Google Analytics is a free service provided by Google that offers you detailed statistics about visitors to your site. Google is the number one search engine in the world and has the most active users daily. Their Analytics platform allows website owners access to user data that is valuable when formulating marketing strategies. The platform allows you to view where your visitors are coming from, what they’re doing while they interact with your site, and how long they stay there. These are just a few things among many others that marketers find valuable when tracking website traffic or their advertising campaigns.

Things Google Analytics Can Do

Google Analytics can offer business and marketers meaningful information that can aid them in finding new customers, defining their target market, measure website appeal, and measure campaign success. Below are some helpful functions:

Identify target audience

Data gathered on your website includes demographic information of visitors. This information includes age, gender, and location. With access to this information on website visitors, you can identify which characteristics make visitors more likely to convert into customers or clients. By understanding the demographics of your clientele, you can cater your content, copy, or advertising campaigns to attract more people like them to your business.

Analytics also allows you to view how visitors behave once they’re on your website. This can help measure whether your site is easily navigable or if visitors are leaving almost immediately after arriving. By identifying weak or unattractive pages on your website that potential customers bounce from quickly, you can rework or revamp the page to be more attractive for target clientele.

Measure advertising campaign success

If you operate a large firm or organization, chances are you have multiple locations. When creating an advertising campaign for your company, you’ll need to create multiple advertisements targeting the different areas in which you operate. This can include search campaigns or display campaigns on Google, or even social media advertisements.

Google Analytics creates custom URLs for your campaigns so that when customers click your advertisements you can track where they came from, which advertisement they clicked, and which page they landed on. The information provided by Google Analytics also includes the medium from which they arrive at your site, like an email campaign, pay-per-click, a social media advertisement, or a banner ad.

From there, once you understand where your clicks and visitors are coming from, you can adjust your campaigns to bring more traffic or optimize the user experience. Perhaps one campaign is outperforming another by a large margin, or another has a poor click-through-rate. Google Analytics provides an in-depth look at campaign performance so that your budget won’t be wasted on advertisements with a low return on investment.

Set a conversion goal and measure its success

Obviously, high traffic to your site is great, but converting visitors into paying customers is the end goal for all businesses. Google Analytics allows users to set conversion goals by adding a tracker to a page that visitors land on if they convert. An example of this is a “Thank You” page that website visitors reach only if they fill out a contact form, make a purchase, or opt-in to emails. This can be used to measure and view which type of visitors convert at the highest rate so that advertising or marketing campaigns can be tailored to attract more of the same types of customers. Or, this data can be used to see conversion rates for specific advertisements so adjustments can be made to campaigns that underperform.

In the end, Google Analytics is a highly valuable and free resource that can be leveraged to identify target audiences, measure campaign success, and track the conversion rates for those campaigns. It is a great way to increase the success of your business.