What is Google Analytics and How Do I Get Them?

As a website owner, you are entitled to some free stats. All you have to do is sign up for Google Analytics, copy some code they give and paste it into your website. It's super simple or super affordable if you really want to pay someone to do it.

Anyone that builds websites can hook you up with Analytics. If you're more of a DIY web person and you have access to your website then you also probably know how to do this. I'm not going to get into how to add the code because there are so many different ways to do this and your website might be built different than how I explain it in this post. There are plenty of resources to help you though.

Why You Must Have Analytics

GA provides you with valuable information about your web traffic. You can use this information to sell more to your visitors and provide better content. Also, you can assess the results of marketing campaigns or figure out where to start campaigns. Let's take a look at a couple examples.

Quick Note: When looking at your GA, it's important to consider the date range. Many website see spikes or lulls in traffic. You may want to focus the date on these ranges or omit them from your statistics. 

What pages are people viewing on my website?

One of the first things you should look at is the Most Viewed Pages. This will give you an idea of why people are going to your website. If your most viewed page (other than homepage) is a particular service, maybe you should promote that service more. You can do this by running ads, blogging, creating a video, etc.

You might be surprised what you see here. If a service or product you don't wish to promote so much is number one, then you need to steer your website traffic and marketing to other areas.

To see the most frequently visited pages, click Behavior > All Content > Site Content > All Pages.

How are people getting to your website?

So you've been using the Social Medias lately. You've been boosting some Facebook posts and you've been tweeting a couple times of day. Hopefully you're including links to your website in these posts. 

With GA, you can see the referrals you're website is receiving. A referral is the place your traffic comes from. So if you post a link to your latest blog post on your Facebook page and someone click the link, GA will track that as a referral from Facebook.

Why is this important? Well if you found out that 20% of your traffic is coming from Facebook Ads and your awesome posts, you might want put more marketing moneys into Facebook. Or on the othe rhand, if you're finding <2% of your traffic is coming from your social media efforts, you now know you need to get more followers, post more beneficial information or stay far, far away from those social medias.

To see your top referrers, click on Acquisition > Traffic > All Channels