How To Configure and Use Google Analytics

Configuring Google Analytics

If half the money you spend on advertising is wasted, it's important to be able to figure out which half it is. Google Analytics can give you the answer, but only if you set it up correctly. These guides will show you how to do that.

Using Google Analytics To Grow Your Business

Hi. I'm David Miles, the founder of The PPC Machine and the chief content creator for this website. I've been helping people use digital marketing strategies to grow their businesses for the past 15 years.

A lot of the time when I take on a new client and carry out an audit of their digital marketing assets, I find that Google Analytics is either not installed on their website or, if it is, then it hasn't been properly configured to give all the required information.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool from Google. Other web analytics tools exists, but Google Analytics is the most commonly used and it can be found on over 55% of all websites.

You can use Google Analytics to capture, measure, analyse and report on data from your website. This data includes things like, number of visitors per day, average visit length, how people find your website, which pages get the most views, and how many visits result in a conversion. The insights from this data will help you understand how people use your website and allow you to optimise your site and your marketing to get better results. 

Google Analytics works by using a piece of JavaScript code installed on your website to collect information about each visit to the site (each visit is known as a "session"). Google Analytics records information about every session and about the users who visit your site. It also tracks which pages are viewed and the on-page actions that are taken, such as a user clicking on a particular button or link. It then segments that data into dimensions, helping users make sense of the large unstructured datasets collected. Website managers can use these dimensions to discover demographic and behavioural details about their visitors such as age group, gender, interests, etc. 

After processing all this data, Google Analytics stores it in a database that website owners can search, filter and draw from to perform their analysis. By using the in-built or custom reports, Analytics can be used to compare different sets of data and provide answers to specific business questions. For example, if Google Analytics shows that 60% of your website leads come from women over 40 in North America, you can use that information to better target your marketing and ad campaigns to suit this audience.

Google Analytics is constantly evolving to keep up with best practices and industry standards. The content on this site will help you learn how to correctly set up Google Analytics, set goals and objectives, and confidently draw insights from your web traffic to improve your marketing strategy.