Analytics is a method used to keep track of the web presence of a product, service or any other activity on your website. Most importantly, it is essential to measure the effect of all social media activities you are making in order to spread word about your brand and website.
There are many platforms that can accomplish this, for example, Alexa, which is a Marketing stack owned by Amazon. The most popular platform however is probably Google Analytics as it gives valuable insight on users, traffic, social media impressions, etc.
After making a Google Analytics Account, there are 4 levels that need to be understood and can be seen in the admin section:
- User
- Account (can create upto 100 accounts)
- Properties (50 for each account)
- Views (default is for all data but can create view for one particular channel like Google search, social media)
Standard reports on google analytics measure what is going on on website from a user perspective (ex. who are the users, where are they coming from, etc.). There are 5 types of standard reports that can be used:
o Real time Reports - who are the people on the website right now or how many people present right now
o Audience Reports - tells more about people present (ex. their demographics)
o Acquisition Reports - from where have these people come, what marketing channels used to visit website
o Behaviour Reports - what are users doing on website, which pages are they visiting
o Conversion Reports - any output expected from a website (ex. sale, lead, registration), tell us if users are converting on website or not
Some important terms to remember while reading these reports are:
o User - someone who visits the site
o Session - when someone visits a site the time period they stay is a session
o Page views - the total number of pages you go through on a website in a session
o Unique page views - reloads of the same page in a session are discarded in count
o Cookie - is an alpha numeric code/id that a browser has and identifies it as a unique browser and user
o Bounce - occurs when a user quits the website without clicking on any link
o Bounce rate is calculated by (No. of bounced visits) / total no. of sessions) * 100