Google Analytics is a web-based tool that allows you to collect and track data about visits and visitors to your website. It allows you to collect and analyse information about everything you can imagine – where people came to your site, what they did while browsing, whether they bought or sent the form to detailed information about users.
The Google Analytics interface is divided into four main sections:
- Audience – who visits your site.
- Acquisition – how people get to your site.
- Behavior – What visitors do to the site.
- Conversions – The actions (events) that you want visitors to take on the page.
Each of these sections is useful for a variety of purposes and will help you optimize your advertising campaigns, make money decisions, improve your website, and identify your customers.
What are the basic reports of Google Analytics?
- Visitors – contain types of reports where you can see what countries and language groups the visitors come from, what percentage of new and regular visitors, what browsers they use with what technologies, etc.
- Traffic Sources – reports on the sources from which visitors come to your website and what is the difference in their behavior on the website compared to visitors from other sources or advertising campaigns.
- Content – here you can find out which website content is the most popular among users, which are the most important input and output pages, and finally the Site Overlay function, with which you can visually see which links on the page users click on the most and which do not use.
- Goals – reports that allow you to analyze in more detail the set goals of the website, their value and testing the business process (Funnel Visualization)
- Ecommerce – a special module that needs to be activated and which will be used mainly by e-shops or sites requiring accurate measurement of statistics when selling a wide range of products with a variable purchase price. All of these variables can be dynamically written to Google Analytics scripts and you have a detailed overview of them directly in the interface.
If you want to track your new paid campaigns from Google Ads and you do not have time for that, we recommend you to use some of the tools that are available on the market, such as BlueWinston.
What are the pros and cons of Google Analytics?
There may be more pros and cons for each type of business. Now we will look at the general pros and cons.
| Pros | Cons |
| ✓ A large number of views on visitor behavior | ✘ Unable to analyze the past before deploying the Analytics code |
| ✓ Ability to track site goals | ✘ Time-shifted data acquisition |
| ✓ Ability to measure the effectiveness of advertising and SEO | ✘ Slow interface at exposed time |
Tips for Google Analytics
You may get lost in the beginning. The interface may be more complicated for you and you will not know where to click first. Now let’s look at a few tips that you should apply from the beginning and that will help you.
Forget about your IP address
Before pasting the Google Analytics code into your website, filter out the IP address of the computer from which you access it. If you work from home and from work, do so for both PCs.
Filter the query from your domain
Did you know that I can copy your GA (Google Analytics) code from your website and put it on my own? What will we gain? We will distort your traffic and you will start tearing your hair. However, there is a filter to ensure that the intruder does not add their data to your reports from their site.
Two profiles
In case you apply different filters for your profile in GA, it is nice to have another profile running in parallel, which collects the same data, but no longer applies filters. If you do not apply one of the filters correctly, there is an effect that will start to invalidate all the reports that the filter affects and you may lose the collected data.
A profile without filters applied collects data, and you will have this data that the profile with filters did not capture in the profile report where the filters were not applied. Alternatively, you can use one profile as a test, and if the applied filter works fine on one profile, you can deploy it live. The same goes for direct hits to the Google Analytics tracking code.
Watch your documents downloads
GA does not track document downloads on your website because it has no. To track it, simply paste a snippet of Javascript code into your hyperlinks.
Follow links to external websites
The next tip follows the previous one, so to speak, but we will not monitor file downloads, but clicks on links that point to external websites. These clicks will be recorded as pageviews in your reports.
Summarize
Google Analytics is a system that, with the correct setting and interpretation of individual reports of collected data, can answer almost every question, the website administrator or the marketing officer responsible for the use of the website. However, without an expert view of the functioning and significance of individual reports, under the flood of information, there is a risk that essential data and signals will disappear in them.
If you are using Smart Shopping campaigns in Google Ads and you want to benefit even more, try one of the free CSS programs.
It’s not easy to learn how to work with it all, but there are various video tutorials and similar things that will help you a lot. We believe that we also helped you with this article and explained to you what it is, what it is and what to avoid. We wish you good luck!