accesso Webinar Series Presents: Introduction to Google Analytics.
Understanding data is the key to making better business decisions, but when it comes to tracking the performance of your online sales, it can be difficult for the average user to know where to start. As part of our commitment to partnership, we strive to empower our clients with the tools they need to analyze their eCommerce data effectively and efficiently. We know that many of our clients use Google Analytics as their web analytics tool, and others have shared that they are interested in getting started with this popular program. We asked our in-house expert Leslie Strickland, Manager of Business Intelligence, to share her top insights from managing analytics tracking for our accesso Passport clients in a recent webinar.
For our beginner users or those needing a refresher, it’s helpful to start with a basic understanding of what web analytics means. Web analytics is the collection, reporting and analysis of data from a website in order to improve its performance. (Wikipedia). The performance of a website is typically measured in terms of conversions or essentially, what action you want the visitor to take. Depending on the type of site you have, this action could be a call to a group sales agent, a form fill for more information or the online sale of an item such as a season pass, membership or event ticket. In the digital era we live in, it is important to care about how people engage with your site. Is it easy to navigate? Are visitors finding the information they need? Are there any barriers to purchase or conversion that you can eliminate?
It’s important to ask these questions because potential customers are online. The average U.S. consumer now spends at least 5 hours per day on their mobile device (TechCrunch) and 79% say they make purchases online (Pew Research). These customers, however, are becoming increasingly discerning: over a third of consumers will stop engaging with a website if it takes too long to load or is unattractive (Adobe). When you have the data on how your customers are engaging with your website, you can optimize it for even better engagement.
While there are numerous web tracking tools available, they all essentially function in the same way—tracking user behavior, including the number of sessions, sources of sessions, actions taken by users throughout the site and ultimately, the most important action of all, conversions. We are focusing on Google Analytics because they have a solid position in the marketplace for their open source solution, and while not necessary for most sites, their paid solution is incredibly powerful.
In our introduction, we will cover the parts of Google Analytics that we’ve found are the most helpful to focus on, starting with a brief account management introduction before turning to navigating report categories, understanding report options, segmentation and a review of the most popular reports and how they might be useful to you. We will also briefly introduce Google Tag Manager and how it can help streamline your conversion tracking for fast, efficient results. For more training on Google Analytics, we highly recommend visiting the Google Analytics Academy which is tailored to different levels of expertise.
Watch our webinar to learn more. If you are interested in learning more about our accesso solutions and how they work with Google Analytics, let us know about your business needs here or email [email protected].