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The Beginner's Guide to Google Analytics

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Google Analytics is a valuable tool for any business owner in Canada with an online presence – that is, any business owner looking to succeed in the modern business world. Whether your business focuses on home services like landscaping, HVAC, renovations, retail, or even business-to-business and manufacturing, Google analytics helps give you more information about the performance of your website and digital marketing. With online advertisements, social media campaigns, and company websites, a strong and thoughtful virtual presence is crucial for any company looking to excel in business today. 

To speed past the competition, it's essential to understand all aspects of your website so that you know what to continue doing versus what to change. That's where Google Analytics comes in – a free website analytics application, Google Analytics is a powerful tool that provides website metrics and helps site owners to analyze traffic.

Rev your engines and get ready to kick your business into the next gear with this beginner's guide to Google Analytics. 

What Is Google Analytics? 

Provided by Google, Google Analytics is a platform that gives you a complete picture regarding your website's performance. You can think of it as your dashboard – a one-stop shop with all of the information and numbers that you need to keep things running smoothly, all neatly packaged and easy to understand at a glance. 

It's used to track website performance and collect visitor insights, helping businesses to do a variety of things, including: 

  • Determine top sources of user traffic 
  • Gauge marketing campaign success 
  • Track goal completions 
  • Discover trends in user engagement 
  • Obtain user information like demographics. 

How does it do this? Google Analytics uses a range of features, such as: 

  • Data filtering, manipulation, and funnel analysis 
  • Predictive analytics 
  • Anomaly detection 
  • Segmentation for subset analysis 
  • Custom reports for advertising, acquisition, audience behaviour, and conversion 
  • Email-based sharing and communication 
  • Simple integration with various other Google platforms and products. 

Through these features and many more, Google Analytics collects a wide range of data and generates reports that contain important insights for your business. You can learn more about your website and its visitors and use them as fuel to drive your business and its online presence forward through those reports. 

Are you ready to take advantage of all of the powerful features Google analytics has to offer? Contact our team today. 

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Where to Start 

As with most powerful web tools, Google Analytics can seem a bit daunting at first. Despite the seemingly endless capabilities that it has to offer, there's no sense in letting that deter you or veer your course. We suggest beginning with one or two features of Google Analytics so that you can get a feel for the platform and experience the benefits. As you grow more comfortable navigating the platform, you can slowly begin to utilize more and more features at your leisure. 

Many Google Analytics users make use of it only to monitor their website traffic volume, and that's more than okay. It's the most valuable information for a beginner using Google Analytics since traffic is critical data when running a website and a business. Monitoring web traffic allows you to notice trends and successes, helping you steer your business on the course to success. 

Next Steps 

Once you've gotten the hang of the platform and its basic format, you can kick it up a gear and begin to look at some other useful reports.  

Consider the "All Pages" report, for example. Located in the "Site Content" section of the "Behaviour" menu on the left-hand side of your Google Analytics dashboard, the "All Pages" report displays all of the individual pages on your site that users have looked at over a particular time. It allows you to determine what visitors are interested in when navigating your website, providing you with a roadmap of which pages require updating or improvement, as well as which important pages should be optimized for conversions. 

Also useful are the "All Traffic" reports, which can be found in the "Acquisition" menu of the Google Analytics control panel. This section includes various reports, specifically focusing on: 

  • Channels 
  • Source/medium 
  • Referrals. 

These reports tell you where your traffic is coming from. Acquisition analytics inform you of new users and sessions. You can also benefit from the behaviour analytics and conversions data found in these reports. 

Where to From Here? 

The offerings of Google Analytics are seemingly endless, which is both exciting and intimidating. If you're happy with the data you've gained from these introductory steps, chances are you won't be disappointed with what you find if you choose to explore the platform further. 

That being said, it may be worthwhile to outsource the more intensive web needs of your business. To avoid spinning your wheels without getting anywhere, consider investing in a reputable digital marketing agency to take over your Google Analytics and other virtual needs so that you can focus on what brought you into business in the first place. 

WEB ROI is a digital marketing agency in Ontario, Canada with extensive experience and industry knowledge across a variety of fields. If you are seeking help navigating the intricacies of Google Analytics or the complexities of web design and digital marketing as a whole, contact the team at WEB ROI. Together, we can discuss your business's needs and help you leave your competition in Toronto, Milton, Burlington, Mississauga and more in the dust! 

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The Prize is a High-Traffic Website That Generates Quality Leads

With a high-traffic website designed to convert quality leads into paying customers you can shift your focus to other areas of your business (or reclaim some much-needed personal time).

Stop running in circles. Choose digital marketing services that are guaranteed to get you results. With an award-winning website design company like WEB ROI at your side, it won't take long to achieve your goals.

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