Google Inc. has been a leading technology company that has placed at our disposal multiple free tools for the management and analysis of our web pages. Google Analytics is part of these tools and since its launch in 2006, its main objective has been to help brands increase the profitability of their online businesses. Before knowing some advantages of using Google Analytics, let’s first learn what exactly this platform is about:
What is Google Analytics?
It is a free service from Google that allows us to collect statistics on navigation and actions that users perform when visiting a web page. To use Google Analytics it is necessary to have a Google account and install the tracking code within your website.
With this tool, companies can know the origin of the users who visit their websites (city, gender, frequency), the number of searches performed, the speed of the site and analyze the effectiveness of the content published in real-time.
In this sense, among the main advantages of using Google Analytics are:
1. Gives you the opportunity to obtain data and statistics from your website:
The Google Analytics platform is designed to constantly provide data and statistics about the performance of your page. Among its main advantages is accounting for the activities it receives on a daily basis. Among the main data that this web tool provides you is:
- Number of visitors: Total number of visits your website has received.
- New users: Number of people who have visited your website for the first time.
- Average Page Views: This is an average that indicates the number of page views on your website. If the average is high, it means that your page is of interest to your visitors.
- Origin of your visits: This data tells you where your visits come from, that is, which ones come directly to your website, from organic positioning, from Adwords campaigns or from campaigns on social networks.
- Search terms: The keywords or phrases for which users have searched for you on Google and you have appeared as an option. In some way, this data allows you to identify which keywords best relate to your content.
- Visit duration: How long users have been on your website.
- Bounce rate: Percentage of users who have entered your website but have not interacted, that is, they only browsed your main page without entering other sections of it.
- Conversions: This data allows you to analyze where the conversions made come from, that is, through social networks or through the Google Adwords campaign. Which is a great advantage if you want to know if your inbound marketing strategies to convert your visitors into customers are paying off.
2. It is your best ally when calculating your KPIs
Already knowing the amount of data that Google Analytics can provide you, imagine how important it becomes to use this tool when calculating your performance in a given time, that is, your KPIs.
KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are an important piece in this process since they act as metrics to precisely compare your results. It is a measurement unit that is responsible for quantifying the degree of fulfillment of your objectives.
Calculating your performance in terms of the indicators provided by Google Analytics is important when monitoring your marketing plan and evaluating how successful it is in terms of profitability (is there a positive return on investment?) and impact (is the content Did you reach the correct audience? By providing you with the number of visitors as data to consider, for example, this web tool allows you to more accurately calculate the profitability of your campaigns per click.
By this, we mean that if you carry out a pay-per-click campaign, thanks to Google Analytics data you will be able to know if that paid advertising receives an optimal number of clicks to make your investment worth it. You can calculate this investment/profit ratio by dividing the total spending of the campaign by the number of clicks obtained (data provided by Analytics)
3. It helps you better analyze the strategies you want to implement on your website:
As we have already pointed out, data is a vital element to devise any strategy that involves optimizing your website, that is, without it it is very difficult to know how much traffic your content has had, to what extent visits have grown, and how much traffic your content has had. how the interaction has played out in it. Without this data, creating a successful marketing campaign or knowing the performance of the one you are already carrying out is very difficult. It is practically working blindly and without a solid foundation.
With the information provided by Google Analytics, it is possible to make the best decisions regarding what aspects to change or improve and what new things to implement to achieve your digital marketing strategies. Analytics gives you the primary data that the performance of your website shows, so one of your primary activities should be to use that data to create a marketing plan according to the behavior of your website, either by eliminating, improving or maintaining the same positioning techniques.
4. It is compatible with other Google web tools
One of the great advantages of Google Analytics is that it is a tool compatible with other Google Inc products, which you can also access for free with your Gmail email and download to your smartphone, whether you have Android or iOS, among those. Tools highlight:
Google Sheets:
This union will allow you to export Google Analytics data to Google Drive spreadsheets. This will save you time when creating reports and you will be able to perform tasks such as: Query data from multiple profiles, create custom calculations, create dashboards with data visualizations, and schedule reports to run automatically to keep data up to date.
Google Adwords:
By linking a Google Analytics property to your AdWords account, you can analyze the activity that customers perform on your website after they click on an ad or after an impression occurs. Let’s remember that Google Adwords is an online advertising tool that allows you to create ads in which you can determine the real cost you must pay for each click, in addition to the number of conversions you perceive in each campaign.
In this sense, by integrating your Google AdWords and Google Analytics accounts you open a new world of opportunities for the management, execution and analysis of your PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns, improving your conversion rate and thus maximizing the return on your investment in marketing.
Google Optimize:
Google Optimize is a tool that helps you create A/B tests and measure them with the objective of knowing which of your two strategies to test is receiving better results and thus decide on the best of them. Binding an Optimize container to an Analytics property and view allows you to run tests in Optimize and access data about their execution in Analytics, that is, how your experiment performed.
5. You don’t need to be a specialist in the subject to use it
Although numbers and statistics can mean complex elements to analyze, the design, language and web structure of Google Analytics is designed so that anyone, with basic knowledge about metrics, web page positioning, can understand. You don’t need to be a web programming specialist to use it. In addition to being free, Analytics is designed for any type of user, you don’t need to be an expert to understand the tool.
In short, using Google Analytics to optimize and track the activities of your website is an excellent decision. It will not only provide multiple advantages but also multiple benefits to your digital strategies, focused on strengthening your website in search engines and strategically attracting visitors.
