How to understand your website with Google Analytics
February 26, 2021
lsandil
What is Google Analytics?
To make it simple, you can think about Google Analytics as your website performance dashboard. It is a completely free tool developed by the eponymous search engine, which allows you to monitor in real time a large amount of quantitative data related to your site and its traffic. Here is a non-exhaustive list:
- Volume of visits
- Traffic origin
- Demographic information
- Type of device
- Time spent per page
- Number of page views
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
Of course, this information can be consulted precisely over periods of time determined by the user. A very useful tool since it allows you to identify what can be improved in order to increase your visibility and your number of visitors.
You can also identify the origin of the majority of your traffic, quantify your netlinking, identify the most effective backlinks and thus orientate your acquisition strategy.But also know the type of content that attracts the most visitors as well as the one that captures their attention, understand their journey on the site in order to optimize it, etc… But to be able to highlight this information, you must first install the beast on your website.
How to install Google Analytics?
The first step is to create an account on the website Analytics. So far, nothing complicated, just follow the steps and answer a few general information questions. Once your account is registered, you will need to create a property, which will match your website. You will then be able to manage several properties at the same time from the same account.
Then, things get a bit more complicated. Except for budding developers and code specialists, this is a part that is preferable to assign to an expert. It’s about adding to the code of your site a tag provided by Google. In two words, you will have to integrate in the opening tag of each of your pages the famous global site tag (gtag.js), a JavaScript framework. Unless you use a site editor, in which case you may be able to use a plug-in …
Finally, Google has created the magnificent Google Tag Manager: a powerful and relatively intuitive tag manager, even for a beginner (provided of course that you roll up your sleeves a little!).With it, you can generate containers to integrate and then manage from the interface all your tags. Once again, all you have to do is create your account and follow the steps.
What to remember about Google Analytics?
First of all, remember one thing: it is an indispensable tool to analyze and improve the performance of your website. Plus, it’s completely free. Of course, make no mistake, Google does not offer you its services out of altruism. Remember the famous phrase “If it’s free, you’re the product”. Here, Google will collect on its behalf all the information you give it access to and fill its database with it. Nowadays, everyone knows what data worths…
In addition, the search engine will not hesitate to offer you several paid services, including its famous Google Ads, its famous SEA tool. “Your acquisition performance is bad? Try advertising! For a few euros, you could get many visits… ”
In any case, if used intelligently, Google Analytics can help you get your site off the ground. Just like Adwords, by the way, but we’ll talk about SEA in a future article. To summarize, simply remember that Google Analytics is a marketing tool that allows you to analyze several insights in order to better understand your target and its interaction with your site.