We all must be aware of the most common Google tools that we use in our day to day lives. Let’s begin with the Google search engine; then Gmail, Hangouts and Google+ come to our mind when we think about communication. Of course, Google has the Google Drive for online storage coupled with the likes of Docs, Sheets, Slide and forms for productivity purposes. Then, what is Google Analytics?
What is Google Analytics?
The answer is; Google Analytics is a freemium tool provided by Google that helps you measure the performance of your advertising campaigns. It offers a set of web analytics services that helps you track your Flash videos, social networking sites, and applications. This service is available on mobile devices as well such as Android smartphones and iPhones. Google Analytics arms you with a set of tools that can be used to determine the return on investment of your advertising campaign and thus make strategic decisions.
Who should use Google Analytics?
If you are a regular user of the internet with no intent to involve in online marketing or even just marketing, the Google Analytics is not for you. The need would never arise. However, for those of you who are into online marketing, the Google Analytics is great tool, the features of which would amaze you. Using the Google Analytics would open your mind to a world of information that you otherwise thought was totally unavailable.
Why should I use Google Analytics?
If you are marketing your goods or services online, it is important that you track the performance of your ad campaigns. This will help you identify campaigns that are performing well and those that are just wasting your money. The Google Analytics will provide you the details and the tools to track this, which would help you to make changes to your marketing tactics or revamp the entire campaign. To understand the benefits of Google Analytics, we take you through some of its great features that you would love to use.
1. Google Analytics is Free
Google analytics is offered as a freemium. The basic version can be used for an unlimited period of time at zero cost. However, to avail advanced features you will have to pay a nominal charge. Having said that access to just the basic features is sufficient in most scenarios. Google Analytics lets you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social networking sites and applications.
2. AdWords Integration
This is for folks who have already been into online marketing. Adwords is an online advertising service offered by Google that offers the advertisers a platform to compete to display their advertising copy to users depending on the keywords, cookies (that gives info about the other browsing habits) and other factors. You can use the Google Analytics to review your online marketing campaigns by tracking various metrics like impressions, clicks, bounce back rates, and other landing page quality parameters.
3. Easy to use
The basic setup of Google Analytics is relatively easy to use and quite easy to learn too so that you have a deeper understanding of how it works and how to generate the required reports. The documentation available is quite comprehensive and it should not be a difficult task to learn using this great tool. The self-help/learn options are plenty as well. Both the implementation and configuration is quite easy.
4. Plenty of metrics and dimensions to track
Google Analytics gives you the facility to track over 50 metrics and dimensions. This helps you with more options to track the performance of your advertisement. These are demarcated as categories such as advertising, content, conversions, e-commerce, social, mobile, goals, site-search etc. This will help you find the exact report that you are looking for.
5. Custom reports
Custom reports can be easily created using Google Analytics. By building a customer report you can easily track only the necessary metrics of the website or webpage that you wish to have a look at. It provides you with the filters to choose the metrics and dimensions that you want to track. What more? It also lets you have multiple filters in a customer report, giving you the flexibility to use it any way that you would like to. You can build multiple report tabs this way.
6. Readymade integrations and partner services
With over 180 partner integration apps and innumerous services encompassing a wide range of aspects like Business intelligence, Content Management, Surveys, Social analysis, Email marketing, phone call tracking, Mobile reporting, Search optimization and many more, Google analytics has the perfect reporting solution for any online system. The tracking mechanism is applicable to computers, as well as mobile devices like android smartphones and iPhones.
7. Free access to Analytics Academy
For a newbie who is relatively new to the world of online computing, the reports and features of the Google Analytics can be quite overwhelming. Don’t worry, Google has a solution for that too. In the Google analytics academy you can learn more about this tool as well as get help from experts.
8. Easily scalable and very flexible
The Google Analytics is quite easy to connect to other tools. You can export data and automatically build reports and dashboards using other tools like Next Analytics. Further, there are many ways to automate data reporting and gain insights easily.
9. Filter out internal traffic
This feature of Google Analytics helps improve the reporting accuracy. If you are keen to find out the number of views (impressions) your ad had got, you should not consider the views generated internally for testing or other activities, only the consumer’s impressions should count. Google Analytics has the feature to filter out and hence exclude your internal traffic from the reports.
10. Multiple profile creation
You can create more than one profile in your Analytics account; one can be used as the main profile while the other can be used to experiment. With two profiles at your disposal, you can feel free to experiment and fall back to the main profile if something goes wrong.
Undoubtedly, the Google Analytics is the preferred and the most widely used marketing analytics tool available. With a host of features that comes with a zero price tag, Google Analytics is something you should use to gain more insights about your online business and achieve both growth and profitability.
