We have previously written a post about 3 Google tools that are essential for your business. Let's take a closer look at one of them, Google Analytics. Google Analytics allows you to track and analyse visitors to your website for free. Google Analytics not only gives you information about how many people visit your site, but gives you the ability to track everything from how visitors use the site to where the traffic to the site comes from. Are many of your visitors coming from Instagram or are they coming from Google search? Google Analytics has the answer! In this post, we'll go over some terms you need to know and also some reports you shouldn't miss in Google Analytics.

Terms you need to know

• Accounts - your properties are under accounts. You can have several properties under one account or have several accounts for different properties.
• Properties - the website or mobile app you want to track
• UA-ID/G-ID - a unique code added to your website to allow Google Analytics to track it
• Conversions - visits that turn into a customer or a potential customer
• Source/medium - shows where your traffic is coming from, such as links from other websites, search engines or social media.
• Length of the session - how long visitors stay on your website
• Events - specific visitor behaviours, such as when a visitor clicks on an advert, watches a video, downloads a file and more.
• Landing page - the first page a visitor lands on when they visit your website
• Organic search - visitors coming to your site from a link on a search engine
• Paid search - visitors who come to your website from an advert in a search engine
• Segment - a way to filter data, e.g. by category or type of visitor

The reports you should not miss:

• Acquisitions - shows where your customers come from, such as search engines, social media, links from other websites, etc.
• Search terms - tells you what keywords users have used to find your website in a search engine. You can find this report in the Behaviour tab, under site search.
• Conversions - tracks how many customers convert to newsletter subscribers, buyers, etc.
• Landing page - shows which pages are your most frequent landing pages so you can track where visitors are coming from and look at what works well on those pages that attract customers.
• Active users - monitors how many visitors are actually active on your site over a specific period of time, such as the last week, fortnight or month. It shows you which pages your most active users visit, so you can think about what catches their attention so you can use it on the rest of your website. You can find the active users report in the audience tab under active users.