HOW TO USE GOOGLE ANALYTICS

At Lillian Purge, we specialise in Local SEO Services and have created a guide on How to Use Google Analytics to help you make sense of your website data and extract actionable insights for business growth.

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful tools for understanding your website’s performance. It helps you track where visitors come from, how they interact with your pages, and what drives them to take action. Whether you’re managing a small business website or a growing ecommerce store, learning how to use Google Analytics effectively can give you the insights you need to improve SEO, enhance user experience, and increase conversions.

Setting Up Google Analytics

Before you can use Google Analytics, you’ll need to create an account and connect it to your website.

  1. Go to the Google Analytics website and sign in using your Google account.

  2. Click on “Start Measuring” to create a new property for your website.

  3. Enter your business name, website URL, and industry category.

  4. You’ll receive a tracking code (Global Site Tag or GA4 tag) that needs to be added to your website’s header.

If you use platforms like WordPress, Shopify, or Wix, many have built-in integrations that make it easy to install the tracking code without manual edits. Once the code is active, Google Analytics will begin collecting visitor data within 24 hours.

Understanding the Dashboard

The Google Analytics dashboard can seem overwhelming at first, but it’s divided into clear sections that make it easier to navigate. The main areas include:

  • Reports: Provides insights on user behaviour, acquisition channels, and conversions.

  • Explore: Allows you to create custom reports based on specific metrics or dimensions.

  • Advertising: Tracks paid campaign performance and helps you measure ROI.

  • Configure: Lets you adjust tracking settings and set up goals or events.

Spend time familiarising yourself with the layout. The more comfortable you become with these reports, the easier it will be to interpret the data.

Tracking Key Metrics

Google Analytics tracks a wide range of data, but focusing on a few key metrics helps you understand your website’s performance more effectively.

Users and Sessions: These show how many people visit your site and how often. Users represent unique visitors, while sessions count all visits, including repeat ones.

Bounce Rate: This measures the percentage of visitors who leave your site after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate might indicate poor user experience, slow loading times, or irrelevant content.

Average Engagement Time: This reveals how long visitors stay on your site. The longer they engage, the more likely your content meets their needs.

Traffic Sources: This shows where your visitors come from—such as organic search, social media, direct visits, or paid campaigns. Understanding this helps identify which marketing channels are performing best.

Conversions: Conversions track the completion of specific goals, such as form submissions, phone calls, or purchases. Setting up conversion tracking helps you measure what actions generate real value for your business.

Setting Up Goals and Events

Goals and events allow you to measure user interactions that matter most to your business.

Goals track specific actions, such as completing a contact form or reaching a thank-you page. You can set these under the Admin section in “Goals.”

Events provide more granular tracking. For example, you can track when someone clicks a particular button, watches a video, or downloads a file. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) makes event tracking easier by automatically tracking common actions like page views and scrolls.

By setting up goals and events, you can measure success beyond simple traffic numbers and focus on meaningful outcomes.

Analysing Audience Insights

Google Analytics gives you detailed information about your audience, including their demographics, interests, and devices.

You can find this data under the “Reports” section in GA4. It includes:

  • Age and gender breakdowns.

  • Location of visitors (country, city, or region).

  • Device usage (desktop, tablet, or mobile).

This information helps you tailor your marketing campaigns and website design to meet your audience’s preferences. For instance, if most of your visitors use mobile devices, you’ll want to prioritise mobile-friendly design and faster load times.

Monitoring Traffic Channels

Understanding where your visitors come from is key to optimising marketing efforts. Google Analytics divides traffic into several main channels:

  • Organic Search: Visitors who find your site through unpaid search results.

  • Direct Traffic: Visitors who type your website address directly into their browser.

  • Referral Traffic: Visitors coming from other websites linking to yours.

  • Social Traffic: Visitors from platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn.

  • Paid Search: Visitors from Google Ads or other paid campaigns.

Analysing these channels shows which sources bring the most engaged visitors. If organic search is performing well, you may want to invest further in SEO. If referrals are strong, building more backlinks could be beneficial.

Using Behaviour Reports

Behaviour reports show how visitors interact with your website once they arrive. You can see which pages are most popular, how users navigate between them, and where they exit your site.

Pay attention to:

  • Landing Pages: The first pages users see when visiting your site.

  • Exit Pages: The last pages users view before leaving.

  • Page Views: Which pages attract the most traffic.

This data helps you understand which content performs best and where users might be losing interest. You can then optimise underperforming pages or add internal links to guide users toward conversions.

Tracking Ecommerce Performance

If you run an online store, Google Analytics can provide powerful ecommerce insights. By enabling ecommerce tracking, you can monitor product performance, transaction data, and revenue.

Metrics to focus on include:

  • Total revenue and average order value.

  • Product performance (top sellers and underperformers).

  • Shopping behaviour (cart abandonment and checkout flow).

These insights help you refine your product offerings, improve checkout experiences, and identify opportunities to increase sales.

Creating Custom Reports

Google Analytics lets you create custom reports to focus on metrics most relevant to your goals. For example, you can build reports showing only local traffic, specific campaigns, or engagement by device type.

Custom dashboards can also consolidate important data points into one view, helping you monitor performance at a glance.

Regularly Reviewing and Acting on Data

Collecting data is only useful if you act on it. Schedule regular reviews of your Analytics reports—weekly or monthly—to identify trends, patterns, and areas for improvement.

If you notice declining traffic from a specific source, investigate possible causes such as broken links or changes in search rankings. Similarly, if a particular page performs well, consider using its format or content style as a model for other pages.

Final Thoughts

Google Analytics is more than a data collection tool—it’s a decision-making platform that helps businesses refine their marketing and user experience strategies. By learning how to use it effectively, you can turn insights into action and continuously improve your website’s performance.

From tracking visitor behaviour to measuring conversions, Google Analytics provides the clarity needed to make smarter, data-driven business decisions. With consistent use and analysis, it becomes one of the most valuable assets for long-term growth and online success.

We have also written in depth articles on How to Create Google Analytics Account and Is Google Analytics For Free? as well as our Google Analytics Hub to give you further guidance.