Using Google Analytics to understand your website visitors

Google Analytics is a web analytics tool we use to track and understand visitor behaviour on a website. Google Analytics provides the information you need to help shape your company's strategy for success and to discover things you probably didn't know yet about your website visitors. Whether you have an e-commerce website or an informational one, Google Analytics helps you understand how your website visitors behave. We use this user information to optimise your marketing plan and customer journey for the best results. That is how we achieve your marketing goals together. 

Google Analytics consists of 4 parts: 

• Audience: who visits your website? 
• Acquisition: where do your users come from? 
• Behaviour: what do your users do on your site? 
• Goals: what does it deliver? (in conversions and/or money). 

Why you need a Google Analytics account

With a Google Analytics account, you gain insight into all activity on your website, such as the number, gender, age and location of your visitors. This information matters because it shows you whether your website is actually attracting visitors who fit your target audience. If you have no idea where your visitors come from, it is unclear which levers to pull to improve your visitor numbers as profitably as possible.

Do you invest in every online marketing channel, but all your leads turn out to come from social media marketing? Then there is a good chance there are still opportunities in SEO or SEA. You can also see which device most visitors use. If, for example, you have an online shop and most visitors land on it from their desktop, there may be something wrong in the buying process on the mobile website.

Do you notice that a landing page has a high bounce rate? Then the content marketer hasn't written the information visitors want to read on that page. Ultimately, this will have a negative effect on your website's rankings in Google. 

Faster insight with Google Analytics dashboards

A Google Analytics dashboard is an overview of the most important statistics for your website or part of your website. Dashboards are handy for management and performance reports. These reports can, for example, be sent automatically from Google Analytics every month or every week.

With a Google Analytics dashboard, all the groundwork is done for you, which shortens the time needed to put the data into documents or spreadsheets. In Google Analytics you can choose from various Google report templates, but you can also build your own custom report with the dimensions and metrics you consider important.  

The difference between the old Google Analytics and Analytics 4

The biggest difference between the old Google Analytics and Google Analytics 4 is the way Google Analytics measures websites. GA4 works with an event-based data model. The old Google Analytics always measures through sessions linked to user data. Events such as page views, downloads and purchases, for example, are linked to user information such as age, gender, source/medium and location.

For many websites, this method can still be used as normal. With the rise of more and more apps and single-page websites (one-page sites), tracking sessions and page views is no longer the best way to evaluate the visitor experience. That is why GA4 links sessions and page views respectively. Google measures a series of events, and each event passes on different information through parameters. This automatically measures scroll depth, video views, downloads and other factors. The emphasis will be more on valuable visits and interactions. Google Universal moved over to Google Analytics 4 from 1 July 2023