Google Analytics (GA)is a free web analytics tool that generates detailed statistics about activity on a website, helping you “…analyze visitor traffic and paint a complete picture of your audience and their needs, wherever they are along the path to purchase.” (http://www.google.com/analytics/)

Check out the video to explore how Google Analytics can work for you.

If you’re a beginner, start by taking note of the following key marketing metrics:

1. sessions
2. users
3. bounce rate
4. pageviews
5. referral traffic

We will individual define them below. But first, how does Google Analytics work? In a nutshell:

1. A tracking code is added to the website.
2. When the tracking code loads on the page, a hit is generated and then sent to GA.
3. This hit gathers all of the known information about the user at that exact moment in time – a snapshot of information.
4. This information is transmitted every time a hit is sent to GA. This means that every time a page is viewed, every new download is a new snapshot about what is happening. This snapshot is compiled and sent to GA.

SOURCES:

• https://developers.google.com/analytics/resources/concepts/gaConceptsTrackingOverview
• https://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2016/06/22/google-analytics-collects-information/

Sessions. These refer to a collective group of interactions that take place on the website within a given time frame

What is an acceptable bounce rate? As a rule of thumb:

Pageviews. A Pageview is defined as a visit to a page on your website.

You can also narrow down the country or city where your visitors came from. You can pinpoint the exact city where most of the traffic to your website are from and then you can customise your messaging to suit them (or even the language).

In addition, you can view the traffic sources which are bringing in the most number of visitors to your websites. If your referrals from social media are so low, then boost your social media engagements. If your email campaigns aren't working, then use your time and resources on SEO perhaps, so your organic traffic will increase further. 

Google Analytics affords you insights that will help you boost your website's ranking. And all those functionalities are for free. Do watch out for our step-by-step tutorial on how to set up your Google Anlytics account soon!