Nowadays, Google Analytics is a powerful web analytic service to measure the success of your website by keeping a track of people visiting your website. Apart from tracking visitors on your site, it also keeps a track of pages people visit your site and where they are coming from. In a nutshell, it is a free service, which consists of:
- Javascript code on each page of site to collect information.
- Processing engine to create the report.
- Data collection service on Google server.
Google Analytics provides insight about your business, website and marketing efforts. So, here are seven Google analytics features that can power your website and will transform the approach of your site:
- Use dashboards
Google Analytics Dashboards are collection of widgets that allows you to visualize your data. While using Google Analytics Dashboards, make sure that you devote your precious time on analyzing your data. You can save your time by creating your own custom dashboard with the important metrics, including traffic sources, social referrals, audience, and top content. With the help of this, you can create a report without digging deeper into Google Analytics in order to find information regarding all these metrics.
- Track outbound links
Outbound link plays crucial role in overall linking strategy. If in case, you have a low bounce rate, you can still see where your visitors are going when they exit your web page. Having a serious understanding about the outbound link behavior of your users, you can easily optimize your website for conversion and brand messaging for better effects.
By tracking the outbound links, you will come to know about the best spots on your page that converts best. This way, you can easily understand and plan the links you want to put or replace your low value link with your best content.
- Set up “New Goals”
Conversions plays a crucial role in the success of any website. +New goals in Google Analytics refer to conversions and completed actions that have done by users. Whether it’s a signing up or making a purchase, if you want to keep a track of all these actions, set up a +new goal that can help you to measure your website’s success and also to determine whether it is good to go with conversion or not.
- Track social media buttons
Social networking becomes a powerful platform to generate traffic to your site. You must have noticed that most of the bloggers encourage their readers to share their content via social media platforms. This way, it can be read by most of the people and becomes easy to bring the consumers and subscribers on your page. When your content go viral, it is important to track down the users who click on the social media button in order to know the number of people shared your content via social media platform.
- Track your custom campaigns
Whether it’s a social media campaign or an email marketing campaign, Google Analytics gives you the potential to measure the performance of your different campaigns. Google allows you to add a custom tag to your URL in order to track descriptive data about the where your traffic is generating from. This custom tag has a short description of the campaign, medium, source, and content, which provides you insight about your traffic is coming from. This way, you will be able to learn about the campaign that is driving the most referral traffic.
So by creating campaign URLs using URL builder, you can start tracking your URLs. With this Google Analytics feature, you can see the traffic that generates from different campaigns and work accordingly by making changes in your design and content.
- Use the Users Flow report
With the help of this feature, you can analyse your data. This users flow report gives you insights into your data. Apart from this, you can also compare the traffic generating from different sources within the same dimension as users flow report helps you in determining about the sources that offer best return. You can determine what’s working and what’s not working on your website as this users flow report will highlight the traffic generating from the source.
- Real time Statistics
This real time data feature allows you to monitor the activity as it happens on your site. It will update you with the activity that occurs on your site and also monitor the effects of the new campaigns and site’s conversions on the traffic. This is one powerful feature that monitors the number of people visit on the site, what pages and events people are interacting with, and what conversions have happened.
Although, there are many other analytics services that can provide you real-time statistics but shells out a huge cash from your pockets. Google Analytics provides you up-to-the-minute statistics and that too without shelling out a huge amount from your bank account. All you need to select the current date as the end date on the date selector calendar and you will get hourly up-to-date data. This is the strongest reasons for people to prefer Google Analytics over other real time statistics.
In conclusion..
After this read, you must have known about the powerful Google Analytics features that can help to transform your site. Although they doesn’t seem as powerful at the beginning, you will understand when you use them. You don’t require any other premium analytics service and with these effective features you can build a strong web statistics system that will allow you to make conversions and traffic optimization.
So, do you want to make your site powerful on the web? Will you use Google Analytics features on your site? How are you going to incorporate these features to your site?
Author Bio:
Sofia Brooks is a subject matter expert at IX Web Hosting, and she is WordPress enthusiast and loves anything that is to do with WordPress. When she is not developing and designing themes, she loves blogging and traveling. You can find her at LinkedIn and Twitter.