Google Analytics Tips For beginners….. Oh… I have to be honest, that this is something that I don’t particularly enjoy looking at. My site is still very young in internet terms and so the analytics do not make for great reading. Of course we all want to see tons of traffic being logged on our websites, but I am astute enough to appreciate that my traffic will go up if I follow a few tips to improving my traffic.
But I hope with this article to show you as a beginner what exactly you can get from your Google Analytics, giving you information that you can use to improve your traffic too.
Analytics, with all its data calculation tools, can be confusing but I know it is important for me to understand my audience and work out what I need to do to increase traffic, what they look at on my site and whether it is optimised to perform well.
SETTING UP
Setting up an account is straightforward……… Follow the instructions to set up the account with a username. You are given an html snippet to copy and embed in your website header. Now Analytics gives you instructions on how to do this but I found them to be confusing when I did it so here are my instructions…. And this is for a wordpress website….
Go to your wordpress dashboard – Scroll down to ‘Appearances – Theme Editor’ then look for ‘header.php’ on the right hand side. Look to the top of the file content and you’ll see ‘<head>’ and further down ‘</script>’ You need to place the html snippet between the two. Then scroll to the bottom and save. You then go back to Analytics and click the button to verify they have found it and you are good to go!
Spend some time familiarising yourself with the Analytics dashboard. Now that the snippet is on your site, it will start collecting data, so give it a few weeks to do this before you start analysing your website.
WHAT GOOGLE ANALYTICS CAN TELL YOU ABOUT YOUR SITE
Vistors To Your Site
- How many visitors you are getting
- The devices they use
- The browser they use
- Where they come from
Sites That Send You Traffic
- The sites that refer the most traffic
- Social media sites that send traffic
- The keywords that bring most traffic
Things About Pages On Your Site
- The length of time visitors stay
- The popular pages
- The unpopular ones
- Whether your landing page works
What Visitors Do On Your Site
- The length of time visitors stay
- The number of pages they visit
- What visitors do on your site
- Do they leave contact information
UNDERSTANDING GOOGLE ANALYTICS
How do we analyse the results? What is is telling us? This is the crux of the analytics. Its all well and good collecting the data but if we don’t know how to act on it, it’s rather a waste of time. The following information shows what data can be collected and what it is telling us. I have shown a selection of the available tools below but there are several more metrics to be seen from Google Analytics.
Remember my site is very new, so my stats that I will show now are fairly thin as far as traffic is concerned but it will improve !
Analytics Home
Users: Number of visitors to your site in the last 7 days.
Sessions: Activites a visitor undertakes whilst on the website.
Bounce Rate:Percentage of useres that vist but leave without visiting any other page
Session Duration: Average length of time spent on your website.
Realtime User Data
You will find this tool in the left hand menu on your dashboard – It tells you the number of active users on your site in realtime, page views/minute and the most active pages in realtime.
Where Do Visitors Come From?
Check out where your audience comes from. Social media, adverts, organic searches
What Pages Do Your Users Visit?
You will find this tool in the left hand menu on your dashboard – It tells you the number of active users on your site in realtime, page views/minute and the most active pages in realtime.
Active User Trends
Look under ‘Audiences – Active Users’
This gives you the number of daily/weekly/monthly active users and plotted on a graph
Where Are Your Users
This gives you an idea about the countries and locations of your visitors.
How Well Do You Retain Visitors?
Look under ‘Audience – Behaviour’ on the dashboard to find this metric and see who comes back.
Behaviour Of Your Users?
Look under ‘Audience – User Flow’.
Check out where your audience goes on your site.
What Are Your Top Devices
Look under ‘Audiences – Mobile – Overview’
This is percentage breakdown of the devices used to access your website by your audience.
CONCLUSION
Whilst on the quick glance, Google Analytics looks like a load of jumbled graphs with nothing really to tell us but this is not so…. I can tell a great deal about my site, although I haven’t got much traffic yet, I can see that there is quite an audience in North America and my bounce rate is not too bad!
From the diagram below, I can tell, right now that most of my traffic is getting there directly from the search engine, some through referrals an a very small amount from social media. I can act upon that and increase my posting to social media and Pinterest to encourage more engagement. The fact that my website is very new explains the metrics I have. Its a starting point and I will revisit Google Analytics frequently to see how well my site is doing. I hope this has helped you understand Google Analytics more.
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Thanks, that’s some very useful information. But what do we do with the numbers on analytics?
Do you plan to get a bit deeper into analysing the information? I mean in a how to use google analytics results and applying them to your website with the intention of increasing traffic, stay time etc.?
Thanks Vasilij… I do intend to cover each result individually in the coming weeks to show how exactly to use the information. I have just done a blog on a guide to write the perfect blog – what features to cover and tips on how to do this which cover some of the results but I will be offering up more articles on how to improve each of the metrics.
Hey, Your tips on Google analytics are very useful for me. I am beginner. I recently started my online business from my home. I enjoy while reading your article. I see your most of the traffic come from search engine and social media. We will follow your guide to get more traffic to our site from search engine. We will try all tools. Keep this grate work up.
Thanks Parveen, I hope in the next few months my analytics improve, and Im pleased to hear that its useful for you.
This is a great post not only fir newbies but for seasoned online marketers as well. I personally use google analytics on a daily basis, it gives insight on what I did wrong, what I would have done better, and how to increase my traffic. Once again this is a great post a d i enjoyed reading it
Thanks Randy, good that it it the right mark!
Hi Quinn
Thank you very much for this detailed article telling you how to get the best from Google analytics. You tend to find a lot of people do use Google analytics but do not use it in the correct manner and miss important information that others will use. I find this article to be very useful , as it would tell you all the important factors to take into account on how well your website is doing. What is hot and what is not, such useful information.
The obvious question is what you do if you are not getting traffic to your website?
Thanks
Antonio
Thanks Antonio.. the answer to your question is continue posting and working on engaging your audience.. if you build it they will come!😂
Reading your article has given me hope that at some point I will be able to utilise Google Analytics to its full potential. I’ve tried to understand the jargon that comes within the platform itself, even venturing into the search world to see if there are any instructions on how to get the best out of it. When you’re not really at the right level to understand most of it, posts like this are welcomed. Saying that, I’m not sure how well I would be able to act on the information that it could provide.
I had no idea that all these features were available. Up until now I have mainly used it for indexing and guidance on any errors that might have arisen. Is Google Analytics and Console all one and the same thing ? I recognise some of the images but I’m not sure if that was because I’d gone onto analytics separately. I’ve also noticed something called Webmaster tools, is that all part of the same thing ?
We master tools is the old name for Search Console .. and I used to find errors really and index posts etc. It “talks” to google analytics( you can connect your site to both) and with analytics, learn what is orient working well on your site.
Thank you for this straightforward, easy-to-follow and visually appealing guide to Google Analytics for Beginners.GA provides so much information in anty number of styles of presentation that it’s really difficult to know where to start, what to look at and, more importantly, what to ignore (for now at least). Thank you for cutting though all the noise and laying out the most important features to focus on.
Thankyou for your comments, really helpful in that they express exactly the tone I was going for.
Hello Quinn. Thank you for sharing this post on Google analytics tips for beginners. I haven’t used Google analytics before although I have been hearing about it. I like the information and data that it displays to us. This way we can improve on where we are lacking behind and invest more on where we are doing well. I hope to set up my website soon. By then I’d have to experience more of Google analytics.
Regards!
Thank so much for taking time to comment. I hope this helps you when ou get to the analytics!