When you’ve invested significant time and effort into your website, you’ll want to find a way to determine whether your website is successful in reaching your target audience, engaging potential clients, or otherwise reaching its intended goals. Many site owners are turning to the highly popular Google Analytics tool as a way to gain important insights about their websites’ audiences. Both easy to use and a valuable source of information, you may want to consider using Google Analytics as a way of monitoring your own website’s success.
If you’ve just begun to think about installing Google Analytics, or are otherwise a Google Analytics beginner, here’s some information to help you get your site started with Google Analytics.
What can Google Analytics do for your site?
Aside from simply telling you how many page views your site receives each day, Google Analytics can provide a wealth of more specific information about the demographics that your site is reaching. Among other details, you’ll be able to track visitors’ geographic locations, search terms, the time of day that visits occur, and the amount of time spent on your site. In addition, Google Analytics will give you information about how your visitors are finding your site, including which search terms are used and referral links. Google Analytics will ultimately help you determine whether your site is reaching its target audience, and will give you insights that you can use to improve your site’s visibility and functionality.
Installing Google Analytics
Installing Google Analytics as a relatively straightforward process. The first step is to create Google Analytics account, if you don’t already have a pre-existing Google account. (Otherwise you can simply log in using a Google account that you already own.) From there, you’ll be guided through the steps of setting up your account, including adding information about your website.
Once you sign up for a Google Analytics account, you’ll receive a unique tracking code that can be installed on the web pages that you want to monitor. You can either manually paste the tracking code into your web pages, or you can install the Google Analytics plugin by Yoast. Once the code has been installed, you’ll be able to begin tracking your website’s data.
Interpreting your site’s results
Google Analytics provides a wealth of data, which can be overwhelming at first. In order to interpret your site’s results, it’s helpful to think about what you specifically want to learn from your data and to focus on your most important details first. You may wish to focus on how visitors are finding your site, in which case you’ll want to pay attention to search terms and referral links. Or, you might want to start by looking at how visitors behave on your site by focusing on length of stay, number of clicks, or popular content. Over time, your Google Analytics results will become more 
meaningful and easier for you to interpret.
Using Google Analytics to make your site better
Using Google Analytics strategically can help you to drastically improve your site’s marketing strategies. It’s often beneficial to look at the search terms section of your Google Analytics page, as this will give you information about the terms that visitors are using to find your site. From there, you can capitalize on popular terms, incorporating them into your site’s SEO strategy. Furthermore, you may want to integrate your Google Analytics account with Google’s AdSense or AdWords, both of which can help you further target your marketing strategy.
Please feel free to contact us if you have questions, or if you want to learn more about how we can help you improve your website design or internet marketing strategy using Google Analytics.
