How To Use Google Analytics For Beginners : A Guide

Google Analytics is a platform that collects data and compiles it into useful reports. It is a perfect solution to judge all website-related parameters. Things like who visited the website, how they interacted with the website, what action they took on the website, etc. It gives you the free tools you need to analyze data for your business or other businesses in one place, so you can make smarter data-driven decisions.

Below is a quick guide to Google Analytics for beginners.

1. Setting Up A Google Analytics Account

Firstly, let's start with how to create a Google Analytics account. You can sign up for an Analytics account with Google by clicking here: Google Analytics.

After this, you need to get the tracking ID (which will be added later to every page of your website that it wants to analyze) and then add it to your website. Within 12-24 hours, you will be able to check all the detailed traffic data for your website.

2. Set Your Goals

Now, this step is important too. You need to set certain goals to track important activities taking place on your website, for instance, playing the product video, signing up, initiating a purchase, etc. You need to know your key performance indicators (KPI) before you can take any sort of decision for your business. This goal-setting will help Google Analytics track the important metrics which are relevant to your business and will help to measure the effectiveness. You can create up to 20 goals in the Google Analytics dashboard.

3. Reports

Once you start using Google Analytics, you will start getting reports which will tell you the problem areas, and the well-performing areas for your website which you have tracked above.

Starting with the Home tab, you would be able to see important overview data regarding your sessions, average session duration, bounce rate, and goal conversion rate.

Next up, the Reporting tab will actually give you data regarding the happenings on the website. It gives reports like conversion reports (the user journey before he converts), audience reports (which will give you a detailed study about your audience), acquisition reports (which will tell you where your visitors came from), and behavior reports (which will highlight your content performance).

4. Google Analytics Metrics

There are some metrics within Google Analytics also, which help in understanding the reports further. Metrics like sessions, users, page views, bounce rate, session duration, etc. are certain other really useful metrics. All these metrics together give a clear picture of how the website runs.

Google has put together a completely FREE learning program for people who want to learn more about Google Analytics, you can access it here: Google Analytics Academy

Conclusion

We hope you got some insight into how even beginners can use Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a powerful tool that can measure your website and give you very valuable insights so that you can improve its performance. Since this can be overwhelming to look at in the beginning, a lot of students give up on it after they’ve used it a couple of times.

Students don’t realize that every platform feels complex when you use it for the first time, it’s only when you use it multiple times that you learn how to use it effectively. Remember the first time you used Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat and you didn’t know what was going on at all?

That’s part of the process. Every task has a learning curve to it.

At Board Infinity's Digital Marketing Learning Path, we offer a fantastic opportunity to learn Google Analytics from coaches in top MNCs. This helps you to understand the practical examples as well and helps you execute them in your jobs. This also cuts down your learning curve because these coaches help you avoid the mistakes that they made when they started out using Google Analytics.