Learn How to Use Google Analytics to Monitor Website Activity

One of the most important things you must do after you implement your SEO strategy is the monitor that it works. How do you do that? The answer is simple: monitoring how many users visit your website, how they reached it, and what they do while they are browsing it. All these valuable data are found in one place, a free tool called Google Analytics. Today we will show you how to use Google Analytics starting from the very beginning.

What Is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a suite of tools that collect traffic data from your website and analyze it. You will know at any moment how many people visited your site over a period of time, how much time they spent browsing it, how many pages they browsed, and many other similar details.

In short, Google Analytics tells you everything about your website traffic. The way you use this information can help you improve your SEO strategy, understand more about the behavior of your website visitors and, ultimately, improve the marketing strategy for your chiropractic business.

Getting Started with Google Analytics

The first step is to create a new Google Analytics account. Click here and use your existing Google account (for Gmail, YouTube, or Google Drive) to sign in, or create a new account if you never used Google services before.

Next, you will have to follow the step-by-step guide to set up Google Analytics. You will probably need a developer to help you because you will have to install the Google Analytics tracking code on each page of your website. Our SEO specialists will be happy to set up your Google Analytics account, install the code and check that it is working. We will need the following information:

• Your Google account details
• The full name of your chiropractic business
• The URL of your website.

After the account is fully set up, you can log in at any time to see the traffic data for your website on the Google Analytics platform. Time to Learn How to Use Google Analytics. Let us move on to the reason why you should make the effort to use Google Analytics. The data it collects from your website is categorized in:

• Audience
• Acquisition
• Behavior
• Conversions.

Let us look at what kind of data each category collects.

1. Audience Information

The audience is simply the total number of visitors to your website. Once you learn how to use Google Analytics, you will know exactly where to navigate for relevant information in the Audience sub-menu:

• Active users – website visitors currently browsing your website
• Demographics – age and gender
• Interests – based on their search history, Google collects a list of general interests
• Geo – country, and city where they live
• Technology – what device, operating system, and browser they use to visit your site
• Mobile – whether they browse your site from a smartphone
• Behavior – how frequently they visit your website.

2. Acquisition Information

This is a very important set of data for you. It shows how exactly users found your website:

• Organic – your site showed up in a Google Search
• Direct – they typed in the URL of the site in a browser window
• Referral – they clicked on a referral link (backlink to your site)
• Email – they clicked a link in your email newsletter
• Social – they clicked a link from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
• Paid search – they clicked on one of your Google ads
• Affiliate – they clicked on an affiliate link (for instance a blogger who earns a commission from you by writing about your chiropractic practice).

3. Behavior Information

The Behavior panel tells you how users interact with your site once they get there. You will find data on:

• Site content - the top most visited pages on your website
• Site speed- how fast your website loads for visitors
• Site search – what terms users typed in the search box on your website
• Events – what actions users take: watch a video, click on a CTA button, download an ebook, etc.

4. Conversions Information

In order to see information on this topic, you need to set up Goals in the main Google Analytics panel. Examples of conversions for your chiropractic business are:

• Download a guide to chiropractic treatment
• Subscribe to the newsletter
• Book an initial appointment
• Refer a friend.

It all depends on what you want to track – so you need to understand your business goals clearly, otherwise, you may be tracking irrelevant events. 

We are here to help you learn how to use Google Analytics, set up your account and business goals with zero errors, so get in touch with us!