Using Google Analytics to Track Website and Social Media

Whether it be your website, mobile app, or social media page, if you’re looking to better understand your users, Google Analytics is here to help — and so are we. Google Analytics is a free analytics service that not only gathers data, but also helps give insights about your users.

Creating an account is quick and easy — click here to get started!

With your account up and running, you’re ready to start improving your customer's experience, as well as your own.

Step 1: Discovering Your Audience

In this step, I'll share what information is found in the Google Analytics’ Audience and Acquisition section to help you evaluate your audience and develop an effective online marketing strategy.

Google Analytics' Audience Section demographics and location

When you are advertising, you want readers to take interest on what you are promoting. An audience is one or more people who view your content. They are your potential client! The main purpose of marketing is to attract attention and get your audience interested.

Age matters in developing a marketing plan. Different ages often have different interest and different gender also has different interest. Google Analytics offers a segment dedicated for specific audience information. In the Audience section, data about your users age and gender is represented in a chart. These figures are shown in the demographic overview found in the section. Additionally, you can find more details by clicking the links shown in the image with yellow highlights.

If you want to know the physical location the users are coming from, the information is available in the Geo tab found in the Audience section. It ranks country by the number of users you get from them. You will be surprised how diverse your visitors you get in the internet! This can also give you an idea if the users actually take time reading your content.

These data could enable you to adjust your strategy that would suit your readers. Analyze your audience and a form an effective strategy.

Web and social media traffic in Google Analytics' Acquisition Section

Finding data about the general population who visits material that may concern your product is important. However, if you don't know where your audience is, it will be difficult to reach out to individuals. Google Analytics’ Acquisition section can provide you this information.

In the Channels tab, found in the Acquisition section, Google Analytics provides the information how your users end up on your website. This allows you to determine if search engines can find you and if your online strategy is effective.

If you aim is to observe which social site drives the most movement, you'll want to concentrate on social referral traffic. When you’re in the channel tab, click Social to see the results for each social media channel.

This allows you to assess the effectiveness of your current social media strategy. This information will give you an idea which platform plays the biggest role in driving individuals to your site. Plan your marketing strategy and decide which platforms to focus on. Know where your audience are coming from.

Congratulations! You finished the first step! In this step, we learned what information is provided in the Audience and Acquisition section. Proceed to the next step to know what data is available in the Behavior section.

Step 2: User Behaviour

After selecting the overview tab, you’ll be greeted with a plethora of data. Although it may be slightly overwhelming at first glance, we’ll walk you through it — you don’t need to be a developer to benefit from Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Home

First, we’ll start with the Google Analytics home page. This is the landing page when you sign into your account. Here, you’re greeted with data primarily in the form of graphs and charts. The home page does a great job of displaying detailed data without making you feel overwhelmed. You can see your sites busiest hours, most popular geographical regions, and even the devices your site is reached from. While the home page is a great high-level overview, there are a couple more features worth mentioning.

Behavior Flow

The Behavior Flow report may be one of the most interesting features Google Analytics has to offer. With this report, you are able to view the pages your user navigates to during their session. This is extremely valuable as it allows you to track user engagement with current or newly added content. You can display a Behavior Flow report by city, gender, landing page, and almost any other imaginable metric. Knowing that your users are arriving at your site via Facebook may indicate that your Facebook Ad money has been well spent. Realizing your promotional video resulted in an in-site purchase and not your search engine optimization can save you money and point you in the right direction. The Behavior Flow reports are just one of the many tools you’ll learn to love when getting started with Google Analytics.

Site Content

The Site Content tab has a few sections with a lot of valuable data. This section provides detailed analytics on categories such as page views, time-on-page, bounce rate, and exit percentage. Making sense of these metrics can be difficult as different pages are trying to accomplish different things. For example, a high time-on-page for a blog post is ideal, yet may not be for a user contemplating whether or not to purchase tickets to a show. A high exit percentage at the end of a particular set of pages could indicate the user read the whole article on your site. The Site Content tab is a very powerful tool when paired with creativity and intuition.

Step 3: Converting Users

Having gained insight into the behaviour of users towards your platform, the next thing to do is to ensure that users are carrying out actions that coincide with your purpose for having such a platform. For example, in an academic context, the desired objective for a website may be to have more users apply for scholarships or to increase the number of subscribers to a particular journal via social media. Such an objective is a called a goal in Google Analytics, and the successful completion of a goal is called a conversion. Hence, a goal is anything you want your users to do as they interact with your platform.

After reading this step on converting users, you should be able to take steps that result in the increased completion of your platform goals.

Creating a goal

From your Google Analytics dashboard, access the admin area. From the options available, choose the ‘Goals’ item. This gives you the avenue to easily create new goals as you follow the on-screen instructions. Congratulations! You have created a new goal.

Analyzing your goals

To examine the status of your goals, navigate to the ‘Goals’ section of your dashboard. This would bring you to a screen with very vital information such as Goal Completions, Goal Conversion Rate, and Total Abandonment Rate. Each of these sections have an interactive graph with various timespan options which can help you narrow down or broaden the scope of your analysis. Hence, this reveals patterns among users and prompts you to take informed action as needed.

Taking strategic action

Based on the insight gained from analyzing your goals, take necessary action to ensure you are increasing your Goal Conversion Rate. Such action may include changing the position of a ‘Subscribe’ button to the top of a webpage in the case where users are not scrolling all the way down, or displaying a pop-up link to scholarships and bursaries on a page where there is high user activity. In brief, always strive to take steps relevant to the fulfillment of your goals.

Now that you’ve learned about converting users, you are better equipped to understand the changes you need to implement to ensure your platform goals are being met by your users.

Step 4: Get Productive. Get Tracking!

We have now briefly covered a few Google Analytics features, and how to make use of them. We have highlighted how to make sense of your audience, their behaviours, and how to convert users to meet your goals. With this new found knowledge and a bit of intuition, you will be able to turn insights into productive action.

Know of any other applicable Google Analytics tips? Please leave them in the comments below!

If we've piqued your interest in analytics tools, feel free to check out this instructable that highlights an alternative analytics tool: KUKU.io .