Behind the apparent success of a website lies a significant amount of work. It is necessary to find an innovative concept, set it up in an attractive way from the point of view of the visual aspect, and find a host that corresponds to your needs. Once these three aspects have been put in place, it remains to create unique and quality content. To increase your number of visitors, it is then necessary to implement marketing campaigns and optimize your referencing for search engines. But these efforts must be measurable and analyzed to test the effectiveness of SEO measures, in terms of advertising placement or net linking. This is why online analytics tools prove to be of great help and deliver exhaustive data on the behavior of visitors. Google Analytics is the most popular and well-known tool for achieving these ends. 

 What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a tool for analyzing websites and was created by the Urchin Software Corporation. Previously called “Urchin Tracking Monitor”, this tool was acquired by Google in 2005. The results are based on various cookies, which collect various information on the behavior of visitors to a website. The analysis of this data makes it possible to establish precise statistics, which makes it possible to answer the following questions from administrators:

1. How many visitors came to the website and for how long exactly?
2. What is the visit time on the site and in particular how long per page?
3. Did people come to the site directly from Google, another search engine, or through another website?
4. Are the users located in the region, on the territory, or abroad?
5. What is the conversion rate (the number of visitors who have become buyers or who have taken actions on the site, for example, a download, a purchase, a registration, a click on an advertisement, etc.)
6. At what stage of the visit did users leave the site?

Using this visitor information, Google’s analysis tool can define and classify different categories of users. Nevertheless, Google’s data collection methods are often controversial when it comes to respecting personal data. The leading search engine indeed stores data on servers in the United States, as well as analyzed user profiles, which may even correspond to a particular person if they have a Google account. 

How can admins take advantage of Google Analytics?

The data collected on users is an opportunity to be seized to ensure the quality and effectiveness of the content. It also allows you to assess the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. For example, you can link your Google AdWords account with your Analytics account, and easily filter which keywords have the expected success. It also allows you to analyze which points need to be optimized in your campaign. You can identify which pages are performing best on your site from information collected on visitor bounce rate and clickstream.

Configure Google Analytics for your web project

To use Google Analytics with your website, online store, application, or social networks, it is possible to open an independent account on http://www.google.fr/analytics/ or to link your Adwords account to the ‘tool. You’ll find the tracking tool under the “tools and analytics” tab, which requires a Google account. Define a site, an application, or a store in the properties and choose which users can have access to the data. If you want to get precise data on the conversion rate, set specific actions beforehand.

Once the tool has been defined according to your expectations, you can link your Google Analytics tracking code to your Web project. For this, the Google Tag Manager is very effective, especially if you add other tags to your website. If you only use the Google Analytics tracking code, manual integration directly into the HTML code of your pages is possible. For CMS like WordPress, there are additional modules to integrate the code with the system requirements. If you want to analyze the behavior of users on an application, it is necessary to use Google Analytics SDK (Software Development Kit) for Android or iOS. Alternatively, the Google Tag Manager for Mobile SDK (Software Development Kit) for Android and iOS is another effective solution, available for download.