Our intent with the Explain It To Me series is to provide a quick, high level overview of a topic. Ideally, just enough to help our readers, clients, and followers understand the basics. Usually, that’s enough for them to know if it’s something worth pursuing in more detail. And if the interest is there, we’ll follow up with a more in-depth discussion, as well as explaining how we can partner with them in the endeavor.
Web analytics, specifically Google Analytics, is one of the most ubiquitous web tools out there that almost no one uses. Sure, marketers use it, but not nearly enough of them. And web developers, too, but again, only a fraction. Even non-developers using WordPress know enough to add a plug-in and a tracking id, just to make sure some data is being collected. But how many of them are following up with that data regularly? How many are running reports and checking on conversions or demographics?
Google Analytics is an extremely powerful, and horribly underutilized tool. It’s full of information and data that goes way beyond marketing or dense, hard-to-read statistics. There’s a ton of information to unpack when it comes to this topic, but no one likes reading a wall of text right off the bat. So let’s start with a VERY brief overview of analytics, and hopefully, give you enough information to make sense of what this tool brings to your business.
Analytics is Free
Seriously, it costs nothing to get this service up and running and collecting data for your website. Now, some advanced consultation usually incurs a cost, but that’s typically to a third party (like FileNotFound.Studio, for example), not to Google.
It’s customizable
Like any good data tool, Google Analytics provides a bevy of pre-built reports. But it also allows you to create your own custom reports, based on just about any data points you can dream of. Not only that, but the report builder has a nice, easy to use drag-and-drop interface for those of us who need all the help we can get with report building!
It provides enough data to understand your customers
With Google Analytics, you can see what geographic area your viewers are from, what times of day they visit, and what devices and operating systems they use. You can also enable even deeper metrics (which usually requires a privacy policy notification) such as age, gender, and market affinities.
Analytics also helps you understand your web site
Knowing your customers helps you understand what they need to find on your site. Maybe you need to know what types of ads to place on your site, or the types of content to focus on. Maybe certain products or services apply to specific geographic regions, and you want to focus on the ones that will get in front of the most eyeballs. Analytics helps you discover all of this and more.
Google Analytics has real-time tracking
Want to see what’s happening on your website right this instant? Check the Real Time tab and see who’s on your site, where they’re from, and what they’re viewing. Watch the results of a recent promotion or a product launch in real time!
It collects data automatically
The set up for Google Analytics is fairly simple, and I think our next post on this will cover that particular topic. But even better than the easy setup is the fact that once it’s running, it’s collecting data about every visitor and hit to your website 24/7.
And just to be clear, we understand that the phrase “collects data” has a negative connotation. In this case, the data being collected are the requests to and from the website’s server, which provides details such as browser, location, device, operating system. No passwords, saved credit card numbers, or personal details are being collected, so you can rest easy on that front. There is an option to set up cookies on a visitor’s browser that will collect additional data, but that requires an update to your site’s privacy policy, and remote users can opt out of that feature.
It’s easy to get started
As I just mentioned, setup is fairly easy. All you have to do is add a small piece of code (specifically a <script> tag) to your website and you’re pretty much up and running. Look for a followup post on this shortly, where we’ll talk about setup and some initial reports/views/filters you can setup to get things rolling.
Everything I just mentioned is high level and shallow on detail. Just enough to give you a rough idea of what Analytics can provide. If you need more information and can’t wait until we put up a new post on the topic, feel free to browse through the links below, some of which go into much more detail.
https://www.hostgator.com/blog/why-use-google-analytics/
https://www.logit.net/blog/10-reasons-why-you-should-choose-google-analytics/
https://medium.com/@dineshsem/10-good-reasons-why-you-should-use-google-analytics-699f10194834
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