Note: This is a beginner guide I wrote for PR students to get familar with the Google Analytics software, a free web analytics service that is heavily applied by many brands in the digital economy.
The Ten Critical Things PR Students Must Know About Google Analytics
- Google Analytics is a free web analytics service which can measure and track the return on investment and performance of your advertisements, websites, videos, social networking sites, and applications. Google Analytics provides public relation practitioners information on website performance, and if the performance leads to user satisfaction and desired business actions.
- Google Analytics helps you better understand your audiences through the audience report. The user analysis section on the audience report enables you to see their digital profiles based on demographics, interests, geography, and technological devices they use, etc. It provides insight on how to reach the “right audience” and guide your marketing, community and content strategy.
- Through acquisition report, Google Analytics helps you find out which traffic sources are essential to your site, and learn about which sites refer traffic so that you can develop a better SEO strategy, build possible partnerships and allocate advertising costs accordingly.
- By clicking “behavior flow” on Google Analytics, you will be able to track audience’ path and interaction on specific pages, including what visitors are interested in your site, and where do they enter and exit the site (exit page report.)
- Traffic is important, but conversion is more important. Google Analytics measures your success through different goals of conversion to see if your website is creating value for your business. You can decide what your goals are depending on the nature of your business. You can also choose a goal from the goal template or even create your own custom goal. For example, you can select a goal of destination (a specific location goal) or duration (how long they have stayed.)
- You can link your “Google Ads” account with your Google Analytics account to evaluate your Google Ads performance. Google Analytics can support your “Google Ads” conversion tracking.
- Google Webmaster, which you can find on the Google Analytics site, is an excellent tool for you to track your site’s search performance, get insight on related keywords, and learn to create high-quality and search-optimized sites.
- Google is not just about desktops, you can now seek for mobile performance report to see if your site is optimized for mobile devices and if there are rooms for improvement to attract mobile users.
- For most of the Google Analytics tabs, the metrics, dimensions, and configuration sides are all customizable. You can create custom dashboards, a customizable set of data in your account, or even custom segments for advanced segmentation and interpretation of data. Just play with it!
- Real-time is the key to success in public relations because you have access to what’s going on in the world and take advantage of the contextual geniuses as fast as possible. The Real-Time report on Google Analytics allows you to see displays of six different reports including Overview, Locations, Traffic Sources, Content (or Screens, for Mobile App properties), Events, and Conversions. You can click any sections of these reports to apply a real-time segment. By doing this, you can see the number of active users on your website and hits refreshed every 60 seconds!
Alexandra Lyu 