Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools you can use to measure and monitor the success metrics of your website.

It provides the information you need about who visits your site, what they are looking for, how they got there and what search terms they used. Any person who want to monitor their website performance should use this free tool.

Many website owners have already heard about how Google Analytics can be helpful in understanding what they should work on to fulfill the needs of their readers, and at the same time try to capitalize on it to boost sales. The data extracted are extremely important and it might just give you the answer on how to increase the efficiency of your website.

This is a free tool and anybody can use it. As soon as you have set up your account, Google will immediately start to pull in useful data about your website that you can use to your advantage.

What does Google Analytics measure?

1. Dimensions – These are the attributes of your website data, such as the town or city where the traffic came from, the social media you are evaluating or the page you are measuring.
2. Metrics – These are the quantitative element of the dimensions. An example would be the number of traffic from New York City or Atlanta, Georgia.

While dimensions and metrics are the building blocks of Google Analytics, below is a list of the important data that Google Analytics can gather for you.

Average Time On Website – Gathering the data on how long visitors stay on your website will give you a small window of what they are looking for and if they have found what they need. This also determines the pages that are popularly visited by users.

Unique Visitors – If you often wonder how many people exactly visit your website daily, Google Analytics can help you determine the exact number of unique visitors everyday. There are parameters that you can set so that you can view the trends over a certain period of time.

Keywords Used – Using relevant and niche-appropriate keywords definitely helps boost traffic. If you want to know the keywords that are pulling traffic for you, Google Analytics can also give you with this data. Having this information at hand will help you understand what the users are looking for and help you strategize your keyword use in the future.

Sources of Traffic – In the event that you want to track or put a return of investment figure on your SEO efforts, you can definitely use Google Analytics to predict the future growth of your business. Using this tool will allow you to see where all of your traffic comes from and you can also visit the referring links used by your visitors.

Conversions – The conversion data from Google Analytics tell you how people convert on your website and which part of it needs some improvement to increase your conversion rate.

Now that you know the importance of installing Google Analytics, there are some pointers you need to work on to proceed to the next step.

1. Make sure that the tool is implemented properly. If you are using WordPress, you can easily use the analytics plugin to implement the tool correctly.
2. Once you have determined the performance of your website, you can dive into further information that will help you improve on your weak points. For example, if people cannot find you through organic search, try to check if you can pull up the data you need to learn why.
3. Outline the dimension and metric that will show the questions you have regarding your website. For example, if you want to know how many of your visitors dropped by to your website through organic search, you can simply look at the organic traffic of one of the pages.

Think of Google Analytics as a handy tool that can resolve problems. But try not to see it as a solution, but rather a place where you can see problems. Once you identify them, you can dive into the cause of the problem by analyzing the data you have gathered and formulate a plan on how to fix them.