Google Analytics is no more a sales and conversion measuring tool. It’s a magical box that contains all the data related to your site, starting from the source of incoming traffics, the actions taken by the traffics, to where they go off and the ways to keep them bringing back to your site. This Google Analytics is nothing but a mishmash of some elegant grand analytics tools. I am talking about those features that made GA the mostly used web statistics service. Google Analytics offers five key analytical solutions to the marketers; and these are what I am going to thrash out here in brief.
Content Analytics
Content analytics is equipped to track the value of the contents; mainly in terms of conversions, visits, and the time that a visitor elapses on any particular content. A tool named Experiment, under content section, will be of your assistance to improve content quality of your site. It does so by testing different variations of contents, texts, images, headlines etc. and letting you know the best possible combinations to generate maximum conversions. Site Search is an awfully interesting reporting tool. It lists out the words or keywords that a visitor uses to search any content in your site and let you make apposite changes. You can use the In-Page Analyticsto know how the visitors navigate on your site. The Site Speed Analysis will alert you for the slow pages.
Conversion Analytics
This part of Google Analytics is a collection of reports to get the number of visitors you are attracting and more importantly the number of visitors generating conversions. You will only need to define the Goals; rests are the responsibility of Event Tracking. But, before that, to get the most from the visitors, use the Ecommerce Reporting to have a study on “what the customers purchase” and “why they purchase”. You can then put together a healthier portfolio of contents. The Multi-Channel Funnels is the best thing to describe about GA. MCF is highly supportive in improving the keyword coverage, conversion of inbound clicks, reaching customers at any stage of the conversion path, spotting out the most effective channels of marketing etc.
Mobile Analytics
Nowadays, mobile sites are one of the prominent additions in the field of online marketing. Google Analytics will measure the ultimate impact of mobile sites on your business. Understanding the growing importance of this concern, GA has enabled features to give the marketers an insight to discover the result of interacting through mobile devices. You will also get program development kits to delight the visitors and create a better experience on their mind.
Social Analytics
Social media is probably at its paramount level and has been targeted by the marketers. Companies around the world are stepping up toward social media marketing to get attention of communities through social media like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube etc. to bring traffics to the fore. How the visitors interact through media buttons (facebook like and share button, tweet button, Google +1 button etc.) has been a major phenomenon these days. The Conversions report that we outlined earlier can track the inbound links from social media buttons as well. The Social Source report presents a complete picture of the paths that a visitor took to reach through your site.
Advertising Analytics
Advertising analytics is the last broad feature to the value creation process. For advertising, the rule of thumb is that, it doesn’t mean that, if you spend more on your keywords and ads, it will give you a better result. All your success depends largely on the quality and effectiveness of your ads. GA lets you know the actual performance of all advertisements. You can now show specific ads to specific visitors through defining campaigns and target customers. So far you must have understood that Google Analytics is a platform with fully equipped tools to support your business. I will try to discuss these tools broadly in my upcoming writings.