If you’re investing in digital marketing, you’ve probably heard about Google Analytics a lot, which allows businesses to track their website visitors’ journey and behavior.
But do you really need it?
Unless you attract and convert leads mostly offline and your website has little or no importance to your business, the answer is, absolutely!
In this article, we’ll go over six reasons why you need to set up Google Analytics 4 and how it can be a game changer for your business.
Six reasons to install Google Analytics
Reason #1: To understand where your site’s visitors are coming from
In Google Analytics 4, GA’s new version, you’ll find an entire Acquisition section where you can learn where your site’s new and returning visitors are coming from.
The most common traffic sources are:
- Direct (by typing the URL)
- Organic search
- Paid search (PPC ads)
- Referrals (when another website links back to yours)
- Social media
Learning where your traffic comes from can help you evaluate which sources and lead generation strategies are working best.
For instance, if you’ve been running a campaign to increase brand awareness, you should see a surge in traffic from direct and organic search.
If you’re trying to build a strong social media presence, you can see how many visitors are coming from each platform and measure the effectiveness of your strategies.
Finally, you can also compare the purchase behavior of leads from each channel and find out which traffic sources are bringing you the most valuable leads.
Reason #2: To learn who your visitors are
Every marketer knows that understanding your audience’s demographics is one of the most crucial things to creating an effective digital marketing strategy. Thankfully, Google Analytics can help with that as well.
By default, GA4 provides the following information about your visitors:
- Age
- City
- Country
- Gender
- Interests
- Language
- Region
By learning your audience’s traits, you can optimise your overall marketing strategy in several ways.
That includes adjusting your tone of voice to their language, focusing on the value propositions that are most compelling to them, optimising your ads’ targeting, and more.
You can also find which demographics have the highest conversion rates and lifetime value and adjust your strategy and marketing efforts to them, but more on that later.
Reason #3: To learn how people behave on your site
GA4 has made it easy to gather in-depth information about how visitors behave on your site.
You can use Events in Google Analytics 4 to track dozens of possible actions you’d like your visitors to take.
That includes clicks, form submissions, downloads, purchases, and more.
But GA4 data isn’t limited to conversion events. You can also evaluate the effectiveness of pages that don’t have a call-to-action by measuring things like the engagement rate, average engagement time, and page scrolls.
Gathering that information allows you to understand which pages attract the most viewers, whether your copy is compelling enough, compare outcome variations before and after implementing a change, and more.
From there, you can optimise your visitors’ experience by creating shortcuts to the pages they’re most interested in, improving your copy, and running A/B tests.
Reason #4: To find out where visitors are bouncing your site
Leading traffic to a site with a high bounce rate is like pouring water into a leaky bucket.
To make your marketing efforts sustainable and ensure you’re not wasting resources, you must find and fix the biggest ‘holes’ in your visitors’ journey.
GA4 allows you to find those holes by tracking each page’s bounce and engagement rate.
They work basically the same way, with the former tracking the percentage of sessions that weren’t engaged and the latter tracking the portion that was.
According to Google, an engaged session is one that:
- Lasted more than ten seconds AND
- Generated at least one conversion event OR
- Resulted in at least two page/screen views
By analysing and finding the pages with the highest bounce and lowest engagement rates, you can easily see where your leads are leaving, start figuring out why, and come up with ways to fix things.
Reason #5: To predict which leads are most likely to buy
Google Analytics lets you segment your data in many ways, including purchase history.
This means you can find out the common traits and behaviors of your highest-spending customers and predict which leads are most likely to convert and spend more.
You can then focus your remarketing efforts on them for a higher ROI.
You may also find that people from certain demographic groups are more likely to convert. In this case, you could adjust your communication and strategy to become more relevant to those groups.
Reason #6: It’s free
The best part of all? Google Analytics is entirely free.
All you have to do is take a few hours to set up your Google Analytics account, and you’re good to go. Considering hiring an agency to do the setup for you may come with some costs, but it will help you save a lot of time and ensure that you collect comprehensive data which can later help you improve your digital marketing strategies.
Takeaway
In summary, GA4 is an essential tool for businesses that want to stay competitive and relevant in today’s digital age. The benefits of GA4 over Universal Analytics are clear, and the sooner businesses make the switch, the better positioned they will be to take advantage of its powerful features and insights.
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