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Published July 25th, 2016 by

How To Configure Google Analytics For Online Business Success

Measurement is important to a business success but what is worse than no measurement at all is wrong measurement.

Data analysis one of the reasons online marketing gain much popularity. With a properly tagging structure, you can measure up to the last click that brought not only traffic to your website but also conversion or leads.

Yet in my years of working on different website across various industries, I find it surprising that most people do not have analytics setup on their website.  Some simply because they find it difficult to comprehend, others because they do not believe in it.

For you to grow successful online, you must have a good analytic tool plugged to your website for you to understand what is going on behind the scene. Setting up analytic tool for your site helps you answer some of the following questions:

  1. How many people visit your website or a particular section of it?
  2. Where did they come from- geolocation?
  3. What did they do when they land?
  4. Which pages do they find interesting?
  5. Did they follow the path you expect them to follow?
  6. What is stopping them or encouraging them to buy from you?

 

This and much more will a good analytic tool help you to answer. But for you to be able to do this, your analytic tool must be set-up correctly.

It is not only surprising a lot of people do not take much action or rarely do they even check their analytics. If you have ever taken a look at Google Analytics ( yes, we are going to be talking a lot about it today), you will be dazed by the sheer amount of information available that like most people, you are going to just browse through it and leave.

We do not want that happening so I am going to show you how to set-up Google Analytics for actionable insight for your website so that yo can use the information you gather there to make intelligent business decisions.

Why Google Analytics?

You may be wondering why Google Analytics? There is simply not much reason apart from the fact that it is

  • Free
  • Cheap
  • Shows how Google sees your website.

There are dozens of other analytical tools that you can use. Your business need, resource and manpower will determine how far you go with data gathering but for small businesses just kicking off, Google Analytics will do just fine.

In this article, you will learn how to setup Google Analytics, how to set-up views and the type of views you need to set-up and how to set-up goals.

For this activity, you will need a Gmail account. With your Gmail account, you will be able to access Google Analytics and a whole lot of other Google product.

Let’s get rolling.

Set up Google Analytics

  • Navigate to Google analytics
  • Follow the setup process.
  • Validate your account
  • Go to Google Search Console
  • Register your website
  • Validate the account
  • Link Google Analytics to your Google Search Console

 

And this is where most businesses stop the process. Once they set up Google Analytics, that is the end.

While that is a good step, that is actually the beginning of your data collection process.

This is because Google Analytics consist of hundreds of information that can make it very difficult to navigate or get valuable insight that you can use to grow your business.

So we are going to go a step forward and create views.

 

What are views and Why are they important?

Views are your profile on your Google Analytics that let you segment data the way you actually want to see them.

Let us imagine you have three people on your team. An SEO expert, Social Media and PPC specialist. While there are linkages between their activities, these people are focused on measuring different results and are interested in different KPI.

Views make it very easy for each team to see exactly the data they want without interfering with the main data.

 

So what type of views should you create?

Google allow you create up to 25 views but you do not need to create 25 views. At minimum, you need 3 major views

  • Unfiltered view – This is the default view and contains all your data from the date of creating it. Leave it as it is.
  • Test view – A view for you to experiment and test new step up before making it live.
  • Main view- This is the main view for the business. It contains the overall goals for the business. When you want to pull reports for the CEO, this is where you go to.

The first view you should create is your main view. Immediately you create the main view, you should set-up the desired goal your website is focusing on goals on this view. This is because the main view is what you are going to use to replicate other views.

 

But first, what are goals?

Goals are the desired outcome you want to achieve with your website. For most businesses, the desired outcome usually are

  • Online sales for e-commerce website.
  • Leads for B2B websites.
  • Engagement.
  • Events like watching videos or downloading files.

 

Once you identify the desired business outcome you want, then you should setup a way to track it in Google Analytics.

This tracking can be done by setting up goals.

How do you setup goals in Google Analytics

1.Launch GA

2.Go to admin tab

GA-Admin

3. Click goals

GA-goals2

 

4.Click +goals

ga-newgoal

 

5.Google gives you a preset template to pick from. Chose the one that represents your goal.

GA-goal-setup1

 

6.Give your goal a name so you can remember what it is.

GA-goal-setup2

 

 

7.Select the page that corresponds to your goal page. (It could be any page but most often, it is usually the page your web visitors see after they carried out the action you want them to).

GA-goal-setup3:

NB:If you have a path you want them to follow, you can toggle the “funnel” option on to specific a desire path Google Analytics should track.

 

Now that you have your main goal configured, then you should go ahead and create views based on what you are interested in.For a recent project, I decided to create four (4) additional views

  • Blog view – I want to see how our blog is performing and contributing to the overall success of the website. ( Note: track your blog activities using views but setup a different property if you have a mobile app)
  • Mobile – We are beginning to live in a mobile-first world so I want to see how my website is performing on mobile device
  • Organic – How is your SEO effort performing.
  • PPC – How effective is your paid campaign.
  • Social media – Is it worth putting much effort into social media. Setting up a view for this channel will help you find out.

NB: You should create views based on your most important activities or current marketing channels.

 

Conclusion:

That is how you can set up Google Analytics so that you do not drone in data any time you check your data. How deep you go and how often you check your data will depend on how big you business is. You may want to check your GA every week so you can check what is working and what is not.

How do you use Google Analytics to grow your business?

Adegboye Adeniyi

Adegboye Adeniyi

Head of Search at VTNS Solutions
Adegboye Adeniyi is the Head of SEO at VTNS Solutions. He is a chess enthusiast and SEO junkie
Adegboye Adeniyi

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