Google Analytics is a web analytic service that provides analytical tools and statistics that can be used for search engine optimization and marketing. Anyone with a Google account can set up Google Analytics on his website for free. After setting up this service, the website owner can get valuable information like how many people visit the site, where they came from, bounce rate, etc. In short, he can understand how his site is performing. However, the most important application of Google Analytics is it is the backbone of digital marketing. It has become the backbone of digital marketing because it provides the following benefits
Tracking website traffic
Think about your website as a virtual store or hangout place. Google Analytics tracks and quantifies the number of people who visit your website how many pages they visit, how long they stay on each page, and how they interact with each page. This data is collected at the time of an event for example, when a user enters a website or exits it. What conveys this data to a website owner is how popular it is and the engagement level of his website.
Facilitates Data-Driven decision-making
Data-driven decision-making is analyzing key performance indicators and measurable goals, and then making informed decisions, not guessing something. Google Analytics offers 14 essential metrics. By analyzing data from these metrics, digital marketers can plan effective marketing strategies and make informed data-driven decisions.
Identify Traffic Source
Identifying the target audience is the first step of any brand’s marketing strategy. Reaching to the target audience with the services and content is a powerful digital marketing strategy. In this case, Google Analytics will help you to identify your target audience.
Improves the understanding of your Target Audience
Google Analytics provides crucial demographic information about your website’s visitors. By analyzing demographic data like language, country, city, age, and gender you can hypothetically construct an image of your target audience.
User behavior with your website
Google Analytics offers behavioral metrics like bounce rates, pages per session, average session duration, page views, unique page views, top pages, and their performances, site search, etc. Data from these metrics will help you understand how visitors or customers interact with your site.
Helps in website optimization, content strategies, and measuring ROI
Website optimization is difficult if you don’t know which element requires optimization. Google Analytics, for example, provides bounce rates for your website. If you see that the bounce rates of your mobile users are quite high, it means the mobile version of your website requires more improvement. Google Analytics provides useful support for the finer design of your website for greater content flows. For example, it can help where to place internal links so that visitors re-engage with your website. Another helpful thing from GA is if you anticipate that one page will achieve more success than others, replicate the content and the design of this page through the website.
Google Analytics can play a critical role in planning solid content marketing strategies. With the help of Google Analytics, for example, you can identify your top-performing pages. Now do some research on why these pages are more successful than others. Was it keywords or the content itself responsible for the success of these pages? Similarly, find out the least performing pages. This will help you to avoid making the same mistake again. In short, to make a viable content marketing strategy, and run a successful online business, the inclusion of GA in your website is essential.
When it comes to measuring the effectiveness of online businesses, tracking and measuring conversion becomes essential. Among other metrics, GA offers a metric-conversion goal-tracking – that helps you to track any goals whether it is leads, sales, or behavioral goals.
Case Studies or examples illustrating successful outcomes using Google Analytics
You would be surprised to know that 65% of websites, ranging from small blogs to corporate companies’ websites, installed Google Analytics due to its several essential benefits that we discussed earlier. Examples of successful use of Google Analytics by different companies and organizations are abound. Below is 10 notable companies/organizations that got so much success due to the use of Google Analytics :
General Electric
This company uses GA to track the geographical locations of its site’s users. Utilizing this data GE locates the geographical location where its products have demands and then modifies its website according to different cultures and languages.
NASA
It depends on Google Analytics to determine the percentage of its visitors who use mobile devices to access its site. It is because NASA often needs to livestream important events. So the organization delivers excellent quality live streaming.
It uses Google Analytics to monitor critical data like the frequency of visitors who after arriving at the site not only browse the site but also twit.
Financial Times
It uses Google Analytics to observe how visitors to the FT site interact with features +1 buttons, like buttons, and ” how tweetable ” their content and news stories are.
Epson
Google Analytics helps this company measure the effectiveness of the company’s advertising. Epson’s slogan is ” Exceed your vision. ” By deploying Analytics in its website, it can then truly gauze how effectively it reaches its audience.
Barnes and Noble
This American bookseller company uses Analytics to track how various author layouts, reviews, and chapter layouts influence users’ navigation on its site, and then determine the most relevant titles people use during their search.
The Four Seasons
It collects guests’ data about where they have the most interests, their travel patterns, their habits as well as potential guests. After collecting this data, the company then maps out its strategy to reach customers and select websites to post its advertisements.
Levi’s
It uses excellent utilization of Google Analytics to see whether it can make quick sales. else, how customers navigate through the site before moving to some other new places.
Samsung
It uses Analytics to track products that create much attention from customers. It then makes this information to update the corresponding pages of these products, and also on the landing page. Updating its website becomes essential particularly when the holiday season is approaching.
The Virgin Group
It depends on Analytics to devise the company’s strategy and offer its website users a pleasant experience.
The main objective of marketing strategies of a company is driving more sales. In digital marketing, Google Analytics has become an essential web analytical service. After installing it on a website, the administrator of the site knows how visitors interact with digital assets and how successful a company’s marketing campaign is. This data can then be utilized to enhance visitors’ experience, increase their numbers, which ultimately results in generating more sales and revenue.