The Learning Center

What is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics gives you a breakdown of your website visitors. You can use the following information to determine how people are finding your website and which pages they are visiting while they are there. You can sign up to receive email reports from Google Analytics, which show just a snapshot of the most pertinent information available about your website. For a more in depth explanation of your website’s performance, you can log in to your Google Analytics account and dig in for yourself. 

Google Analytics provides five categories of information: Real-Time, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions. Each category provides an “Overview” of what Google has identified as the most important data from each category, and several sub-categories to dive deeper into the information.

Real-Time
This section of Google Analytics shows you what’s happening on your website right now, in real-time. For most, a monthly report of their website activity provides more than enough information, but if you’re running a campaign, or testing out a new feature on your website, the Real-Time section can allow you to pinpoint specific behaviors to help you make decisions about your website’s effectiveness.

Audience
The Audience section of Google Analytics gives you information about the customers visiting your website. What are their demographics, their interests, their geographic location? What software and hardware are they using to view your website? How do your website analytics compare to other websites in your industry? All of this information can be found in the Audience section.

Acquisition
The Acquisition section of Google Analytics tells you how people are getting to your website. Have they opened an email campaign you sent? Did they click on a link to your website from someone else’s website? Did they find you on social media? If you participate in paid search campaigns like Google Ad Words, you’ll also find information about how you’re acquiring website visitors in this section.

Behavior
The Behavior section of Google Analytics shares information about how your customers are navigating through your website. What pages are they viewing and how much time are they spending on each page? What are they searching for? Analyzing this information can help you determine which pages on your website need your attention in order to become more effective at capturing your customer’s attention and getting them to act on the information they find.

Conversions
Google Analytics allows you to set up goals and events that trigger “conversions”. Conversions are dictated by your own measurement of success. If a successful website for you means having people fill out a contact form or call your store, that can be tracked as a conversion. If you’re running a campaign and your goal is to have people on a specific landing page for a certain period of time, that can be tracked as a conversion. If you have an e-commerce integration, you can track actual website sales in the Conversions section. Decide what success looks like for your business, and then set up goals to track it!

The video below, created by Google’s Analytics Academy, is a great “crash course” to help you get up to speed on some of the key terminology used in Google Analytics, and describes how the data provided by Google Analytics is calculated.

Contact your account manager with questions or to schedule a call to review your full Google Analytics Report.