Google Analytics 5 makes it incredibly easier to gain insight into your audience, track performance, and make improvements on your site. Downloading Google analytics is one of the first things most people do after building a new website or blog. But many don’t know how to fully leverage this amazing tool, especially with the latest features introduced with GA 5.
So in this article, I will take the top 8 Google analytics 5 features, so it’s easier for you to use them.
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Real-time Data Tracking
Real-time tracking is one area where Google analytics was lacking before, and its addition makes the tool even more valuable. This feature allows you to monitor real-time visitors’ activities and data changes on your site.
For instance, you can track the number of visitors on your site at any given point in time.
You can also monitor campaign performance and make necessary changes in real-time. So if you’re getting low conversions, you can look through available data to identify the issue and fix it. You can see what pages your visitors are and where they’re likely to leave to. This real-time feature is beneficial for product/ content recommendation.
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Identify Your Most Important Data
An important rule in analytics is to only track what is important, and Google analytics 5 makes that easier. It allows you to set up your dashboard in a way that you’ll only see important data whenever you log in.
To do this, you have to create multiple widgets for each data on the same dashboard. You can represent critical data with widgets and charts. For instance, if you’re a marketer tracking traffic, conversions, and cart abandonment, you can represent them with pie charts, tables, or other widgets.
This provides a useful summary of all your important performance data, goal completion, and metrics in one place.
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Discover What Your Visitors Are searching For on Your Site
Do you know what people are searching for on your website? When people visit your website, they use the search box on the site to locate products or contents they desire. Google analytics 5 allows you to track these search terms.
To see these internal searches, click on the ‘content menu’, then ‘site search’. You’ll see a list of the search terms under ‘usage.’ GA even goes further to tell you whether the visitor exited the page, refined their search, or continued browsing.
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Identify The Locations Of Your Most Valuable Visitors
If you’ve used Facebook ads or Google AdWords that allows advanced retargeting, you’ll know how difficult it is to decide on the locations to target – especially if you aren’t a local business. Google Analytics 5 helps in this regard, as you can identify the countries and cities with the best converting visitors for your business. That way you’ll know the location to target for your ads.
This feature displays global statistics, including the time spent on your site and the bounce rate for each country. You can further drill this data to identify the conversion rate for each country and your overall best-performing country.
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Monitor How People Move Around Your Website
Another benefit of the real-time capability of Google Analytics is that it allows you to see how people move around your website. You can see the pages that brought them in, the pages that they visited while on your site, and where they exited the site. This information helps you understand how to attract and retain website visitors. It also allows you to ascertain any pages they need improvement.
To see this data, click on ‘Behavior Analytic’ on your GA dashboard, then visitors flow.
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Identify Your Best Performing Page
Google Analytics allows you to see the pages that keep visitors longer on your site and has a lower bounce rate. Click on the ‘Content menu’ then select pages ‘Site Content’ to see the pages keeping your visitors on your website for a longer period.
To determine the web page with the lowest bounce rate, just filter for the site that people exit the quickest.
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Identify Your Best Performing Campaign
Have you ever wondered which of your online marketing campaigns is the most effective at driving traffic and conversions to your site? Then it’s time you examine your advanced campaign.
- Go to the ‘Advanced Segments’ dropdown and select the ‘New Custom Segment’.
- Once you’ve created the segment, you can then track your traffic from different segments. For instance, if you want to track your traffic from various social media platforms, you can call your custom segment social media profiles, and start entering the URL of platforms like facebook.com, twitter.com, and other platforms from which you are expecting traffic.
- After entering the domains, you can then check whether it’s pulling data and save the segment.
When followed through, you should be able to track the performance of all traffic sources, giving you an idea of the most effective ads platforms. You can also use this data to calculate the returns on each campaign and make better optimization decisions.
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Discover Why Shoppers Are Abandoning their Carts
Cart abandonment is a major issue every eCommerce trader has to deal with. Google Analytics allows you to identify why your buyers are quitting their carts. While it’s almost impossible to drive your cart abandonment to zero, the insight from GA allows you to improve your customer experience, adjust your sales funnel and make your site more shoppers friendly.
- To track your cart abandonment, go to ‘Setting Wheel’ and select ‘Goals’ from the drop-down menu.
- Create a new goal using ‘URL Destination’ as the Goal Type.
- Check the ‘Use funnel’ box to input each of the URLs that correspond to the stages a visitor must take when purchasing an item. After you’ve entered the basic objective parameters, including the final URL of the checkout process (typically a thank you for your order page).
If a significant number of visitors leave on the checkout page, then you’ll know that you have to make the site more customers friendly. If they leave without clicking on the button, then there’s something preventing them. Overall, Google analytics 5 will allow you to identify and resolve cart abandonment issues.
Conclusion
There’s so much more to Google Analytics than meets the eye. Whatever it is you learned in this article, the next step is to put them to practice to grow your site.