Google Analytics is a free service that will help you to obtain the most value from your business website. With all that it has to offer, it certainly takes time to get familiar with the platform and utilize it properly. However, if you start with the Google Analytics basics, you can slowly build your knowledge. It is well worth the time, because the insights you draw from Google Analytics can help you to improve your marketing, better serve your target audience, and obtain more customers. This post goes over the reasons why it is a good idea to use Google Analytics, as well as the benefits it offers, to help ensure that the platform is well worth the investment of your time.
General Benefits of Google Analytics
Cost
The first and most obvious reason to use Google Analytics is that it is completely free. You don’t need to purchase, subscribe, or provide credit card information. All you need is a Gmail account and the ability to install a tracking code on your website, and you’re ready to go.
Data Visualization
Data is only useful if you can make sense of it. Therefore, the data visualization offered by Google Analytics is the second reason to use it. This platform presents the metrics in various forms: lists, charts, graphs, pie charts, spreadsheets, and more—allowing you to see how your website is performing. With enough knowledge, you can create dashboards to display the metrics that are most important to your business’s goals.
Reporting
While data visualization allows you to make sense of data, reporting allows you to draw conclusions from it. By comparing metrics within the data, you can gather further insights and identify causes and correlations—another reason why Google Analytics can benefit your business.
With the platform’s reporting capabilities, you can collect, present, and compare any data set or combination of data sets. Report on content relevancy, traffic sources, traffic volume, date ranges, campaign conversions, and more. Use Google Analytics to make data-driven decisions and share supporting information with other decision makers.
Real Time
The fourth reason why Google Analytics is useful is that the data it collects is ongoing and in real time. This means that you can create reports, compare metrics, and check performance on whatever basis you want—hourly, daily, monthly, yearly, year over year, quarter over quarter. You can associate traffic changes with specific campaigns, take note of trends across certain time frames, and cater reports to your company’s reporting periods. You can also take note of peak times for your target audience, such as whether certain pages, SEM campaigns, or blog posts gather more interest at certain points of the week, month, or year.
Source: Thrivehive
