GA is a free tool that Google provides that allows you to track what’s happening on your website. With analytics you will be able to see real-time as well as historical data, things like the amount of traffic that visited your website, pageviews, conversions and revenue and much more. Not having analytics installed on your website is like aiming at a target blindfolded, it will be very difficult to hit the target but if you do, you will not be able to say how you did it.

One of the advantages of digital marketing is that you can track every rand spent and see if it is bringing you a good return. Google analytics allows you to track your marketing campaigns, for example if you are running Google Ads you can see exactly how much your ads brought in over a specific time period.

To succeed online your business must understand its target audience and analytics will give you demographic as well as geographical information about the people that are visiting your website. You can use this data to improve or adjust your marketing message to speak to the audience that is most likely to buy your product.

Watch this video on how to install Google Analytics:

Another important aspect to check is how people are interacting with your website. Google analytics will show you which pages are bringing in the most traffic and where people are dropping off. For example are people going to the product page but not going to checkout or people are going to the checkout page but not completing the purchase. This is valuable information because you can make adjustments to improve each step of your sales funnel.

Checking the Source/Medium report will show you where your traffic is coming from and which channels are performing best.

Here are a few more things you can track in Google Analytics:

1. How many total visitors you get,

2. Where they are coming from

3. How long they spend on your website

4. Which of your pages they are visiting most

5. Age

6. Gender

7. General Location

8. And much more!

There are endless data points you can check with analytics but the important thing to remember is to track the data that is important to your business.