4 Reasons You Must Hook Up Google Analytics Right

Google Analytics is perhaps the most common way of tracking the number of viewers that a website receives during a specific period. Alongside this, the platform offers quite a large variety of analytics focused on these viewers, such as their key demographics and location, among others.

While the platform has been designed to be as easy to use as possible, mistakes can still happen when it’s being implemented and configured. In some cases, many website owners mightn’t realize that their Analytics has been incorrectly installed.

This is something that many people may be surprised by, as they expect people to know whether or not their analytics account is working. However, this isn’t always the case, as the platform may be showing some results, though they mightn’t be showing the right ones.

Not having your Google Analytics account installed and configured correctly can have quite a large impact on your overall website. As such, there can be a significant number of reasons why you should ensure that it’s done in the recommended way.

Why Ensure That Analytics Is Installed Correctly?

Accurate Visitor Numbers

This is perhaps the most obvious reason why you should have Google Analytics installed correctly, as failing to do so can have a variety of effects on your visitor numbers. While this shouldn’t stop people from going to your website, they may not turn up in an Analytics report.

Alongside this is the fact that the reports can often count certain visitors twice, or simply provide visitor number that is just plain wrong. As a result of this, you shouldn’t be able to get an accurate idea of how many people are actually visiting your website.

Naturally, this is something that every website owner should want to avoid. Depending on how badly or incorrectly installed the platform is, you may see quite a significant hike or drop in your visitor count which mightn’t be seen through any of your other marketing efforts.

As such, you’ll need to ensure that your Analytics account is properly installed to ensure that all site visitors are tracked and logged while they’re on your website.

Determining Where Your Visitors Are Coming From

Knowing where your website visitors are coming from can make quite a significant difference in your marketing activities. There are quite a variety of factors at play here, with the geographical location being just one of them.

Alongside this will be what kind of devices a visitor is using, which websites brought them to yours, and much more. These are all valuable pieces of information that you’ll be able to improve your marketing efforts in the short- and long-term.

For example, if you’re targeting people in a certain country, but the majority of website visitors are coming from somewhere else, then there’s clearly a problem at play. Though you can naturally expect a certain number of people to visit your website from places other than those you’re targeting, these should be a small minority.

Should your Analytics account be incorrectly installed, then this may be the reason why, which should mean that the rest of your marketing efforts are working fine.

Site Optimization

Geographic and device location aren’t the only pieces of information that you’ll be able to glean from Google Analytics, as it includes quite an extensive amount of information about your website visitors. You should also be able to see how long they spend on your site, which links they click on, and much more.

As a result, you’ll be able to optimize your site to encourage visitors to come back to, and stain on, your website. There are a variety of reasons that you may want to do so, with one of the more notable being to encourage them to buy your products or services.

Without knowing your bounce rate, average session time, and much more, you mightn’t be able to optimize your website as much as you may want. This can be quite a large negative, as it means that you shouldn’t be able to determine where your site is going wrong and what it can do to improve.

Much of this can be seen in whether you need to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) strategies or even your social media marketing. Alongside this, using the platform should also help you to figure out if there are any pages or posts that aren’t performing as well as you’d like.

With an incorrectly configured Analytics account, you’ll be losing out on much of this valuable information, which will have quite a significant amount of negative consequences. One of the more notable of these is tracking your marketing campaigns to ensure that you’re getting the views you’re looking for.

Marketing Efforts

You’ll need to base your marketing efforts on a solid foundation of information, which is one of the primary reasons why digital marketing professionals use Google Analytics. There’s quite an extensive amount of data that can be collected through the platform, which can then be used in all of your future strategies.

This is especially true if you’re already running a variety of campaigns across different channels, such as social media, search engine optimization, and much more. While social media companies will often have their own analytics software, these wouldn’t have any input into where on your website people went and what they looked at.

In contrast to this, Analytics should be able to tell you exactly where your visitors are coming from. As a result of this, you should be able to analyze the success of a particular campaign by measuring the increase in viewers and conversions that are made through the website.

By having Analytics installed correctly, you’ll be able to ensure that all of the information you need to improve on and adjust previous marketing strategy is accurate and usable. As a result, you should be able to create much more actionable strategies that ensure you bring in visitors and that they’re reading the ages that you want them to.

How To Set Up Analytics Correctly

This naturally leads to many people wondering how they can set up Google Analytics properly. While the process may seem complicated thanks to a large amount of jargon, it can be much more straightforward than you might believe. First, you’ll naturally need to have a website and have created an Analytics account. It should also be noted that you’ll need a Gmail account to do so, although this is quick and easy to set up.

When doing so, you’ll also need to set up a Google Tag account. While this is an extra step that many people mightn’t want to make, it’s an essential part of the process. Setting this up is straightforward and only requires some simple information.

Where many people may get confused is when they’re given their code snippets to put onto their websites. With WordPress and other platforms, however, this should be a simple copy and paste into the relevant sections of your site, notably the header and footer.

Once this has been done, you should log in to each of the accounts and put in the requested information for your Analytics account. This typically includes the website name, URL, company name, and much more. While these may seem overwhelming, they shouldn’t be as you should already have all of the information needed, making this as simple as copying and pasting much of the data.

When doing so, it’s worth taking your time to ensure that everything you out in is correct. Once you’ve done this, you should be able to find your Tracking ID. With this, it’s time to go to your Google Tag account, where you should be able to generate a new Tag, where you’ll then be able to input your Analytics Tracking ID, alongside some more information.

Once these are entered and saved correctly, you should have your Analytics account set up.