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Google Analytics (GA) is a marketing and product analytics tool from Google. GA gives you insights into how users find and use your website/app. These insights let you evaluate and measure how marketing, content, and products are performing relative to prospect/customer engagement. In essence, GA takes away the guess work, allowing you to measure your return on investment (ROI) from digital campaigns and initiatives.

You can seamlessly integrate GA with other Google products, such as Google Ads or Google Search Console. You can also use campaign tagging (UTMs) to measure any kind of campaign on any platform/website, including advertising, social, and PR campaigns.
Note: Some GA integrations are not available on the Standard (free) GA plan, and a Premium/360 GA paid contract is required. The good news is that if you are a small or medium-sized business, you will likely get all the features you need from the free version.

Let’s discover the main GA benefits to your business and why using GA is essential to understanding the bigger picture of your digital efforts and investments.

Benefits:

1. Traffic Source View

Analyse how prospects/customers land on your website/app. With the Acquisition reports in GA, you can assess profitability by looking at which channels are best at bringing quality traffic. Improving your traffic generation starts by assessing the best traffic channels.

2. Prospect/Customer Engagement

Understand the behaviour of prospects/customers after they land on your website/app. Assess the performance of your published content and determine if your prospects/customers are engaging and taking the actions that you expect from them (e.g., ‘form_submission’). Without engagement data, optimising your website’s/app’s performance is impossible.

3. Improve Advertising ROI

Know how your ads perform in relation to your website/app. Every advertising platform provides ad results, including conversions. But only GA will tell you what happened after someone engaged with your ad and landed on your website/app. What’s more, GA gives you the whole picture by bringing together all advertising sources data in one place.

4. Replicate SEO and Content Marketing Success

Identify the best performing pages on your website/app to gain insights on what type of content to replicate. Also, analyse the worst performing pages to learn how they can be improved for the long-term SEO game.

5. Measure Conversions

GA allows you to define and measure the conversions on your website/app that matter to your business. Analysing conversion rates will help you stay on track to achieving the defined targets, and readjust your marketing (e.g., Advertising or SEO) or product strategies if needed.

6. Know Your Audience

Offering a message that resonates with your target audience is fundamental to growing your business. GA provides vital demographic information (e.g., Country or Language) about your prospects/customers so you can understand who is accessing your website/app and what they are doing after landing. With this data, you can adapt your acquisition strategies as needed.

7. It’s Free!

GA is free for everyone, but there is also a paid version of GA named GA360 for businesses that find the Standard free version limiting to their needs.

Google Analytics 4

If you’re looking to implement GA on your website/app, chances are that you will deploy the newest version of this tool – Google Analytics 4 (GA4). We have made a guide on how to install GA4 on your website: 6 Steps To Set Up Google Analytics 4 With Google Tag Manager. If you think it’s complicated for you to set up GA4 yourself, that is completely fine. That’s why we are here! Make sure you contact us so we can provide the assistance you need! Link: Google Analytics 4 Setup & Configuration.

Conclusion

The many benefits of GA as a marketing and product analytics tool make it invaluable to anyone looking to make data-driven decisions that scale and grow business.

Getting started with GA is straightforward, and in most cases, you can begin to collect data and report on metrics right away. But the fact is that GA offers numerous levels of complexity. The more time you invest into its setup, the more beneficial it will be for your business. If you want clear, meaningful, and trustworthy data over time, GA should not be set up and forgotten.

Be sure to reach out to us today if you need support setting up and maintaining GA for your business.

Vitor Morais

I am the Martech Ninjas founder, covering all things digital analytics. With 10+ years’ worth of experience in marketing and analytics, and having the privilege of working across 4 different countries, I have seen it all! Something I have always seen in the world of digital analytics is how poor data quality and the lack of standardisation is hurting businesses in their data-driven decisions to achieve growth. When I’m not immersed in the world of digital analytics, I enjoy working out and try new cuisines – yes, in this order!