of content or difficult navigation.
Location: Knowing which country most of their visitors live in, may prove interesting to a multi-national company and could be used to plan it's next overseas campaign.
How do I set up Google Analytics for my website?
Google analytics can be set up for a website by inserting a tracking code in the HTML of every webpage you want to track.
This tracking code is a is usually a piece of javascript code that can be found on the Google Analytics dashboard. This dashboard can be accessed using the Google address associated with the website.
If I own multiple websites, do I need to have a separate Google Analytics tracking code for each of them?
Yes. Each Google Analytics code is associated with one web property (web domain or app). A website has many pages. The same tracking code can be installed on all the different pages of that website.
You can manage 50 properties (50 different websites and/or apps) through your Analytics account. Your Google analytics account also allows you to share permissions with other users to help manage these properties.
To sum it up the article, let us review what we have discussed so far. In this article we have learned how to set up Google Analytics for a website. We discussed why we need Google Analytics and touched up on how we could use the Google Analytics data to help our business.
You can read my answer about how Google Analytics can help a small business here.
Contact me at info@anandimerchant.com to get help setting up Google Analytics for your website or if you have questions about Google Analytics.
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