What Information Does Google Analytics Track?
What Data is Google Analytics Unable to Track?, As the most widely used digital reporting tool in the world, Google Analytics captures a huge amount of behavioural and analytical data. But how much of this information do you really want to track? There are a number of ways to modify the way that Google Analytics tracks your website traffic and conversions. [1]
Some of these modifications are classed as “Features”, while others are classed as “Filters”. These modifications can include adding additional tracking code to your site or changing the settings on Google Analytics to add or exclude specific types of information. This is especially useful for sites that have ecommerce functionality and wish to track sales leads generated by online marketing campaigns.
What Is Customer Lifetime Value Tracking?
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a powerful metric that allows marketers to track the long-term impact of a marketing campaign. It is a great tool for determining which customers are worth investing more money in to keep them coming back. CLV is especially important if you are running multiple channels and want to know which ones are producing the best ROI. By knowing which channels are generating the most revenue, you can allocate your budget accordingly and optimize the performance of your campaigns. This can be a huge advantage over traditional methods such as tracking the number of new customers referred from a particular source, or the cost of acquiring that customer.[2]
What Is the Importance of Customer Lifetime Value?
It’s easy to get caught up in the revenue numbers and forget one of the most important drivers of growth – your customers. Tracking the customer life cycle from acquisition through repurchase is crucial to achieving sustainable growth. The customer lifetime value (LTV) is a great way to measure your efforts and see which strategies are paying off. It is also one of the most important data points to track because it helps you prioritize your marketing budget.
You can track the LTV by analyzing your customer data using a CDP and then measuring the LTV with the help of Google Analytics. This is a smart way to increase your profitability and boost your brand image. The best part is that you don’t have to spend a fortune doing it!
Setting Up Goals in Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking ecommerce data, but it can be difficult to set up properly. Many businesses have problems with cross-domain tracking, or have third-party integrations installed that aren’t correctly configured in Google Analytics, which leaves them with inaccurate data.[3]
Fortunately, Google Analytics has a new feature called Event Editing and Synthesis that makes it easier to track behavioural events like clicks, scroll behavior, transactions, and file downloads. This allows users to hone their goals and get granular behavioural data with very little effort required, saving time for digital marketing experts and conversion analysts.
When you configure a goal in Google Analytics, it’s important to set a value for each one that you’re interested in tracking. For example, if you’re interested in tracking how often a customer completes a step of the checkout process on your website, you might want to set a dollar value here that will increase every time a goal is completed successfully. Fomo will fetch these values each 4 hours, so you can easily check back in your GA account to see how successful your campaign is.
What Data Are Google Analytics Goals Unable to Track?
There are a lot of things that can be tracked using Google Analytics goals, from form submissions to video clicks. But there’s one metric that isn’t able to be tracked: customer lifetime value.[4]
Lifetime value is the total profit a customer brings to your business over the course of their relationship with you. It’s a completely different type of metric than a specific interaction with your site.
Importance of Tracking Goals
Goals are an important part of any marketing campaign, as they help you measure your website’s performance. They can also help you determine how well your ads and email campaigns are performing.
The first step in setting up Google Analytics Goals is to decide what type of data you want to track. For example, if you‘re an online retailer, you may want to track visits to your products page and how much time they spend on it. Or, you might set a goal that tracks how many people sign up for your newsletter each week.
There are many different types of Goals, so you’ll want to choose a goal that’s appropriate for your business. A good marketing agency will help you make this decision.
One of the most common Goals is Conversion. This type of goal measures how many people take a particular action on your site (such as a purchase or app download).[5]
Another popular Goal is Inquiry. These goals are a great way to track actions that indicate that potential customers are looking for more information about your product or service. These may include things like checking contact details, clicking on phone numbers, or submitting a form.
For education professionals, it’s a good idea to set up Goals that track any downloads of brochures or student handbooks that prospective students may find on your site. These could be complementary resources to your course content and are a great way to nurture prospects towards conversion.
Finally, Pages/Screens Goals are a great way to track how engaged your prospects are on your site. This can be especially useful for websites that gain revenue from ad displays or website clicks.
Event goals are another popular Goal type that can be used to track specific user interactions. These goals use the same values that you would assign to a conversion goal, and they are a great way to track events such as signups for your newsletter or social media shares.
About Google Analytics Features
Google Analytics is a web-based analytics platform that helps businesses understand how their websites and apps are being used. It also enables them to track user behavior and take action to improve their site or app.
Google offers several features to help users get the most out of their data, including free IQ lessons, custom alerts and audience segments. The company also has an active blog and community forum for discussing new product features.
Goals in Google Analytics are essential for measuring website performance. They allow businesses to focus on specific goals, such as driving revenue or acquiring leads.[6]
However, there are certain limitations to goal tracking in GA. For example, you can only set up four types of metrics as a goal: Pages/Sessions, Events and Destination, Duration, and Lifetime Value.
Another limitation is that Goals can only be tracked on pages that are tagged with Google Analytics tracking code. This means that you must make sure that all of your goals are tagged with the correct tracking code before you can view reports on their performance.
The tracking code is a block of JavaScript that is included on website pages to track the actions of users. Once the tracking code is installed, it sends data to the analytics server.
In addition to tracking page visits, analytics can also tell you where your users are spending their time on your site and which pages they are leaving your site. This is referred to as the “Behavior flow” feature and can provide useful insights into where your users are coming from, what they are interested in and how they move through your website.
One of the most important features in Google Analytics is the user identifier feature. It allows you to track your user’s engagement on your website using their unique user identifier.
Using this feature allows you to see which interactions an individual had with your website and how long it took them to convert. This feature can be particularly valuable for businesses that want to know the customer journey from start to finish.[7]
Conclusion
There is a good reason why it is often the case that most digital marketers will choose Google Analytics over the competition in this category. Having said that, the software suite offers more than just website traffic and user metrics. For example, there is a plethora of data visualizations available in the form of charts and graphs to name but a few. There are even data tagging and analysis options available on a more granular level. To top it all off, the software suite is free for the life of a Gator. Aside from the aforementioned perks, Google Analytics also boasts a plethora of features in a streamlined interface that makes data management a breeze.
What Is Google Analytics?
Google Analytics is a web analytics platform used by millions of websites to track the performance of their websites. It is a free tool that helps businesses and website owners discover more information about their visitors.[8]
It offers metrics on the volume of visits, unique users, pageviews, average session duration, traffic channels, user retention, and more. It also lets you build reports about your audience, acquisition channels, engagement, and conversions.
The number of sessions that a user has on your site is one of the most important Google Analytics metrics because it allows you to determine whether or not your paid marketing (Google Ads) and search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns are working. It also shows you how many people are returning to your site after a previous visit, which is vital for driving repeat business.
You can find this metric under the Audience tab in Google Analytics, or you can access it using the GA API. This metric gives you a good high-level proxy for user engagement, but it is not the only data you should be collecting to get a full understanding of your audience and their habits.
Another important metric in Google Analytics is your bounce rate. Bounces are the percentage of your visitors who trigger only one request from your server, such as a single page view, without engaging with any other content on your website. If you have high bounce rates, that means most of your visitors aren’t staying long enough on your site to find what they’re looking for or to complete any other action.
Your site search data is another metric in Google Analytics that can help you determine which keywords and phrases your users are using to get to your website. This can be useful for zeroing in on the terms that your SEO campaigns should focus on, so you can improve your organic search traffic.[9]
While these are just a few of the most important Google Analytics metrics, there are many others that can be used to track your website and help you optimize it. The key is to set goals, decide what you want to measure, and then ask the right questions to make the most of your data.[10]
